PhD summer school in Political Economy of ICT

(por e-mail)

PhD summer school

Political Economy of Information and Communication Technologies

Skagen, Denmark

21 – 26 August 2012

Website: http://phdsummerschool.nordict.aau.dk 

Deadline for registration: 15 May 2012

The topic of the 2012 PhD summer school on the political economy of ICT organized by the center for Communication, Media and Information technologies (CMI) is

The Future of Internet

The focus will be on two important developments: 1) Internet and the media and 2) Internet of Things (IoT)

Internet is becoming a major infrastructure for media services. This is driven by social media and new and creative content, by mobile and fixed broadband infrastructures, by application and service platforms, the development of end user devices like smart phones and tablet PCs, and new business models. Recent developments in broadcasting and Internet technologies have radically changed the conditions for the development and use of media and communication services. One of the most significant examples of this trend is the paradigm shift from traditional broadcast to hybrid Broadcast - Broadband technologies and the over-the-top (OTT) platforms. These solutions open new pathways but also constitute great challenges to the industry and market.

Another important area of change for the future Internet is the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT introduces significant changes in our lives and help realizing visions of "ambient intelligence". Within a few years we will be surrounded by a huge amount of sensors, devices and "things", which will be able to communicate and bring artificial intelligence to different sectors of society and promote the development of areas such as smart cities, green IoT, e-health, intelligent transport, supply chain management, factory automation etc.

These changes massively influence markets and businesses and the development of services and applications. The aim of the PhD summer school is to discuss the major factors influencing this development with focus on the interplay between technological, political, economic and cultural aspects.

Topics included:
• Internet and the media
• Convergence of telecommunications, IT and the media
• Internet TV and Hybrid Broadband Broadcast TV
• Internet of Things
• IPv6
• Cloud computing
• Broadband
• Social media
• Business models
• The interrelationships between technology, market developments and regulations

The summer school is organized by CMI in cooperation with the CAMMP project (Converged Advanced Mobile Media Platform), and is part of the activities of the Mobile and Wireless Cluster CWMC (Copenhagen Wireless and Mobile Consortium).

Course faculty:

William H. Melody, Professor, CMI, Aalborg University

Ruth Towse, Professor of Economics in the Creative Industries, Bournemouth University

Ramjee Prasad, Professor, CTIF/AAU

Knud Erik Skouby, Professor, CMI

Anders Henten, Professor, CMI

Reza Tadayoni, Associate Professor, CMI

Mangia che ti fa benne

(via I Love Charts, via Charming Italy)

Ma che! Pasta!

Click image to open interactive version (via CharmingItaly).

Ma che pasta è questo?

What kind of pasta is on your plate? by Charming Italy

Vino

Click image to open interactive version (via Charming Sardinia).
 
Caffè

50 types of Italian coffee: espresso, cappuccino and many more by Charming Italy

Tudo é som

Aos que não sabem: música é quase minha religião. O "quase" se deve ao fato de eu não conseguir estabelecer critérios e processos devocionais sequer para esse aspecto da minha vivência.

A música também tem "uma pegada" religiosa para mim quando paro para filosofar sobre o "Om", indo para o "om mani padme hum", passando pelo "A Arte e a Bíblia", que a Erica me emprestou há alguns dias, e o "The World Is Sound: Nada Brahma: Music and the Landscape of Consciousness", que o Juca já me indicou um milhão de vezes, e sobre essa coisa toda. Tudo está em alguma frequência e indo para algum lugar, enfim.

E então eu entro no Gizmodo e vejo a chamada "Este senhor redescobriu a felicidade ao ouvir músicas da sua época em um iPod", que eu humildemente renomearia cortando as últimas três palavras (dane-se o iParelho). Na matéria, o seguinte vídeo (um pouco longo, pule para 2min15seg se preferir):

 

Old Man In Nursing Home Reacts To Hearing Music From His Era 

E muita coisa faz sentido a partir daí.

"Jai guru deva, Om."

Educação e Internet

Alguns dados interessantes pra quem trabalha com educação e/ou Internet:

Cartograma - 29 - Municípios com existência de bibliotecas públicas – Brasil – 2006.
Fonte: IBGE, Diretoria de Pesquisas, Coordenação de População e Indicadores Sociais; IBGE, Diretoria de Geociências,
Coordenação de Geografia.  Suplemento de Cultura da Pesquisa de Informações Básicas Municipais – MUNIC 2006.

Cartograma - 31 - Municípios com existência de unidades de ensino superior – Brasil – 2006.
Ibid.

Atividades desenvolvidas na Internet - Treinamento e educação. Fonte: NIC.br - set/nov 2010 (grifos meus, clique para ampliar)

Ou seja, nas regiões que tem um número reduzido de bibliotecas, a Internet é consideravelmente usada para educação.


É preciso lembrar que o número de municípios das regiões brasileiras é bastante desigual e desproporcional em relação à área dos territórios:

• Norte: 449
• Centro-Oeste: 467
• Sul: 1188
• Sudeste: 1668
• Nordeste: 1793

New book out "International Internet Law"

(por e-mail)

International Internet Law
By Joanna Kulesza
Published Routledge
http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415674683/

This book discusses the international legal issues underlying Internet Governance and proposes an international solution to its problems. The book encompasses a wide spectrum of current debate surrounding the governance of the internet and focuses on the areas and issues which urgently require attention from the international community in order to sustain the proper functioning of the global network that forms the foundation of our information fuelled society. Among the topics discussed are international copyright protection, state responsibility for cyber-attacks (cyberterrorism), and international on-line privacy protection.

Taking a comparative approach by examining how different jurisdictions such as the United States, the European Union, China and Singapore have attempted various solutions to the problem of Internet Governance, the author offers a practical solution to the problem and is a proponent of International Internet Law. Kulesza suggests that just as in the case of International Environmental Law, an Internet Framework Convention could shape the starting point for international cooperation and lead to a clear, contractual division of state jurisdictional competences.

International Internet Law is of particular interest to legal scholars engaged with the current challenges in international law and international relations, as well as students of law, international relations and political science. The issues discussed in the book are also relevant to journalists and other media professionals, facing the challenges of analyzing current international developments in cyberspace.

Começa hoje a Conferência Virtual Paulista

(por e-mail)
A Conferência Virtual Paulista sobre Transparência e Controle Social se inicia nesta segunda-feira, 23 de janeiro, com o recebimento de propostas/diretrizes sobre os quatro eixos temáticos da 1ª Consocial. Após um ciclo de quatro palestras virtuais interativas, que ocorreram entre os dias 10 e 19 deste mês, está aberto o espaço virtual de participação e manifestação direta de ideias e opiniões relativas à temática de transparência e controle social. Podem ser apresentadas até cinco Diretrizes/Propostas em cada um dos seguintes eixos de discussão:

Eixo 1: Promoção da transparência pública e acesso à informação e a dados públicos;
Eixo 2: Mecanismos de controle social, engajamento e capacitação da sociedade para o controle da gestão pública;
Eixo 3: A atuação dos conselhos de políticas públicas como instâncias de controle;
Eixo 4: Diretrizes para a prevenção e combate à corrupção. 

Até o dia 06 de fevereiro de 2012, qualquer pessoa poderá acessar o link no site e enviar suas propostas/diretrizes para contribuir para o aumento da transparência e do controle social. Participe!

CFP: Academic research into Wikipedia: Beyond English Wikipedia and towards comparative perspectives

(por e-mail)

DIGITHUM: THE HUMANITIES IN THE DIGITAL AGE
http://digithum.uoc.edu

Issue 14 call for papers (English, Catalan and Spanish)

Download call for papers: http://www.onlinecreation.info/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/digithum-call-for-papers-november11-en1.pdf

Deadline for submission of originals: 1 March 2012

Publication date: May 2012

Subject: Academic research into Wikipedia: Beyond English Wikipedia and towards comparative perspectives

This year saw the celebration of the 10th anniversary of Wikipedia. In 2011, following its creation 10 years ago, Wikipedia became one of the world’s 10 most visited websites and one of the most active virtual communities. It currently has around 20 million articles – 3.7 million of which are in English: the most popular version. It has  some 365 million regular readers, around 90,000 regular editors – all voluntary – and hundreds of thousands of people who contribute anonymously.

Wikipedia is one of the numerous examples of mass online collaboration projects to follow in the footsteps of open-source software production and its modus operandi. Some authors see this new type of collaboration as representing an innovative form of social production, given that it operates on the edges of the market and its rules, functions successfully without many hierarchical organisational structures or command management systems and is developed thanks to the cooperation of thousands – or, in some cases, millions – of geographically dispersed people working voluntarily and without expecting any direct remuneration. The term commons-based peer production was proposed recently to conceptualise this practice (Benkler, 2006).

Since about 2005, there has been growing interest from the scientific community, and in particular from the field of social and human sciences, in researching this historically unprecedented phenomenon. A recent review of the scientific bibliography on Wikipedia has identified over 2,100 scientific articles and 38 doctoral theses with Wikipedia and/or its sister projects as their object of analysis. However, this volume of scientific production has focused excessively on the English version of Wikipedia when Wikipedia is now available in 279 different languages. Consequently, the current bibliography does not pay sufficient attention to the dynamics and peculiarities of versions of Wikipedia in other languages, which makes a comparative analysis showing the contrasts and similarities between the different communities difficult.

The aim of this Digithum issue is to bring together articles that explore all aspects of Wikipedia – and other related projects – which may prove relevant from a social and human science research perspective. As well as the subjects that have been the focus of the scientific studies to date – motivation and type of participants, organisation and governance, regulatory structure, publishing dynamics, content quality and reliability, teaching uses, the role of technology, etc., (Okoli 2009) – proposals for new problems and objects of analysis will also be welcome. The theory and discipline may be linked to any field of social and humanistic research: political science, sociology, anthropology, science and technology studies (STS), economics, etc.

Articles should have an empirical basis and use established qualitative or quantitative research methods in social and human sciences. Papers whose empirical focus is on versions other than those in English will be especially welcome and, in particular, those that present comparative studies showing contrasts and similarities between different size projects and/or projects in different languages, including Catalan. However, we will not be excluding papers about the English version.

Bibliography

Benkler, Y. 2006. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom.Yale University Press: Yale.
Lovink, Geert and Nathanel Tracz (eds.). 2011. Critical Point of View. A Wikipedia Reader. Institute of Network Cultures: Amsterdam.
Okoli, C., 2009. A Brief Review of Studies of Wikipedia in Peer-Reviewed Journals. In: 2009 Third International Conference on Digital Society. p 155–160.

Issue coordinators

Eduard Aibar, lecturer, Arts and Humanities department, and IN3 researcher, UOC Mayo Fuster Morell, postdoctoral fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University

Publication guidelines

Articles must not exceed 5,000 words and must contain the following information:
+ Title
+ Abstract (200 words) containing the basic aspects and results of the paper.
+ Keywords (between 4 and 6)
+ Body of the article, divided into sections and subsections
+ Bibliography
To ensure a blind review of articles, the following documents should be submitted
separately:
+ Author’s details (name and surname, professional affiliation, professional postal address, e-mail)
+ Brief CV (100-200 words) and photograph
Articles may be submitted in Catalan, Spanish and English.
For more information, please visit the Author Guidelines section of the website
(http://www.uoc.edu/ojs/index.php/digithum/about/submissions#authorGuidelines).