Is internet freedom a tool for democracy or authoritarianism?

Liberal and Conservative Representations of the Good Society: A (Social) Structural Topic Modeling Approach

It is generally agreed that literature surveys and descriptive compilations do not meet the contribution-to-knowledge re-quirement for the dissertation

Positivist versus postpositivist.

Experimental versus descriptive.

Quantitative versus qualitative.

NEW OR IMPROVED ANALYSIS Analysis may be based on existing evidence or include new data.

The evidence may be collected by an experiment, simulation, observations, questionnaire, interviews, or measurements.

The additive contribution of a dissertation may arise from 1. new or improved evidence; 2. new or improved methodology; 3. new or improved analysis; 4. new or improved concepts or theories.

The dissertation should be based on a significant question, problem, or hypothesis.

Different approaches to testing of important results. If a researcher has reported interesting results with one research technique and a given research population, a doctoral student may consider replicating the experiment, altering either the research technique or the research population.

Writers of disserta-tions commonly describe further research that needs to be done.

If there is likely to be a continuing interest, either academically or otherwise on the topic, then a student can continué to maintin scholarly capability in the área and continué to be a significant authority on the subject.

A research project will typicaliy have more than one potential outcome. For example, a research experiment may fail to dis-prove the nuil hypothesis, it may disprove it, or it may be incon-clusive.

The exploratory investigation, definition of problem, and writing normally take about half of the total time.

If no theory base can be identified, the topic should be rejected

Observations lead to theory to classify, explain, and predict the observations.

Research needed and interesting

In reading dissertations, the student should begin to formúlate a general understanding of the structure and scope of a disserta-tion, and the meaning of contribution to knowledge as applied to doctoral dissertations.

The Selection of a Dissertation Topic

The first is the way the natural scientific community operates.

Especially in situations of shared powerlessness, it can be perceived as safer to hide one's views and do nothing if it goes against the status quo.

He could have said yes and they would have been friends. The Chinese were like that too, only more so. He had heard how a Chinese from China by the name of Eng could go to Jacksonville, Florida, or any other place, and look up another Chinese family by the same name of Eng and be taken in like one of the family with no questions asked. There was nothing wrong with it. On the contrary, it was a fine thing in some ways. Still, how much finer it would be if Smith would do the same for Eng and Sato would do the same for Wotynski and Laverghetti would do likewise for whoever happened by. Eng for Eng, Jap for Jap, Pole for Pole, and like for like meant classes and distinctions and hatred and prejudice  and wars and misery, and that wasn't what Mr. Carrick would want at all, and he was on the right track.

new data provided by the Department of Human Services showed that almost half of all pension applications received last year were not processed within the timeframe set out in their Key Performance Measure standards

. To summarize: Your aim is to explain 1. what you are writing about —I am working on the topic of... 2. what you don't know about it—because / want tofind out... 3. why you want your reader to know and care about it—m order to help my reader understand better...

add a second indirect question that explains why you asked your first question.

When you add that because I want tofind out how/why/whether clause, you state why you are pursuing your topic: to answer a question important to you.

because I want to find out who/what/when/where/whether/ why/how .

start by naming your project:

SO WHAT?

If you are an experienced researcher, look for questions that other researchers ask but don't answer.

How does your topic fit into the context of a larger structure or function as part of a larger system?

Ask about the History of Your Topic

So the best way to begin working on your focused topic is not to find all the information you can on it, but to formúlate questions that direct you to just that information you need to answer them

If a writer asks no specific question worth asking, he can offer no specific answer worth supporting.

Caution: Don't narrow your topic so much that you can't find information on it

We narrowed those topics by adding words and phrases, but of a special kind: conflict, description, contribution, and developing. Those nouns are derived from verbs expressing actions or relation-ships: to conflict, to describe, to contribute, and to develop. Lacking such "action" words, your topic is a .static thing.

A topic is probably too broad if you can state it in four or five words

Few experi-enced researchers trust Wikipedia, so under no circumstances cite it as a source of evidence (unless your topic is Wikipedia itself).

Google your topic,

Once you have a list of topics, choose the one or two that inter-est you most and explore their research potential. Do this:

Start by listing as many interests as you can that you'd like to explore.

But also ask yourself: What interests me about this tapie? What would interest others?

Some questions raise problems; others do not.

But other questions may intrigue only the researcher:

A subject is a broad área of knowledge (e.g., climate change), while a topic is a specific interest within that área (e.g., the effect of climate change on migratory birds).

As you begin a research project, you will want to distinguish a topic from a sub-ject.

From Topics to Questions

On social media, we are at the mercy of the platform. It crops our images the way it wants to. It puts our posts in the same, uniform grids. We are yet another profile contained in a platform with a million others, pushed around by the changing tides of a company's whims. Algorithms determine where our posts show up in people’s feeds and in what order, how someone swipes through our photos, where we can and can’t post a link. The company decides whether we're in violation of privacy laws for sharing content we created ourselves. It can ban or shut us down without notice or explanation. On social media, we are not in control.

I feel by far less distracted. My attention span feels more robust than it ever has. I also clocked in at 1000 consecutive days of meditation this past year so I’m not sure which can lay claim to more of these benefits, but my hunch is that getting rid of social media helped.

Running a small social network is like hosting a party. It requires social intelligence, empathy, and yes, technical skills.

Social justice education does not merely examine difference or diversity but pays careful attention to the systems of power and privilege that give rise to social inequality, and encourages students to critically examine oppression on institutional, cultural, and individual levels in search of opportunities for social action in the service of social change.

include student empowerment, the equitable distribution of resources and social responsibility, and her processes to include democracy, a student-centered focus, dialogue, and an analysis of power.

As such, we can read Yelp and similar review sites as curated collections of texts that provide annotators.d-undefined, .lh-undefined { background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2) !important; }.d-undefined, .lh-undefined { background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5) !important; }2Troy Hicks, Maha Bali with a public and networked opportunity to express their truth and author counternarratives.

notes are tediously authored for the profit of multinational corporations.

There are important differences between social imaginaryand social theory. I adopt the term imaginary (i) because myfocus is on the way ordinary people ‘‘imagine’’ their socialsurroundings, and this is often not expressed in theoreticalterms, but is carried in images, stories, and legends. It is alsothe case that (ii) theory is often the possession of a small mi-nority, whereas what is interesting in the social imaginary isthat it is shared by large groups of people, if not the wholesociety.Which leads to a third difference: (iii) the social imagi-nary is that common understanding that makes possible com-mon practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy.

So the solution for the U.S.’s relatively high poverty rate will probably rely little on personal responsibility and moral rectitude. Instead, the U.S. should look to European countries, or to Australia and Canada, for ideas on how to reduce poverty. There’s just no substitute for a strong social safety net.

In October, Chetty’s institute released an interactive map of the United States called the Opportunity Atlas, revealing the terrain of opportunity down to the level of individual neighborhoods.

Another solution might be to limit on the number of times a tweet can be retweeted.

Without a retweet button, Wetherell said, brands “would certainly be less inclined to have a financial relationship with [a platform]. And when you're Twitter and that's vastly your primary source of income, that might be a challenge.”

As Gamergate unfolded, Wetherell noticed its participants were using the retweet to “brigade,” or coordinate their attacks against their targets, disseminating misinformation and outrage at a pace that made it difficult to fight back. The retweet button propelled Gamergate, according to an analysis by the technologist and blogger Andy Baio. In his study of 316,669 Gamergate tweets sent over 72 hours, 217,384 were retweets, or about 69%.

some parenting styles or early trauma, which can impair social and mental development, can contribute to creating the school bully. How about reaching out and asking the bully?

In the absence of alternatives, activists would simply have to accept the negatives of CSM while trying to take advantage of them.

Carol Nichols of the Twitter alternative rstat.us makes this explicit: Twitter is “actively ignoring the needs of their users in order to serve the needs of their advertisers and shareholders.” In contrast, she argues that rstat.us is more concerned with user expression.

Refusing advertising is refusing to privilege moneyed speech. The increasing equation of money with speech—that is, those with the most money can be the loudest and most persistent voices in contemporary media—is denied when advertising is refused.

We have to recognize that prior to Web 2.0 and social media, “the media” often connoted “mass media,” broadcast from the few to the many.

The initial promise of Web 2.0—that gatekeepers have their power reduced and that “ordinary” users can make media—is still true, even for for-profit firms such as Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook allows users to sign in, authenticate, and identify themselves on a range of Web sites, feeding our data to Facebook as we move across the Web.

In the years between 2004 and 2012, many media critics proclaimed a promising new mediascape of democratic production and thus democratic organization (Benkler, 2006; Bruns, 2008; Shirky, 2009)—precisely what alternative media theorists had been calling for in previous decades.

If alternative media theory is correct in orienting us to production—the how of media, rather than the what—ASM, not CSM, offer a more fitting suite of tools for people to both make media and shape media distribution infrastructures.

Digital texts embody the intersections between history and biography that Mills (1959) thought inherent to understanding social relations. Content from my blog is a ready example. I have access to the entire data set. I can track its macro discursive moments to action, space, and place. And I can consider it as a reflexive sociological practice. In this way, I have used my digital texts as methodologists use autoethnographies: reflexive, critical practices of social relationship.

The architecture of the platform where I published allowed authorial control of content but could not control context collapse or social interactions.

But, whereas engaged scholarship has a political imperative, academic microcelebrity has a market imperative. Academic microcelebrity is ostentatiously apolitical, albeit falsely so because markets are always political. Academic microcelebrity encourages brand building as opposed to consciousness-raising; brand awareness as opposed to co-creation of knowledge. It creates perverse incentives for impact as opposed to valuing social change. Microcelebrity is the economics of attention in which academics are being encouraged, mostly through normative pressure, to brand their academic knowledge for mass consumption. However, the risks and rewards of presenting oneself “to others over the Web using tools typically associated with celebrity promotion” (Barone 2009) are not the same for all academics in the neo-liberal “public” square of private media.

Microcelebrity refers to the affective capital engendered and commodified by various social and new media platforms where identity and brand are merged and measured in likes, shares, follows, comments and so on.

I believe there is a place for public comments, but the amount of energy required to nurture a positive community is beyond the means or desires of most institutions. And so most comment sections simply don’t provide a healthy place for conversation.

To put our toxic relationship with Big Tech into perspective, critics have compared social media to a lot of bad things. Tobacco. Crystal meth. Pollution. Cars before seat belts. Chemicals before Superfund sites. But the most enduring metaphor is junk food: convenient but empty; engineered to be addictive; makes humans unhealthy and corporations rich.

That is to say: if the problem has not been the centralized, corporatized control of the individual voice, the individual’s data, but rather a deeper failure of sociality that precedes that control, then merely reclaiming ownership of our voices and our data isn’t enough. If the goal is creating more authentic, more productive forms of online sociality, we need to rethink our platforms, the ways they function, and our relationships to them from the ground up. It’s not just a matter of functionality, or privacy controls, or even of business models. It’s a matter of governance.

So this is where some older paths-not-taken, such as Ted Nelson’s original many-to-many, multidirectional model for hypertext, and some more recent potential paths, such as Herbert van de Sompel’s decentralized, distributed vision for scholarly communication, might come in.

That said, I personally can’t imagine handing over all of my labor to a centralized platform where it’s chopped up and shuffled together with content from countless other sources, only to be exploited at the current whims of the platform owners’ volatile business models. I know a lot of creators are successful in that context, but I also see a lot of stuff that gets rendered essentially indistinguishable from everything else, lost in the blizzard of “content.”

Ah, Jane, I take your place now, and you must go lower, because I am a married woman

— shire

breakfast-room

carriage was sent to meet them at — , and they were to return in it by dinner-time.

thousand pounds

She sat intently at work

Here, Sarah, come to Miss Bennet this moment, and help her on with her gown. Never mind Miss Lizzy’s hair.”

dressing-room

He is gone to my father already

a letter to write

sash

“ungovernable” spaces

alternate forms of governance and coercion

proliferation of organized crime

poverty

overcrowding

Feral Cities

Mega Slums

Large concentrated populations create very large vulnerabilities.

greater opportunities for terrorists and other non-state actors

Asymmetric Disruption and Destruction

greater collaboration and information sharing between and among the various agencies tasked with the defense and security of the nation and the vast majority of the population

power shifts to municipal/local rather than national government

hallenge to the Legitimacy of Traditional Defense and Security Forces

humanitarian, defense and security challenges

non-state actors such as terrorists and revolutionaries

Defense organizations will also be challenged

higher level of interagency information-sharing and collaboration

Providing adequate police and security for these areas will be costly

growth of radicalization and alternative governance structures

outpacegovernments ability to provide basicservices

explosion in urbanization

Megaprojects

aggregate power will rival

megacities grow

cloud technology, mobile devices, data analytics, and social networks to automate and connect city departments and promote eco-friendly practices

Smart Cities

150 cities strategy

massive investments in smart infrastructure

in emerging economies, new cities will rise rapidly

In developed economies and older cities in the developing world, infrastructure will be strained to the utmost— and beyond—as populations expand

Large scale migrations from rural areas

growth in urban population will likely take place in Asia and Africa

By 2050, the world’s urban population will have increased by some 44%

By 2015, the United Nations (UN) estimated that there would be 22 mega-cities—those with populations of 10 million or more

by 2030, the UN projects that some 4.9 billion people will be urban dwellers.

curricle

livery

Her teeth are tolerable

— — shire

Publishers of all sizes are trying to figure out how to leverage these new platforms as user behavior on each platform evolves. On top of all this, the platforms themselves are rapidly changing. It can often feel like no one is on steady ground.

It could mean working closely with a platform itself to beta test new products and features. Companies like CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post have signed on as Facebook media partners and have collectively produced hundreds of Facebook Live broadcasts, for instance. Other brands such as The Wall Street Journal, Cosmopolitan, ESPN and more have teamed up with Snapchat to produce content for Snapchat Discover, Snapchat’s media portal.

les plantes sont extraordinaires. Elles ne peuvent pas se déplacer. Quand tu as des racines, tous ceux qui sont autour de toi sont fondamentaux.

all meeting frequently at St. James’s

properly sanctioned

three or four hundred a year

barouche-box

Netherfield ball

Daughters are never of so much consequence to a father.

Miss De Bourgh exerted herself so far as to curtsey and hold out her hand to both

I may suffer from the want of money. Younger sons cannot marry where they like.”

but fifteen

The envelope itself was likewise full.

inferiority of your connexions? — to congratulate myself on the hope of relations, whose condition in life is so decidedly beneath my own?”

executors of my father’s will

Chile has developed from 1990 to date, a considerable decrease in poverty rates, which fell from 40.5% in 1990 to 8.5% in 2015.

Between 1990 and 2016, copper mining provided on average of 7.8% of tax revenue for Chile

A barren, leached cap,

the government reported the discovery of large gold deposits in Lege Dimbi, also in Sidamo.

Due to its electrical conductivity, copper is used in electronics, cars, and wires. This makes copper critical for highly developed countries.

Codelco is a state-owned Chilean mining company and the world’s largest copper producer. Based on their annual report and USGS statistics, they produced ~10% of the world’s copper in 2015 and own 8% of global reserves. They are also a large producer of greenhouse gas emissions. Last year, Codelco produced 3,2 t CO2e/millions tmf from both indirect and direct effects, and in 2011 it consumed 12% of the total national electricity supply.

Copper is a key driver of growth and economic wealth for Chile.

What can Codelco do, then? In addition to cost cutting, Codelco could consider entering the recycling copper industry, as energy prices are driving “virgin” copper costs up.

copper mining significantly contributes to climate change.

The country’s economy is completely dependent on mining. Many poor families are completely dependent on their children working the mines. That $9/day is hard for a child to reject

Walt describes how the multibillion-dollar industry, that has made some people outside Africa really really rich, is not known to workers like Lukasa. He just sells his haul to Chinese traders who have seen their profits increase 400% over the last two years.

Especially one child named Lukasa who gets up at 5 AM to work a 12-hour day for less than $9

Xiamen Tungsten and Xiamen Sanhong Molybdenum would invest more than 2 billion yuan (US$314.13 million) in the surveying and subsequent exploitation of the tungsten ore mine.

The proved reserve of the mine has exceeded Jiangxi's total amount of available tungsten reserves, and has a potential economic value of more than 300 billion yuan (US$47.13 billion).

in the right rail

entail

fifty pounds

That so much social capital for the young comes in the form of followers, likes, and comments from peers and strangers shouldn't lessen its value.

Maintenance of existing social capital stores is often a more efficient use of time than fighting to earn more on a new social network given the ease of just earning interest on your sizeable status reserves. That's just math, especially once you factor in loss aversion.

A social network like Path attempted to limit your social graph size to the Dunbar number, capping your social capital accumulation potential and capping the distribution of your posts. The exchange, they hoped, was some greater transparency, more genuine self-expression. The anti-Facebook. Unfortunately, as social capital theory might predict, Path did indeed succeed in becoming the anti-Facebook: a network without enough users. Some businesses work best at scale, and if you believe that people want to accumulate social capital as efficiently as possible, putting a bound on how much they can earn is a challenging business model, as dark as that may be.

Copying some network's feature often isn’t sufficient if you can’t also copy its graph, but if you can apply the feature to some unique graph that you earned some other way, it can be a defensible advantage.

Most of these near clones have and will fail. The reason that matching the basic proof of work hurdle of an Status as a Service incumbent fails is that it generally duplicates the status game that already exists. By definition, if the proof of work is the same, you're not really creating a new status ladder game, and so there isn't a real compelling reason to switch when the new network really has no one in it.

The same way many social networks track keystone metrics like time to X followers, they should track the ROI on posts for new users. It's likely a leading metric that governs retention or churn. It’s useful as an investor, or even as a curious onlooker to test a social networks by posting varied content from test accounts to gauge the efficiency and fairness of the distribution algorithm.

graph-based social capital allocation mechanisms can suffer from runaway winner-take-all effects. In essence, some networks reward those who gain a lot of followers early on with so much added exposure that they continue to gain more followers than other users, regardless of whether they've earned it through the quality of their posts. One hypothesis on why social networks tend to lose heat at scale is that this type of old money can't be cleared out, and new money loses the incentive to play the game.

I can still remember posting the same photos to Flickr and Instagram for a while and seeing how quickly the latter passed the former in feedback. If I were an investor or even an employee, I might have something like a representative basket of content that I'd post from various test accounts on different social media networks just to track social capital interest rates and liquidity among the various services.

Instagram, despite not having any official reshare option, allows near unlimited hashtag spamming, and that allows for more deterministic, self-generated distribution. Twitter also isn't as great for spreading visual memes because of its stubborn attachment to cropping photos to maintain a certain level of tweet density per phone screen.

What changed Twitter, for me, was the launch of Favstar and Favrd (both now defunct, ruthlessly murdered by Twitter), these global leaderboards that suddenly turned the service into a competition to compose the most globally popular tweets.

It's true that as more people join a network, more social capital is up for grabs in the aggregate. However, in general, if you come to a social network later, unless you bring incredible exogenous social capital (Taylor Swift can join any social network on the planet and collect a massive following immediately), the competition for attention is going to be more intense than it was in the beginning. Everyone has more of an understanding of how the game works so the competition is stiffer.

[An aside about exogenous social capital: you might complain that your tweets are more interesting and grammatical than those of, say, Donald Trump (you're probably right!). Or that your photos are better composed and more interesting at a deep level of photographic craft than those of Kim Kardashian. The difference is, they bring a massive supply of exogenous pre-existing social capital from another status game, the fame game, to every table, and some forms of social capital transfer quite well across platforms. Generalized fame is one of them. More specific forms of fame or talent might not retain their value as easily: you might follow Paul Krugman on Twitter, for example, but not have any interest in his Instagram account. I don't know if he has one, but I probably wouldn't follow it if he did, sorry Paul, it’s nothing personal.]

Almost every social network of note had an early signature proof of work hurdle. For Facebook it was posting some witty text-based status update. For Instagram, it was posting an interesting square photo. For Vine, an entertaining 6-second video. For Twitter, it was writing an amusing bit of text of 140 characters or fewer. Pinterest? Pinning a compelling photo. You can likely derive the proof of work for other networks like Quora and Reddit and Twitch and so on. Successful social networks don't pose trick questions at the start, it’s usually clear what they want from you.

While you can outsource Bitcoin mining to a computer, people still mine for social capital on social networks largely through their own blood, sweat, and tears.

The creation of a successful status game is so mysterious that it often smacks of alchemy. For that reason, entrepreneurs who succeed in this space are thought of us a sort of shaman, perhaps because most investors are middle-aged white men who are already so high status they haven't the first idea why people would seek virtual status

Think of this essay as a series of strongly held hypotheses; without access to the types of data which i’m not even sure exists, it’s difficult to be definitive. As ever, my wise readers will add or push back as they always do.

Social capital is, in many ways, a leading indicator of financial capital, and so its nature bears greater scrutiny. Not only is it good investment or business practice, but analyzing social capital dynamics can help to explain all sorts of online behavior that would otherwise seem irrational.

Tips to increase Your SEO With a Social Media Strategy

The conundrum isn’t just that videos questioning the moon landing or the efficacy of vaccines are on YouTube. The massive “library,” generated by users with little editorial oversight, is bound to have untrue nonsense. Instead, YouTube’s problem is that it allows the nonsense to flourish. And, in some cases, through its powerful artificial intelligence system, it even provides the fuel that lets it spread.#lazy-img-336042387:before{padding-top:66.68334167083543%;}

The first week of class was pretty similar to most first weeks of a programs I have experienced. However, this program was a little more hectic due to the fact that we have so many programs trying to do so many different and connected things. The moment that stood out the most to me was how much work was accomplished in 8 short hours by the MTA changemakers, this was impressive and inspiring to me. I participated in a similar group last quarter. In that program we  had weeks to get the point that they got to in an afternoon.