Autonomía digital y tecnológica

Código e ideas para una internet distribuida

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There was to be no outbreak of cholera in New Orleans, nor among the residents who fled. Despite raw sewage and decomposing bodies floating in the toxic brew that drowned the city, cholera was never likely to happen: there was little evidence that the specific bacteria that cause cholera were present. But the point had been made: Katrina had reduced a great American city to Third World conditions. Twenty-first-century America had had a cholera scare.

Teams are making ready-to-use COVID-19 datasets easily accessible for the wider data visualization and analysis community. Johns Hopkins posts frequently updated data on their github page, and Tableau has created a COVID-19 Resource Hub with the same data reshaped for use in Tableau.

These public assets are immensely helpful for public health professionals and authorities responding to the epidemic. They make data from multiple sources easy to use, which can enable quick development of visualizations of local case numbers and impact.

At the same time, the stakes are high around how we communicate about this epidemic to the wider public. Visualizations are powerful for communicating information, but can also mislead, misinform, and — in the worst cases — incite panic. We are in the middle of complete information overload, with hourly case updates and endless streams of information.

COVID19 is currently spreading exponentially, in a mostly unchecked fashion, throughout the world. Infection doubling rates are as high as 2-3 days. Under simplistic models, such unchecked growth means the disease infects most of the world in months. Current statistics indicate that 15-20% of people who get it require hospitalization for respiratory failure for multiple weeks, and often need intense healthcare from medical professionals who are at severe risk treating these highly infectious patients. If infections proceed at their current pace across the globe, we will not have enough supplies like ventilators, respirators, PPE, etc. to meet demand.

This group is being formed to evaluate, design, validate, and source the fabrication of open source emergency medical supplies around the world, given a variety of local supply conditions.

A marmot hiding in plain sight in the Swiss Alps

…on certain maps, in Switzerland’s more remote regions, there is also, curiously, a spider, a man’s face, a naked woman, a hiker, a fish, and a marmot. These barely-perceptible apparitions aren’t mistakes, but rather illustrations hidden by the official cartographers at Swisstopo in defiance of their mandate “to reconstitute reality.” Maps published by Swisstopo undergo a rigorous proofreading process, so to find an illicit drawing means that the cartographer has outsmarted his colleagues.

Captura de pantalla de la web From Data to Viz

From Data to Viz leads you to the most appropriate graph for your data. It links to the code to build it and lists common caveats you should avoid.

What kind of data do you have? Pick the main type using the buttons below. Then let the decision tree guide you toward your graphic possibilities.

Data visualizations are a powerful way to display and communicate data that otherwise would be impossible to transmit in effective and concise ways. The spread of broadband Internet, the easier access to reusable datasets, the rise in read/write digital media literacies, and the lower barrier to generate data visualizations are making mass media to intensively use of infographics. Newspaper and online news sites are taking advantage of new, affordable and easy to access data visualization tools to broadcast their messages. How can these new tools and opportunities be used effectively? What are good practices regarding data visualization for a general audience?

After an introduction to a series of key concepts about visualizing data the lecture will follow with an analysis of a series of significant data visualizations (tables, pie and bar charts, maps and other systems) from TV, daily newspapers and news websites to detect good and bad practices when visualizing statistical information. The lecturer will then analyze recent literature of visualization studies regarding persuasion, memorability and comprehension. What are more effective embellished or minimal data visualizations? Does graphical presentation of data make a message more persuasive?

Basically, women were slightly more liberal with the modifiers, but otherwise they generally agreed (and some of the differences may be sampling noise). The results were similar across the survey—men and women tended on average to call colors the same names.

Color Naming Perception Chart

Each user was shown a random color and asked to type in a name. We asked people provide the most generic name possible, dropping things like modifiers (blue instead of light blue). Instead of using the entire RGB spectrum (millions), we pruned the color set to 216 «web safe» colors. This helped ensure every color had many responses. We left it online for a week or so and collected 6,276 color responses.

Miquela nace en 2016. Un perfil de Instagram daba comienzo a su historia: una joven hispano-brasileña, residiendo en Los Ángeles y proyectando identidad de IT-Girl comenzaba su rastro digital suscitando todo tipo de especulaciones (como que era una campaña para promocionar el juego Los Sims). Después de tres años ya sabemos un poco de qué va la historia: «un estudio transmedia que crea universos narrativos y personajes digitales». Esto es lo que puede leerse en la escueta web (es un Google Doc en realidad) de presentación de Brud.

Welcome to slow travel, the movement that goes back to what travel is all about – the journey, not the destination, the experience, not the social media post.

Slow travel started as an offshoot of the slow food movement, which itself began in Rome in the 1980s as a protest against a McDonald’s opening up in Piazza di Spagna. What started as the indignation of food-loving Italians turned into a celebration of traditions and culture, of authenticity and building connections – ideas that were all wonderfully ahead of their time.

In a world where we’re all too busy and too stressed, with too little time and too many emails, slow travel is like a deep breath of fresh air. It is our chance to step out of our lives and immerse ourselves in a different culture, to explore and soak up experiences.

…la noción de grupo sin estructura se convierte en una cortina de humo que favorece a los fuertes ó a aquellas personas que pueden establecer su hegemonía incuestionable sobre los demás. Esta forma de hegemonia puede establecerse muy fácilmente porque la noción de falta de estructura no impide la creación de estructuras informales; solo lo impide de las formales.

…la falta de estructura feminista, es normalmente defendida por aquellas que tienen mayor poder (sean o no conscientes de ello). En la medida en que la estructura del grupo es informal, las normas de cómo se toman decisiones son sólo conocidas por unas pocas, y la conciencia de que existe una relación de poder se limita a aquellas que conocen las normas.

Las normas de cómo se toman las decisiones deben ser abiertas y conocidas por todas, lo que sólo ocurrirá si son formalizadas; esto no quiere decir que la formalización de la estructura de un grupo destruya necesariamente su estructura informal, normalmente no ocurre así, pero sí impide que la estructura informal tenga un control predominante, al tiempo que ofrece mejores medios para atacarlas si la gente involucrada no responde a las necesidades
generales del grupo.

Las élites son nada más y nada menos que grupos de amigas que, incidentalmente, participan en la misma actividad política…

Estos grupos de amigas funcionan con redes de comunicación al margen de cualquier canal que el grupo haya establecido con este fin y, si no existen canales, funcionan como la única red de comunicación; porque esta gente es amiga, porque habitualmente comparten los mismos valores y concepciones políticas, porque se hablan en circunstancias de la vida cotidiana, porque se consultan cuando tienen que tomar pequeñas decisiones sobre sus vidas, la gente que participa en estas redes tiene más poder que aquella que no participa.

…si se trabaja ocho horas o se tiene alguna obligación similar es normalmente imposible llegar a ser parte de la élite, simplemente porque no hay suficientes horas para asistir a todas las reuniones y cultivar las relaciones personales necesarias para tener voz en la toma de decisiones; ésta es la razón por la que las estructuras formales para la toma de decisiones son un regalo para las personas cargadas de trabajo. Contar con un procedimiento fijo para tomar decisiones garantiza, hasta cierto punto, la participación de todos y cada uno de los miembros.

¿Cómo compaginar el sostenimiento de la vida y los cuidados con las exigencias de horarios, disponibilidad y flexibilidad que el emprendimiento requiere?

Una guía para introducir pequeñas modificaciones en nuestras rutinas del día a día, para que poco a poco, de manera colectiva y por efecto mariposa, se puedan producir cambios a gran escala, transformaciones más profundas.

Solid, an open-source project to restore the power and agency of individuals on the web.

Solid changes the current model where users have to hand over personal data to digital giants in exchange for perceived value. As we’ve all discovered, this hasn’t been in our best interests. Solid is how we evolve the web in order to restore balance – by giving every one of us complete control over data, personal or not, in a revolutionary way.

Solid is a platform, built using the existing web. It gives every user a choice about where data is stored, which specific people and groups can access select elements, and which apps you use. It allows you, your family and colleagues, to link and share data with anyone. It allows people to look at the same data with different apps at the same time.

In 2009, I said, “The web as I envisaged it we have not seen yet.” That was because people were using the web just for documents, not for the data of a big web-wide computer. Since then, we have seen a wave of open data, but not of read-write data. For example, much open government data is produced through a one-way pipeline, so we can only view it. With Solid, it becomes a read-write web where users can interact and innovate, collaborate and share.

The CCC describes itself as «a galactic community of life forms, independent of age, sex, race or societal orientation, which strives across borders for freedom of information…». In general, the CCC advocates more transparency in government, freedom of information, and the human right to communication. Supporting the principles of the hacker ethic, the club also fights for free universal access to computers and technological infrastructure as well as the use of open-source software. The CCC spreads an entrepreneurial vision refusing capitalist control. It has been characterised as «…one of the most influential digital organisations anywhere, the centre of German digital culture, hacker culture, hacktivism, and the intersection of any discussion of democratic and digital rights».

Captura de pantalla de killedbygoogle.com

Killed by Google is the Google graveyard; a free and open source list of discontinued Google services, products, devices, and apps. We aim to be a source of factual information about the history surrounding Google’s dead projects.

Es una herramienta de forja de software que permitirá a las entidades públicas y a la población en general alojar sus proyectos de software fomentando el desarrollo colaborativo de una comunidad o grupo de personas que buscan un mismo fin o tienen un mismo interés. Esto con el fin de alcanzar soberanía tecnológica de manera conjunta en el Estado, ahorrando recursos al reutilizar software común entre entidades.

France is to become the first major economy to impose a tax on internet heavyweights. Dubbed the Gafa tax – an acronym for Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon – the legislation will impose a 3% levy on the total annual revenues of the largest technology firms providing services to French consumers.

…tech giants, as monopolies, now presented a democratic challenge to governments. “Certain tech platforms have become the building blocks of our economy and democracy,” he said. “They have acquired a monopoly position today which gives them a footprint no other company has on the economy, so they need to see specific regulations applied … A company which has 1.4 billion citizens on its social networks can’t be treated like just any other company, with the same rules. A company that is the only search engine or messaging platform can’t have just the same rules as any other private company.”

In the age of international telecommunications, global migration and the emergence of the information economy, how can class conflict and property be understood? Drawing from political economy and concepts related to intellectual property, The Telekommunist Manifesto is a key contribution to commons-based, collaborative and shared forms of cultural production and economic distribution.

Venture communism

Proposing “venture communism” as a new model for workers’ self-organization, Kleiner spins Marx and Engels’ seminal Manifesto of the Communist Party into the age of the internet. As a peer-to-peer model, venture communism allocates capital that is critically needed to accomplish what capitalism cannot: the ongoing proliferation of free culture and free networks.
Copyfarleft

In developing the concept of venture communism, Kleiner provides a critique of copyright regimes, and current liberal views of free software and free culture which seek to trap culture within capitalism. Kleiner proposes copyfarleft, and provides a usable model of a Peer Production License.

Encouraging hackers and artists to embrace the revolutionary potential of the internet for a truly free society, The Telekommunist Manifesto is a political-conceptual call to arms in the fight against capitalism.