infoneer.net

At a behind-closed-doors meeting facilitated by the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport, copyright holders have handed out a list of demands to Google, Bing and Yahoo. To curb the growing piracy problem, Hollywood and the major music labels want the search engines to de-list popular filesharing sites such as The Pirate Bay, and give higher ranking to authorized sites.

» via TorrentFreak

Analysts say this year is a turning point for social media’s incorporation into the biggest mass-media event of the year, and advertisers are taking note. 

“The trend in social media with the Super Bowl has been building over the past two or three years,” said Tim Calkins, professor of marketing at Northwestern University. “This year, we’re really seeing it go to a totally new level where marketers are making social networking a core part of their Super Bowl efforts.” 

Glen Gilmore, a social media strategist and professor of digital marketing at Rutgers University, said companies have begun to realize that social networks aren’t just for kids anymore. “There’s a recognition among big businesses that social media is the new marketplace that they’ve got to be part of the conversation.” 

» via MSNBC

The unlikely coalition of companies and consumer groups that last week helped quash antipiracy legislation on Capitol Hill is now weighing the future of what might be called lobbying 2.0. Can the Internet industry, along with legions of newly politicized Web users, be a new force in Washington? And if so, what else can they all agree upon?

» via The New York Times (Subscription may be required for some content)

The federal government’s plan to expand computer security protections into critical parts of private industry is raising concerns that the move will threaten Americans’ civil liberties.

In a report for release Friday, The Constitution Project warns that as the Obama administration partners more with the energy, financial, communications and health care industries to monitor and protect networks, sensitive personal information of people who work for or communicate with those companies could be improperly or inadvertently disclosed.

While the government may have good intentions, it “runs the risk of establishing a program akin to wiretapping all network users’ communications,” the nonpartisan legal think tank says. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the report in advance.

» via Yahoo! News

A former senior Russian archive official says he saw a file that could shed light on Holocaust hero Raoul Wallenberg’s fate — challenging the insistence of Russia’s KGB successor agency that it has no documents regarding the man who saved tens of thousands of Jews in Hungary before disappearing into the hands of Soviet secret police.

Anatoly Prokopenko, 78, told The Associated Press that in 1991 he saw a thick dossier containing numerous references to Wallenberg that suggested he was being spied upon by a Russian aristocrat working for Soviet intelligence. Russian officials later said the file didn’t exist, in line with blanket denials of having information on Wallenberg.

“That file is extremely interesting, because it could allow us to determine the reasons behind his arrest,” Prokopenko said, while acknowledging he had only a few minutes to flip through hundreds of pages of documents.

» via Yahoo! News

If you ever sit back and wonder what it might have been like to live in the late Pleistocene, you’re not alone. That’s right about when humans emerged from a severe population bottleneck and began to expand globally. But, apparently, life back then might not have been too different than how we live today (that is, without the cars, the written language, and of course, the smartphone). In this week’s Nature, a group of researchers suggest that we share many social characteristics with humans that lived in the late Pleistocene, and that these ancient humans may have paved the way for us to cooperate with each other.

» via Wired

Depending on whom you ask, Rosetta Stone is either modernizing higher education or jeopardizing the quality of foreign language instruction by offering classes for transferrable college credit.

Rosemary Feal, executive director of the Modern Language Association and a Spanish professor, calls the idea “scandalous.”

David McAlpine, president of the board of directors for the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), said teaching a Spanish class completely online threatens educational standards and leaves students floundering behind their peers in traditional courses.

But James Madison University officials say the academic demands in an online class they offer through Rosetta Stone are the same ones that students face in their Harrisonburg, Va., lecture halls. Of course, the people making these statements aren’t Spanish professors – many language professors at the university don’t like the idea, but weren’t in a position to stop it. The university’s foreign language department chair is skeptical, arguing the software is best used as extra practice for students and not a course in itself.

» via Inside Higher Ed

The buzz surrounding the digital humanities has largely emphasized its implications for professional scholarship. But here at the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities on Thursday, a panel of digital humanists said that weaving digital humanities research into undergraduate education could help boost information literacy among college students.

“I think it’s a little disgraceful how little our students are forced to learn about the tool they and their friends use every day,” said Christopher Blackwell, professor of classics at Furman University.

With online gateways such as Google exerting a great deal of influence on how information is organized and presented, it is incumbent on humanities instructors to teach undergraduates how to read websites and digital discovery tools with the same critical vigilance with which they are taught to read textual arguments, the panelists said.

» via Inside Higher Ed

Udemy, a company that allows anyone to create and sell courses through its online platform, has announced a new area of its site, called The Faculty Project, devoted to courses by professors at a number of top institutions, such as Colgate, Duke University, Stanford University, Northwestern University, Vanderbilt University, the University of Virginia, Dartmouth College and Vassar College. While Udemy is a for-profit enterprise, the Faculty Project courses will be free.

The goal is to “elevate the brand,” according to Gagan Biyani, Udemy’s president and co-founder. The company says it has no immediate plans to monetize the Faculty Project, and would never do so without the input and permission of its faculty contributors.

The inaugural Faculty Project courses include many humanities electives normally reserved for small classrooms of undergraduates. Among them: “Elixir: A History of Water and Humans,” “Select Classics in Russian Literature” and “The Cognitive Neuroscience of Mindfulness.” Garland and the project’s other professorial recruits are developing, pro bono, mini-lecture-based versions of courses they offer on their home campuses. Udemy says it does not require the professors to relinquish ownership of the courses.

» via Inside Higher Ed

The lack of interaction among excellent scholars with similar interests raises some organizational  questions with important implications: Why cluster faculty members into departmental ghettos any longer? Why not allow voluntary mixing and matching — especially in cognate disciplines? Electronic communications via departmental listservs can provide the unit-specific information needed to keep the trains running on time, and the idea of promoting casual, often spontaneous interaction among scholars with similar research interests, but different methods is at once liberating and exhilarating.

Moreover, because scholars from different disciplines possess different strengths and different forms of proprietary knowledge, chances for the kind of intellectual arbitrage and cross-disciplinary collaborations that make for innovative breakthroughs would be enhanced. Few of the world’s major problems are best approached from a single disciplinary perspective, yet research universities generally sequester their best talent along departmental lines.

» via Inside Higher Ed

Apparently, money can’t buy literacy. Miller says he “learned that wealthier cites are no more likely to rank highly in literacy than poorer cities.” Take Cleveland—though the hard-hit city has the second lowest median family income of all cities in the survey, its library system is one of the best in the country. Cleveland also boasts the sixth highest newspaper readership and ranks fifth in magazine circulations. Despite its economic troubles, the city ranked 13th in literacy overall.

In comparison, Anchorage has the fifth-highest median family income, but ranks 61st in literacy. The rise of the Occupy movement has increased our awareness of income inequality across the United States. Even the poorest cities can help close the gap by investing in public education and literacy resources. Although “poverty has a strong impact on educational attainment,” Miller says, cities that are “truly committed to literacy” can find a way to “create and sustain rich resources for reading.” 

» via GOOD