Some of us are looking into literature that studies volunteers, in particular, what types of factors motivate people to join and to continue participating in volunteer activities. From this perspective, the following NY Times article was quite interesting: "My Network, My Cause". It reports on how some students have used Facebook to organize "traditional" volunteering activities - here, getting donations for the people of Darfur - using a new technology. Personally, I'm more interested in how what's known about "offline" volunteering can inform the design of online volounteer-based communities, but this still is quite intriguing.
I've been thinking about buying a new computer, and after some Mac-koolaid-dispensation from Barry Smyth, I started to consider getting a Mac. Here's an article that claims Macs aren't just better but cheaper than PCs, too. So, should I buy a Mac?
I've recently been hearing a bit about Mark Penn's book "Microtrends: The Small Froces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes". As this review says, Penn analyzes poll and survey data to identify 75 important microtrends (which appear to correspond to 'small' segments of the US population, say at least 3 million) that, he believes, are interesting and important.
A recent article in the NY Times "Revisiting the Canon Wars" (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/books/review/Donadio-t.html) took a 20 year retrospective look at the controversy over Alan Bloom's book "The Closing of the American Mind". Bloom argued that American universities had been "dumbed down" by abandoning the classical Western canon.
Lots to argue about here, and the article gives a taste of the argument. However, I was most struck by the way the article ended:
Wikipedia is going to implement Alfaro et al's algorithm to assign trust levels to individual chunks of text within articles based on the reputation of the author of the chunk. The interface will use color coding to visualize trust levels.
http://technology.newscientist.com/channel/tech/mg19526226.200-wikipedia-20--now-with-added-trust.html
Interesting article (see http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/wikicity-0830.html) --
Residents of Italy's capital will glimpse the future of urban mapmaking next month with the launch of "Wiki City Rome,"
a project developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that
uses data from cellphones and other wireless technology to illustrate
the city's pulse in real time.
There was an interesting essay in the most recent CACM titled "Why You Can't Cite Wikpedia in My Class" (http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1284621.1284635). The author, Neil L. Waters, is a professor
of history and the Kawashima Professor of Japanese Studies in the
Department of History at Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT. He recounts how several students submitted essays to him with incorrect information on several topics in Japanese history, and how he traced the incorrect information to several Wikipedia articles.
