Public Intelligence Blog

Patrick Meier

Advice to Future PhDs from 2 Unusual Graduating PhDs

Next week I will be attending my official graduation from The Fletcher School to receive my PhD diploma. It is—in a word—surreal. I’ve been working on my PhD for almost as long as I’ve known my good friend and colleague Chris Albon, which is to say, a long time. Chris is also a newly minted political science PhD and recently joined the FrontlineSMS team as the director of their Governance Project. Needless to say, our paths have crossed on many occasions over the years and we’ve had many long conversations about the scholar-practitioner path that we’ve taken. With graduation just a few days away, we thought we’d write-up this joint post to share our pearls of wisdom with future PhDs.

First: blog, blog, blog! The blog is the new CV. If you don’t exist dynamically online, then you’re not indexable on the web. And if you’re not indexable, then you’re not searchable or discoverable. You don’t exist! Blog-ergo-sum, simple as that. Chris and I have been blogging for years and this has enabled us to further our knowledge and credibility, not to mention our of network of contacts. The blog allows you to build your own independent brand, not your advisor’s and not your program’s. This is critical. We’ve received consulting gigs and keynote invitations based on blog posts that we’ve published over the years. Do not underestimate the power of blogging for your professional (and yes, academic) career. In many ways, blogging is about getting credit for your ideas and to signal to others what you know and what your interests are.

Second: get on Twitter! Malcolm Gladwell is wrong: social media can build strong-tie bonds. Heck, social media is how I originally met Chris. If the blog is the new CV, then consider your Twitter account the new business card. Use Twitter to meet everyone, everywhere. Let people know you’ll be in London for a conference and don’t underestimate the synergies and serendipity that is the twittersphere. Chris currently follows around 1,200 people on Twitter, and he estimates that over the years he has met around half of them in person. That is a lot of contacts and, frankly, potential employers. Moreover, like blogging, tweeting enables you to connect to others and stay abreast of interesting new developments. Once upon a time, people used to email you interesting articles, conferences, etc. I personally got on Twitter several years ago when I realized that said emails were no longer making it to my inbox. This information was now being shared via Twitter instead. Like the blog, Twitter allows you to create and manage your own personal brand.

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Howard Rheingold

I’m glad to see Google providing more material about how to use search effectively — Howard

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GOOGLE SEZ:

Help your students become better searchers

Web search can be a remarkable tool for students, and a bit of instruction in how to search for academic sources will help your students become critical thinkers and independent learners.

With the materials on this site, you can help your students become skilled searchers- whether they’re just starting out with search, or ready for more advanced training.

Search Education / Education on Search

Bojan Radej

The Data Journalism Handbook is Out

6 months ago at Mozilla Festival 2011, the Data Journalism Handbook was born. Thanks for your interest in the book – I have great pleasure in announcing that the Handbook is now live!

The Handbook features contributions from over 70 leading practitioners of data journalism from every corner of the globe, from Japan to Finland, Nigeria to the US and from leading news outlets such the New York Times, Zeit Online, the BBC and the Guardian. The Handbook is an open educational resource, under a creative commons licence (CC-BY-SA) so please share it with your friends and remix it. We hope that it will encourage many budding data journalists to look at data as a source and give them courage to tackle it, as well as showcasing some great examples of journalism using data as inspiration for future stories.

You can find the handbook at: http://datajournalismhandbook.org/ 

Also available for pre-order is the e- and print version from O’Reilly Media – http://oreil.ly/ddj-e-print - so if you are interested in a version to read offline, take a look!

We will soon have the facility to submit feedback via the website if you spot any errors or have any improvements for the next version,

–
Lucy Chambers

Infographic impresario Lulu Pinney created this superb poster, which gives an overview of the contents of the Data Journalism Handbook.

Click on Image to Enlarge

Michel Bauwens

Phi Beta Iota:  This is one of the most elegant trenchant discussions we have seen on the imperatives for arriving at collective intelligence through open methods.   The entire contribution is below the line.

Debating the Iron Law of Bureaucracy and the Power Law: Knowing Networks as an alternative to scale-free networks

Who, Me?

Google’s Destruction Is Already Under Way

Nicholas Carlson

Business Insider, Apr. 27, 2012

The Federal Trade Commission has hired the prosecutor who got Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh the death penalty to lead its investigation into potential anti-trust violations by Google, report David Streitfeld and Edward Wyatt of the New York Times.

Her name is Beth Wilkinson.

Experts tell the Times her hiring sends “a strong signal that [the FTC is] prepared to take the Internet giant to court.”

According to Streitfeld and Wyatt, the government’s concern with Google is that “Google has manipulated its search results, making it less likely that competing companies or products appear at the top of a results page.”

Howard Rheingold

Hootsuite now includes RSS, Mailchimp, and more

Hootsuite, the social media dashboard, has added five new apps specifically aimed at the enterprise: Mailchimp email campaign management tool, Chime.in for brands to build communities, an RSS reader, and more — Howard

See Also:

Howard Rheingold at Phi Beta Iota

Patrick Meier

Future Trends in Global Geospatial Information Management

The United Nations Committee of Experts on Global Information Management (GGIM) recently organized a meeting of thought-leaders and visionaries in the geo-spatial world to identify the future of this space over the next 5-10 years. These experts came up with some 80+ individual predictions. I’ve included some of the more interesting ones below.

• The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as a tool for rapid geospatial data collection will increase.

• 3D and even 4D geospatial information, incorporating time as the fourth dimension, will increase.

• Technology will move faster than legal and governance structures.

• The link between geospatial information and social media, plus other actor networks, will become more and more important.

• Real-time info will enable more dynamic modeling & response to disasters.

• Free and open source software will continue to grow as viable alternatives both in terms of software, and potentially in analysis and processing.

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Sepp Hasslberger

Forget WiFi and Radio Waves, LiFi Uses Lightbulbs to Connect to the Internet

Howard Rheingold

Welcome to DeepaMehta | DeepaMehta

Looks like a more sociable version of Personal Brain — mindmapping plus communication. “DeepaMehta is a software platform for knowledge workers. The special feature of DeepaMehta is the situation-centered user interface: information belonging to one working context is — together with its content associations — displayed and edited in a single window. Whether it is text, images, documents, emails, websites, events or for example contacts.”

Click on Image to Enlarge

Chuck Spinney

Add to this idea a more open “peer review” process in place of the present obscure, back-scratching, club-based peer review process, and climate science might be well on its way to depoliticization.

Peter Coles is professor of theoretical astrophysics at Cardiff University, The Guardian, 20 April 2012

The Guardian’s recent articles about the absurdities of the academic journal racket have brought out into the open some very important arguments that many academics, including myself, have been making for many years with little apparent effect.

Now this issue is receiving wider attention, I hope sufficient pressure will develop to force radical changes to the way research is communicated, not only between scientists but also between scientists and the public, because this is not just about the exorbitant cost of academic journals and the behaviour of the industry that publishes them. It’s about the much wider issue of how science should operate in a democratic society.

Read full story.

See Also:

Open Source Agency: Executive Access Point

THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth & Trust