Build-your-own broadband: Small towns in the United States and the United Kingdom are increasingly bypassing large ISPs and building their own broadband networks, according to two recent stories. Reuters notes that rural communities in the U.K.
After the Chernobyl disaster, a citizen’s initiative in the small town of Schönau, Germany set out to produce clean electricity. When the grid operator obstructed them, the citizens decided to acquire the power grid for themselves. Today they sell clean electricity to over 170,000 German households.
The following text was written by Duncan McCann and originally published in the New Economics Foundation’s Website.
Duncan McCann:
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Unter dem Programmtitel "'Küsse mich" konzertierte der Unichor der HHU am Abend des 08.07.2018 unter freiem Himmel auf der Freitreppe von Schloss Mickeln im Düsseldorfer Süden. Vor den zahlreichen Zuschauer/innen im vollbesetzten Schlossgarten unternahm das Ensemble eine musikalische Reise durch fünf Jahrhunderte mit Stücken unter dem Leitthema: "Lieder der Liebe".Das Programm überzeugte durch einen lebendigen Kontrast von Opern- und Operettenliedern auf der einen und "geistlichen" Werken zum Thema Liebe auf der anderen Seite.
Eillie Anzilotti at FastCompany: “Diagnosed with juvenile arthritis as a kid, Jen Horonjeff knew she wanted to enter the medical field to help others navigate the healthcare system in America. She went on to get her Ph.D. in environmental medicine, hoping to better understand the social and contextual factors that surround the strict biology of a disease. Throughout her studies, though, something began to irk her.
David C.W. Parker at The Forum: “Nearly 40 years ago, Richard Fenno published Home Style, a seminal volume explaining how members of Congress think about and engage in the process of representation. To accomplish his task, he observed members of Congress as they crafted and communicated their representational styles to the folks back home in their districts.
Paper by Susan Stout, Vinisha Bhatia, and Paige Kirby: “We know that Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) aims to support accountability and learning, in order to drive better outcomes…The paper, Understanding Data Use: Building M&E Systems that Empower Users, emphasizes how critical it is for decision makers to consider users’ decision space – from the institutional all the way to technical levels – in achieving data uptake.
Paper by Regina Lenart-Gansiniec and Łukasz Sułkowski: “Crowdsourcing is one of the new themes that has appeared in the last decade. Considering its potential, more and more organisations reach for it. It is perceived as an innovative method that can be used for problem solving, improving business processes, creating open innovations, building a competitive advantage, and increasing transparency and openness of the organisation. Crowdsourcing is also conceptualised as a source of a knowledge-based organisation.
Alessandro Mantelero in Computer Law & Security Review: “The use of algorithms in modern data processing techniques, as well as data-intensive technological trends, suggests the adoption of a broader view of the data protection impact assessment. This will force data controllers to go beyond the traditional focus on data quality and security, and consider the impact of data processing on fundamental rights and collective social and ethical values.
Book edited by Dirk Helbing: “This new collection of essays follows in the footsteps of the successful volume Thinking Ahead – Essays on Big Data, Digital Revolution, and Participatory Market Society, published at a time when our societies were on a path to technological totalitarianism, as exemplified by mass surveillance reported by Edward Snowden and others.
Long Now Foundation Seminar by Juan Benet: “We live in a spectacular time,”…”We’re a century into our computing phase transition. The latest stages have created astonishing powers for individuals, groups, and our species as a whole. We are also faced with accumulating dangers — the capabilities to end the whole humanity experiment are growing and are ever more accessible.
Book by Steven Johnson: “Big, life-altering decisions matter so much more than the decisions we make every day, and they’re also the most difficult: where to live, whom to marry, what to believe, whether to start a company, how to end a war. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach for addressing these kinds of conundrums.
Open Letter: “To everyone who shapes technology today
We live in a world where technology is consuming society, ethics, and our core existence.
It is time to take responsibility for the world we are creating. Time to put humans before business. Time to replace the empty rhetoric of “building a better world” with a commitment to real action. It is time to organize, and to hold each other accountable.
Aaron Fernando: Education can take many forms, including the form of play itself. The TESA Collective is a co-op that creates games for various social justice organizations.
Case study by Gabriel Kuris and Steven S. Strauss at Innovations for Successful Societies: “In 2011, voters in Chicago elected Rahm Emanuel, a 51-year-old former Chicago congressman, as their new mayor. Emanuel inherited a city on the upswing after years of decline but still marked by high rates of crime and poverty, racial segregation, and public distrust in government.
John Abowd at US Census: “…Throughout our history, we have been leaders in statistical data protection, which we call disclosure avoidance. Other statistical agencies use the terms “disclosure limitation” and “disclosure control.” These terms are all synonymous. Disclosure avoidance methods have evolved since the censuses of the early 1800s, when the only protection used was simply removing names.
On Friday August 31, the California Senate gave final approval to Senator Scott Wiener and Sen. Kevin De León’s SB 822, which would adopt net neutrality protections for California. The bill now heads to Governor Jerry Brown for his signature before September 30.
Location
United States
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