The land grab for farm data | TechCrunch Specifically, ownership and control of agronomic and equipment data is understood to have dramatic escalating value. Which seed varieties were the most successful and where? Which plant populations performed best? Whose recommendations (e.g. nitrogen programs) outperformed their peers? Which input datasets are used for these recommendations, how were they acquired and are they standardized and accessible? How are the big companies actually using the data? Who has access, how long have they been acquiring it and how long do they keep it? Which documents did I sign to give them access? Data is one of the most valuable things farmers harvest. Make no mistake, the ambiguity around the value of this data is intentional. Nobody wants to initiate paying for something that has always been free. Returning Meaning To The Heart Of Communications – Brand Quarterly The P&I (Persuasion and Influence) industries, like so may others such as education, policing and (in the UK) the NHS (National Health Service), are increasingly falling under the sway of an “arithmocracy”. It is a reductionist system where managers are risk averse, increasingly reliant on ‘safety in numbers’ and prone to what Gerd Gigerenzer calls “defensive decision-making”. This system is based on a sort of physics envy: the belief (or hope) that human beings are more […]

Rogue Scientists Race to Save Climate Data from Trump | WIRED At Penn, a group of coders that called themselves “baggers” set upon these tougher sets immediately, writing scripts to scrape the data and collect them in data bundles to be uploaded to DataRefuge.org, an Amazon Web Services-hosted site which will serve as an alternate repository for government climate and environmental research during the Trump administration. (A digital “bag” is like a safe, which would alert the user if anything within it is changed.) It’s more than just the words Personal sites, our blogs, these were once our playgrounds. My own site was the first place I added rollover images, CSS for fonts, tried out a “table free” design. I wrote about the web, surrounded by my own experiments with the web. We all did, and it was only in reading those words from 1999 that I realised there was more to owning your own content than simply not publishing your words elsewhere.

MIT Media Lab Changes Software Default to FLOSS* — MIT MEDIA LAB — Medium Kind of insane that there was ever a need for ‘permission’ to release their own work. This student put 50 million stolen research articles online. And they’re free. – The Washington Post “There are many ways to argue that copyright infringement is not theft, but even if it is, it is justified in this case,” she said in an instant-message interview via Google. “All content should be copied without restriction. But for education and research, copyright laws are especially damaging.” What I learned from Om and Hossein These two people who I only know because they blog, are right — but then I thought — no I don’t agree. And yes, it’s something I’ve been struggling with, but for me the struggle is over. I write my blog not because I want to write a “good” blog post, or even one that’s read by a lot of people. And my own self is not scattered, it’s right here, and as long as I live it will continue to be here. And my online self doesn’t exist for the benefit of others, it’s here to help my real self develop his thinking and create a trail of ideas and feelings and experiences that I can look back […]