How Google and Facebook Censor Your World Through Personalization and Algorythmns - TED Video

How WikiLeaks Changes Things for Us All - Carne Ross - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review

The massive disclosure of classified US diplomatic cables by Wikileaks is an event of historic, if not seismic, significance. So great is the number of cables, and so sensitive is much of the information they divulge, that the consequences will be profound, long-lasting, and manifold. No one — neither Wikileaks nor the U.S. government — can know whether the effects will be good or bad. They will undoubtedly be both. We can be sure only that they will be many and unpredictable. Governments are no doubt rushing to secure their data and hold it more tightly than ever, but the horse has bolted. If a government as professional, technically sophisticated, and well-protected as the U.S. can suffer a breach of this magnitude, no government is safe. Politicians can roar their demands for the prosecution of Julian Assange or — absurdly — that Wikileaks be designated as a terrorist organization, but the rage is in truth a tacit admission that government's monopoly on its own information is now a thing of the past.

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Political Innovation: The politics of government procurement and purchasing - Dominic Campbell, Telegraph UK

Procurement is a key signifier of change in government culture. Well, you wouldn’t still be reading had I called it the politics of procurement now would you? (no, stop - don’t go!). No-one who engages with government procurement comes away impressed with it. It’s a process that wastes £billions and rewards process over outcomes. Yet we all know that, deep down, it’s a symptom of a political problem. It is a system set up to manage risk in retrospect and trace blame for failure, rather than create a partnership between supplier and customer that allows us to prototype, innovate, and on occasion, fail (well). Because it’s a top-down process, the top are primarily concerned to shield themselves from criticism rather than to be the parents of success.

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Is Information Visualisation the Next Frontier for Design?

As design work shifts to infrastructure and problem solving, sexy infographics are part of the new skill set. You've seen them. Those tag clouds in the right-hand column of Web sites with jumbled type of varying weight and size indicating the relative usage of words. Tag clouds may be the most common example of an emerging field known as "information visualization," an offshoot of graphic design devoted to the clear display of complex information. Executive pay in relation to shareholder returns. Senate voting patterns. The geographic location of cell phones. Similarities among rock albums. Graphic designers are mapping over the known world and posting their graphic interpretations on sites like Visual Complexity.

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"laggards and obstructionists"

That, according to Andrew Weaver, climate expert, IPCC contributor and author of Keeping Our Cool: Canada in a Warming World, is Canadians’ international reputation is when it comes to climate change. Whether or not you care about our reputation, you should care about what our country is doing in reference to climate change. If you expect to live at least another decade, you will feel its effects economically, socially, and psychologically. Your children, if you have any, will suffer its direct impact, and the lives of your grandchildren will be nightmarish. If I could only write about one thing, it would be climate change/global warming.

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