Publishing:
Which Has More Bias? Wikipedia or the Encyclopaedia Britannica
For more than a century, the long, stately rows of Encyclopædia Britannica have been a fixture on the shelves of many an educated person’s home-the smooshed-together diphthong in the first word a symbol of old-world erudition and gravitas. So it was a shock to many when, in 2012, the venerable institution announced it would no longer publish a print version of its multivolume compendium of knowledge. Though the Britannica would still be available online, the writing on the virtual wall was clear: It had been supplanted by the Internet. And more specifically, by an upstart phenomenon Wikipedia, the free, crowd-sourced encyclopedia that since its inception in 2001 had rapidly become the new go-to source for knowledge.
"There has been lots of research on the accuracy of Wikipedia, and the results are mixed—some studies show it is just as good as the experts, others show [that] Wikipedia is not accurate at all," says Feng Zhu, an assistant professor in the Technology and Operations Management unit at Harvard Business School. Perhaps the most interesting finding … is that the more times an article is revised on Wikipedia, the less bias it is likely to show—directly contradicting the theory that ideological groups might self-select over time into increasingly biased camps.
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/7689.html.
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Freedom of Information:
SSCI [Senate Select Committee on Intelligence] Wants Copies of Full Torture Report Returned
There is a new sheriff in town. Is that the message that Senator Richard Burr, the new chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, is trying to send? Senator Burr reportedly wrote to President Obama last week to ask that all copies of the classified 6,700 page Committee report on CIA interrogation practices be returned immediately to the Committee. While the redacted summary of the report has been publicly released and is even something of a bestseller for the Government Printing Office as well as a commercial publisher, the full report has not been made public. And Senator Burr seems determined to keep it that way. Senator Dianne Feinstein, who chaired the Committee while the report was produced, scorned the request for its return. Among other things, the proposed return of the full report may be intended to prevent its potential future accessibility through the Freedom of Information Act, which does not apply to records in congressional custody.
http://fas.org/blogs/secrecy/2015/01/ssci-returned/.
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Privacy Issues:
HealthCare.gov Sends Personal Data to Dozens of Tracking Websites
The Associated Press reports that healthcare.gov–the flagship site of the Affordable Care Act, where millions of Americans have signed up to receive health care–is quietly sending personal health information to a number of third party websites. The information being sent includes one’s zip code, income level, smoking status, pregnancy status and more. EFF researchers have independently confirmed that healthcare.gov is sending personal health information to at least 14 third party domains, even if the user has enabled Do Not Track. It’s especially troubling that the U.S. government is sending personal information to commercial companies on a website that’s touted as the place for people to obtain health care coverage. Even more troubling is the potential for companies like Doubleclick, Google, Twitter, Yahoo, and others to associate this data with a person’s actual identity.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/01/healthcare.gov-sends-personal-data.
Seventy Public Interest Organizations and Companies Urge Congress to Update Email Privacy Law
EFF, along with more than sixty civil liberties organizations, public interest groups, and companies sent two letters to the House and Senate leadership today. One supported the upcoming bipartisan Email Privacy Act by Reps. Kevin Yoder and Jared Polis, and the other supported the upcoming Electronic Communications Privacy Act Amendments Act by Sens. Mike Lee and Patrick Leahy. The bills aim to update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), an archaic law that’s been used by the government to obtain emails without getting a probable cause warrant. The bills are common sense bipartisan bills that help to codify current judicial decisions regarding the privacy of your personal online communications.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/01/more-x-public-interest-organizations-and-companies-urge-congress-update-email.
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Intellectual Property:
Who Will Own the Internet of Things? (Hint: Not the Users)
From phones to cars to refrigerators to farm equipment, software is helping our stuff work better and smarter. But those features come at a high hidden cost: the rapid erosion of ownership. Why does that matter? Because when it comes to digital products, owners have rights. Renters on the other hand, have only permission. The source of the problem is simple: copyright. You may own your device, but your use of the software in it is usually governed by the terms of an End-User License Agreement (or EULA). And that license agreement is likely to restrict your ability to tinker with your stuff. Typical clauses forbid reverse-engineering (e.g., figuring out how the software works so you can adapt it), transfer (e.g., giving it to a friend or selling it on the secondary market), and even using "unauthorized" repair services at all. Further complication: the software may be saddled with digital locks (aka Digital Rights Management or DRM) supposedly designed to prevent unauthorized copying. And breaking those locks, even to do something simple and otherwise legal like tinkering with or fixing your own devices, could mean breaking the law.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/01/who-will-own-internet-things-hint-not-users.
Fair Use Is Not An Exception to Copyright, It’s Essential to Copyright
Over the past two years, as talk of copyright reform has escalated, we’ve also heard complaints about the supposed expansion of fair use, or "fair use creep." That kind of talk woefully misunderstands how fair use works. Fair use provides breathing space in copyright law, making sure that control of the right to copy and distribute doesn’t become control of the right to create and innovate. New technologies and services depend on the creation of multiple copies as a matter of course. At the same time, copyright terms cover works many decades old and copyrighted software appears in more and more devices. Taken together, these developments mean the potential reach of copyright may extend ever further. Fair use makes sure that the rights of the public expand at the same time, so add-on creativity and innovation can continue to thrive. In other words, “"fair use creep" is an essential corollary to "copyright creep."
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/01/fair-use-not-exception-copyright-its-essential-copyright.
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Public Policy:
Obama’s EPA breaks pledge to divorce politics from science on toxic chemicals
In his first inaugural address, between promising to fix the economy and lower the cost of health care, President Barack Obama made this pledge:
"We’ll restore science to its rightful place."
It might sound arcane as a presidential priority, but it was a big deal at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Political interference from the Bush White House had delayed or derailed dozens of the EPA’s findings on potential health risks posed by toxic chemicals. Yet the Obama administration’s plan has been a failure. In the past three years, the EPA has assessed fewer chemicals than ever. Last year, it completed only one assessment. Today, the agency has even embraced measures sought by the chemical industry that have led to endless delays.
http://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/01/23/16641/obamas-epa-breaks-pledge-divorce-politics-science-toxic-chemicals.
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Internet Access:
Study: Health IT Use Doesn’t Guarantee Doctors Receive Patient Data
More than one-third of physicians who use health IT do not receive the patient data needed to coordinate care, according to a study published in the journal Medical Care. For the study, researchers examined data from about 4,500 office-based physicians who responded to a nationally representative survey in 2012 on electronic health record use and electronic data sharing. The physicians were asked about how often they received certain types of patient health information for effective care coordination. Specifically, the study focused on whether health IT use was associated with a higher share of physicians receiving such data.
According to the study, 39% of surveyed physicians had an EHR system but did not electronically share patient health data; About 33% had an EHR system and shared patient health data electronically; and 25% did not have an EHR system or electronically share patient health data.
http://www.ihealthbeat.org/articles/2015/1/20/study-health-it-use-doesnt-guarantee-doctors-receive-patient-data.
Tweets can better predict heart disease rates than income, smoking and diabetes, study finds
Is Twitter becoming a new public health database? The latest evidence: A group of researchers has found that analyzing tweets can accurately predict the prevalence of heart disease. In fact, the researchers say, Twitter can serve as a better predictor of coronary heart-disease rates than factors such as smoking, diabetes, income and education, obesity — combined. The findings from the University of Pennsylvania were published this week in the journal Psychological Science. The research is part of a larger effort to incorporate big data into science, rather than relying on the time- and cost-intensive process of collecting representative samples and conducting surveys. A previous study found that Twitter can be an especially good way to track the flu, and other research has shown that examining people’s Wikipedia reading habits can accurately forecast the spread of influenza and dengue. Using Twitter as a tool to measure public health can help policymakers more quickly and effectively target campaigns and measure their results.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/01/21/tweets-can-better-predict-heart-disease-rates-than-income-smoking-and-diabetes-study-finds/.
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The Intersect Alert is a newsletter of the Government Relations Committee, San Francisco Bay Region Chapter, Special Libraries Association.