ISBER Centers
Giovanni Vigna and Electronic Voting Systems: The Taxpayers bought Ferraris but got Pintos.
Giovanni Vigna spoke on October 23 about his work as part of a security team looking at electronic voting machines. A video of the talk is below.
Categories: ISBER Centers
Web 2.0 coverage of the Santa Barbara Tea Fire
It is tough to be a Santa Barbara resident when you need news coverage. Most of our network affiliates are actually based in Santa Maria, an hour north, or in San Luis Obispo, an hour and 1/2 north, except for
Categories: ISBER Centers
The Economic Impact on Open Source
What will the impact of the economic downturn be on open source projects? The Internet Evolution blog looks at this issue.
There are two sides:
Perhaps more individuals will participate in open source projects? As Keen posits perhaps, "hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions, of newly redundant Americans will have nothing to do all day except contribute to wikis or become citizen journalists or "work" on their Facebook or MySpace pages."
Categories: ISBER Centers
Christian Science Monitor moves to online only
After a century of continuous publication, The Christian Science Monitor will abandon its weekday print edition and appear online only, its publisher announced Tuesday. The CSM is the first major national paper to make such a change. Could this start a trend?
The CSM was one of the earliest newspapers online, starting in 1995.
The paper's circulation has fallen from a peak of 223,000 in 1970 to about 50,000 now, while its online traffic has soared. The newspaper gets about 5 million page-views per month, compared with about 4 million five years ago and 1 million a decade ago.
Categories: ISBER Centers
Affiliates Badge
We have been looking for ways to expand the reach of CITS and it seemed like getting people who like the Center involved would be a great way to do that. So, we came up with a small logo badge that you could put on your website if you wanted to indicate your affiliation with CITS and point people to our site.
All you need to do is paste the following into your website code where you want the badge to appear.
Categories: ISBER Centers
Twittering the Vote
We've already covered Twittering the debates, and now as voting day approaches, Twitter users are also tweeting about their voting experiences. Watch the live feed here. If you're interested in tweeting your own experience, send to #votereport.
Categories: ISBER Centers
Campaigns and technology
According to this Slate article, the Obama campaign has collected hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of cell phone numbers from loyal supporters and new registrants over the past two years of campaigning.
Categories: ISBER Centers
Spam!
In the United States, 75% of Internet users report receiving spam on a daily basis and it is estimated that the productivity loss associated with reviewing and deleting spam totals $22 billion annually (Swartz, 2005). But a small victory has been achieved: a spam company responsible for one-third of all spam was shut down this week.
Categories: ISBER Centers
Judy Estrin and Innovation
Last week, the Washington Post hosted an online event with Judy Estrin, former CTO of Cisco and CITS's upcoming speaker at the 2008 Distinguished Lecture Series.
Some highlights:
BizBooks: You list research, development, and application as the pro-innovation ecosystem's sort of Holy Trinity. Why do we always hear about R&D, but rarely about application?
Categories: ISBER Centers
Electronic Voting and Upcoming Faculty Lecture Series Event on Thursday
With the U.S. presidential election less than two weeks away, and the ever present concern about election fraud, many have suggested moving toward an electronic voting system. In fact, 32% of Americans will vote on electronic voting systems on November 4th, according to the Washington Times.
Categories: ISBER Centers
Campaigning within Video Games
Fans have sighted an “Obama for President” billboard in the Xbox 360 racing game Burnout Paradise and a number of sports games. The campaign and EA Sports confirmed that it was in fact a paid placement.
Categories: ISBER Centers
CNS-UCSB Event: Community Gathering to Discuss Applying Nanotechnology to Energy Needs
Nobel Laureate among UC Santa Barbara science professors to
lead open forum
Santa Barbara, Calif. – UC Santa Barbara’s Center for Nanotechnology in Society
(CNS) and the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) invite the Santa Barbara
community to attend a casual public forum called “Nano-Meeter” to discuss the possibilities
for applying nanotechnologies to energy needs. The event will be held on Thursday,
November 6, 2008 from 7:00 – 8:00 p.m. at the Mackenzie Lawn Bowls Club House
located just off of Upper State
Street.
Download the event flyer here (index.php?option=com_remository Itemid=100 func=fileinfo id=188).
Categories: ISBER Centers
The cost of free online services: Getting what you (don't) pay for
A lot of people use free email services. Especially in the past few years, as the amount of email storage given out by the free services has increased, often to well beyond the storage space allocated by companies, organizations and ISPs, free email services have grown in popularity.
Categories: ISBER Centers
Detecting Earthquakes With Personal Computers
While harnessing the public's computer power for good through distributed computing is nothing new, a new project, Quake-Catcher Network at Stanford takes distributed computing a step further. In this case, members of the public can download software which allows their computers to take a dense set of measurements that can help detect earthquakes.
Categories: ISBER Centers
CNS-UCSB Helps Land $24 Million National Center to Study Environmental Impacts of Nanotechnology
Santa Barbara, Calif. – The Center for Nanotechnology in Society at the
University of California at Santa Barbara (CNS-UCSB) helped to win the
new University of California Center for the Environmental Implications
of Nanotechnology (UC CEIN), a five-year, $24 million center co-funded
by the National Science Foundation and the Environmental Protection
Agency to study the environmental impacts of nanotechnology. The new
center, headquartered at UCLA but involving significant collaboration
from UC Santa Barbara researchers, will include a research group on
environmental risk perception led by Dr. Barbara Herr Harthorn,
Director of the CNS-UCSB and Associate Professor of Feminist Studies,
Anthropology Sociology. CNS-UCSB also will collaborate in the UC
CEIN’s novel science journalist program, led by Professor William
Freudenburg, a professor in UCSB’s Environmental Studies Program and a
member of...
Categories: ISBER Centers
Online Community Self-Moderation
"The amount of time it would take for the community to self-regulate -- I don't think it could sustain itself in the meantime. Anyway, I can't think of any successful online community where the nice, quiet, reasonable voices defeat the loud, angry ones on their own." - Heather Champ, Director of Community at Flickr, in the San Francisco Gate.
Categories: ISBER Centers
CNS-UCSB Announces Fellowship for Science and Engineering Students
DEADLINE: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2008
Center for Nanotechnology in Society
University of California, Santa Barbara
Click here (index.php?option=com_remository Itemid=100 func=fileinfo id=180) for the flyer of this announcement.
Graduate Research Fellowships in the Center for Nanotechnology in Society:
The Center for Nanotechnology in Society at the University of
California, Santa Barbara (CNS-UCSB) announces fellowship opportunities
for outstanding graduate students pursuing research in the sciences and
engineering. The CNS-UCSB seeks to produce and encourage excellent and
innovative scholarship that addresses the intersection of
nanotechnologies with society. CNS-UCSB researchers work in the
departments of Anthropology, Communication, English, Global and
International Studies, History, Political Science, Sociology, and
Women’s Studies, and are engaged in several areas of inquiry including:
the historical context of nanotechnologies; innovation, intellectual
property and globalization; and risk perception and media...
Categories: ISBER Centers
Surveillance of Skype Messages in China Documented
The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto released a report this week on SkypeSkype in China. [NYT Coverage] The report found that text chat messages of Skype users are "regularly" scanned for sensitive keywords (Falun Gong, etc.), and if present, the resulting data are uploaded and stored on insecure servers in China.
Categories: ISBER Centers
Twittering the Presidential Debate
Twitter is a "free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length" (Wikipedia ).
Unlike a blog, Twitter users frequently update through short posts. Many Twitter users "tweet" through their mobile devices.
Categories: ISBER Centers
The Search Myth: Quality information is not a click away 11/13 12noon ESB1001
This talk challenges the myth of information on the Internet: while information may appear excessively easy to find because of quick search results and increased accessibility to materials, locating relevant, high-quality information requires highly sophisticated literacy skills. Monica Bulger shares results of an empirical study for her dissertation that assessed the ways in which students negotiate potentially overwhelming online information options.
Categories: ISBER Centers