MediaBerkman

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Alexander Heffner senior at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, was the guest speaker this week at the Berkman Center’s Luncheon Series.

He is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Scoop08.com, an online national student newspaper dedicated to coverage of the 2008 presidential election. Heffner discusses how scoop08 is geared towards young adults and represents political ideas across the spectrum. Presently, Scoop08 has a network of several hundred student journalists across the country and abroad, and actively continues to recruit new editors and writers. Runtime: 01:14:23, size: 320×240, 165.4MB, .MOV, H.264 codec

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Fernando Rodrigues, Brazillian journalist and Harvard Nieman Fellow was the guest speaker this week at the Berkman Center’s Luncheon Series.

Rodrigues spoke about journalism and access to public information in Brazil.

Journalist Fernando Rodrigues assembled a database with some 25,000 records of Brazilian politicians showing electoral information and personal data –including the list of personal assets of each politician who run for office in the three past general elections in Brazil (1998, 2002 and 2006). In 2006, the day the website was last updated, it drew 1,000,000 viewers. It is a free access website and voters can check whether a particular politician has increased his or her patrimony in a compatible way with the declared income. The database has also been an endless source of news stories for media outlets all over Brazil.

Collecting all that information was not an easy task, since Brazil does not have a Freedom of Information Act. Mr. Rodrigues also works with the National Forum of Right of Access to Public Information, a new advocacy group in favor of a FoIA for Brazil. The Forum teaches people how to require public information from government agencies despite that there is no clear legislation about it.

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Deb Roy, director of M.I.T Media Lab’s Cognitive Machines group, and Chair of the Academic Program in Media Arts and Sciences was the guest speaker this week at the Berkman Center’s Luncheon Series.

Roy’s presentation discussed The Human Speechome Project, an effort to observe and computationally model the longitudinal course of language development of one child at an unprecedented scale.

The Project is “collecting audio and video recordings for the first two to three years of one child’s life, in its near entirety, as it unfolds in the child’s home. To analyze the resulting massive audio-visual corpus, we are developing new data mining technologies to help human analysts rapidly annotate and transcribe recordings using semi-automatic methods, and to detect and visualize salient patterns of behavior and interaction.”

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Michael Anti, New York Times Beijing bureau researcher and fellow at Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation, was the guest speaker this week at the Berkman Center’s Luncheon Series.

Anti discussed how the recent surge in blogging has changed the state-run media landscape of China and altered the centralized control the ruling party holds over free expression in the world’s most populace nation.

Michael Anti (Zhao Jing), a Nieman Follow at Harvard, is a journalism researcher with the Beijing Bureau of New York Times. He runs several political columns on Chinese top newspapers and magazines. He was a war reporter for a Chinese newspaper in Baghdad in March 2003. His well-known Chinese political blog was shutdown by Microsoft in December 2005. In the wake of this case, he turned to run a collaborative online weekly magazine on International politics. He is an international jury member of Deutsche Welle’s Best of Blogs competition in 2005, 2006 and 2007.
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This week the Berkman Center and the Research Center for Information Law, St. Gallen released the latest study on the state of interoperability: “Breaking Down Digital Barriers.” This joint report follows the Roadmap to Open ICT Ecosystems released in 2005, as it navigates the nuanced territory of consumer, corporate, and governmental interests in the benefits and roadblocks to interoperable ICT systems.

The report and accompanying case studies on DRM-protected music, Digital Identity, and Mashups are available for download on the project website. The presentation and discussion of the report and its findings, took place in Washington, DC. Runtime: 01:04:20, size: 320×240, 181.7MB, .mov, H.264 codec

Download the MP3 (time: 01:03:50)

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Gary Kebbel, journalism program officer at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, was the guest speaker this week at the Berkman Center’s Luncheon Series.

Kebbel’s presentation, entitled “The Knight News Challenge and Digital Innovation: Challenges Posed by Intellectual Property, International Giving, and Grant Administration” discussed the foundation’s grant program. Just ending its third year, the Knight News Challenge is a $25 million contest to find digital news innovations that are used to create community in a given geographic area. At Knight Foundation, Kebbel also helped create the Knight Citizen News Network and the Knight Digital Media Center.

The contest was recently revised to meet new and evolving goals, such as making grants to individuals in foreign countries or focusing the wisdom of the crowd on weak applications so that they could be strengthened and resubmitted. Additionally, $500,000 was set aside for the ideas of people 25-years-old and younger. These changes create new problems of grant administration, intellectual property and having a minor win a monetary award.

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Eszter Hargittai, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies and Sociology, and Faculty Associate of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University, was the guest speaker this week at the Berkman Center’s Luncheon Series.

Hargittai presented a new study using a unique data set on young adults’ Internet uses, skills and participation. She looked at differences in daily digital media uses by type of user background, access and skill level. While all young adults in the sample regularly use the Internet, there are systematic variations in their familiarity with the Web and who does what online. In addition to exploring the relationship of socioeconomic factors and Internet usage, the talk also considers the important mediating role of skill in what people do online.

Hargittai heads the Web Use Project at Northwestern University. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University where she was a Wilson Scholar. She spent the 2006-07 academic year as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

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Aaron Swartz, co-founder of Reddit.com and Tech Lead for the Open Library project, spoke at this week’s installment of the Berkman Center’s Luncheon Series.

Aaron spoke about how, thanks to new technology, the grand vision of a library containing every book in the world is now within our grasp. He discussed how the Open Library Project, a loose collection of technologists, publishers, librarians, and book-lovers, has taken up this challenge by trying to create a website collecting everything we know about books — including library records, publishers’ blurbs, full-text and scans, reviews, and more.

Aaron was previously a co-founder of Reddit.com, which was purchased by Condé Nast in late 2006. He was worked on Internet specifications for RSS and RDF and was one of the early team members of the Creative Commons project. He is the author of a number of free software packages and a co-founder of Jottit.com.

+ Open Library demo
+ Open Library vision
+ Aaron Swartz’s website

Berkman Fellow David Weinberger live-blogged the lunch, and you can check out his comments and summary here.

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The Berkman Luncheon Series continued yesterday with Oliver Goodenough, who, in addition to being a Berkman fellow, is a Professor of Law at Vermont Law School and an Adjunct Professor at the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College.

Oliver discussed how the institution of game theory and other economic institutions can take a broad range of forms, such as conventions of property, promise keeping, truth-telling, and submission to authority, and how they can exist in a similarly broad range of milieu. Examples included the internal psychology of values and commitment, informal cultural expectations, formal institutions like law, mechanical devices like a coke machine and computer code.

You can also read David Weinberger’s great play-by-play of the discussion and Q & A.

Please visit the Luncheon Series page to learn about future guests and be sure to RSVP to save your spot at these wonderful weekly gatherings.

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Drew Clark of the Center for Public Integrity joined an enthusiastic crowd at today’s Berkman Luncheon Series to discuss “Media Tracker, FCC Watch, and the Politics of Telecom, Media and Technology.”

Drew, a senior fellow and project manager at the Center, not only provided great insight into the difficult and confusing intersection of technology & politics, but also dove into specific examples such as, the FCC’s 700 MHz auction and the Connect Kentucky project.

For more information on Drew’s work, the Center for Public Integrity, and future luncheon guests, check out the Events & Webcast blog.

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