Google says that its search engine now contains 500 million objects and knows more than 3.5 billion facts ‘and relationships between these different objects.’
World Bank decides to make its research open access
The World Bank is the frequent target of criticism, protests, and even riots. Critics feel the organization exerts a disproportionate influence on the economies and policies of less powerful nations. As a large, transnational bureaucracy it can be impenetrable at the best of times, moreso if those manning the fiduciary barricades are resistant to change.
Perhaps it is the persistence and extravagance of its detractors, but for whatever reason, the World Bank is taking steps toward greater transparency. It announced yesterday that it would be instituting a new “Open Access policy for its research outputs and knowledge products” begining July 1.
The implications of this policy “for authors, enables the widest possible dissemination of their findings and, for readers, increases their ability to discover pertinent information.”
» via ars technica
One Man's Quest to Make Information Free
Carl Malamud once told a senior official at the Securities and Exchange Commission that he wanted to put the agency’s filings online. “I just don’t think people who use the Internet are going to be interested in this stuff,” Malamud remembers the official saying in 1993. Malamud bought all the filings and put them online anyway, using a computer borrowed from his friend Eric Schmidt. (Yes, that Eric Schmidt.) About a year later, he took them down. That prompted more than 17,000 day traders, investment clubs, and business school professors to beg the agency for free Web access to its records. You might know it today as the SEC’s “Edgar” database.
More than 15 years after that stunt, Malamud is still making the same argument: If you make government information free and easily accessible, there’s no telling who’ll start using it or what good ideas will spring up. “Every time I put something online there’s a huge audience,” says Malamud, founder of Public.Resource.Org, a nonprofit that advocates for government transparency. “The industry guys think the only audience is industry types and Ralph Nader.”
» via BusinessWeek
If each function across the publishing company is responsible for their own metadata, then marketing is going to be responsible for the metadata that’s most important to marketing, production is going to be responsible for metadata that’s most important to them. So, rather than having one person decide what’s the most important metadata, if everyone’s taking responsibility for it — and using it — then it’s guaranteed to be good.
Why People Believe Misinformation, Even After It's Corrected
These days we are bombarded with information, much of it incorrect, and long after the political campaigns are over a lot of it will still be buried in the part of our brain where we store our memories. And new research shows that the more intensely we believe something to be true, the more likely it will resurface in the future, even if we have learned it was false.
» via Yahoo! News
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