“Turkish residents were unable to access Wikipedia on Saturday after the government blocked the site, citing content ‘showing Turkey in coordination and aligned with various terrorist groups,’ according to the Anadolu news agency.
The government has not officially commented on the outage. But the Transport, Maritime Affairs and Communications Ministry told the state-run agency, ‘Instead of coordinating against terrorism, (Wikipedia) has become part of an information source which is running a smear campaign against Turkey in the international arena.'”
— “Turkey Blocks Wikipedia, Accusing It Of Running ‘Smear Campaign,'” Amy Held, NPR
More:
“Turkey just banned Wikipedia, labeling it a ‘national security threat,’” Amanda Erickson, Washington Post
“Turkey blocks Wikipedia under law designed to protect national security,”Reuters, via The Guardian
What Should I Read Next? (WSIRN), “the easiest to use book recommendation system online,” was developed and is maintained by Andrew Chapman and Paul Lenz of Thoughtplay Ltd., and employs “a collaborative filtering system, using our own bespoke algorithm called ‘Incidence Bias Weighting’ and partly using association rules.” This labor of love has been up and running since 2005.
While Amazon recommends titles based on past buying behavior, Chapman and Lenz don’t, observing “you don’t always buy items for yourself, do you?” WSIRN links to Amazon so you can, though. “We’re not trying to urge you to buy particular bestsellers or anything like that,” they say, “we simply want to help people share their favorite items with each other.”
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Short Link: http://wp.me/p6sb6-gkg
Image (“The Kindle Reader or A Young Girl Seated, after Renoir”) by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
Comments are welcome if they are on-topic, substantive, concise, and not boring or obscene. Comments may be edited for clarity and length
After 244 years, Encyclopaedia Britannica will cease publishing paper editions and become a solely digital resource. Britannica has had digital editions on CD-ROM and online for the last thirty years, and will continue updating and publishing online. Unlike Wikipedia with its anonymous authors and crowd-sourced editing, digital Britannica will still be produced by professional editors and named authors who actually know what they’re writing about.
More:
“Wikipedia Didn’t Kill Britannica. Windows Did,” Tim Carmody, Wired
“Change: It’s Okay. Really.” Britannica Editors, Britannica blog
“Research has confirmed that the Internet exerts a polarizing force on the electorate. In his 2011 book The Filter Bubble, Eli Pariser writes about how search engines and social networks filter out dissenting opinions and offer users only what they want to see. Google and Yahoo draw on a user’s past search preferences when responding to queries, meaning that over time a liberal and a conservative might receive ideologically opposite search results having entered identical information. (Pariser recounts how a conservative entering the letters “BP” into Google received stock tips, whereas a liberal was linked to news stories on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.)
Similar work by Cass Sunstein, the current Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, shows how the Internet creates “echo chambers” where users surround themselves only with the like-minded. This not only preserves partisanship—it exacerbates it. Sunstein found that pro-choice liberals become more pro-choice if they interact only with other liberals, and anti-abortion conservatives become more anti-abortion after surrounding themselves with other conservatives. The niche driven nature of the Internet is pushing us further and further apart.”
“Is the Internet Polarizing Politics?” Peter James Saalfield, big think
The Google search engine has been available in China since 2006, but the firm complied with government censorship restrictions (‘The Great Firewall of China“) until 2010. Disclosure of this fact resulted in Congressional hearings and a Google redirect from China to its Hong Kong site. The conflict was uneasily resolved later after the government realized that 70% of the country’s Web surfers use China’s homegrown search engine, Baidu.
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