title: Why Facebook doesn’t cause protests

authors: Ganesh, Shiv

subjects: social networking

abstract: Anyone who has followed the recent spate of political unrest in the Middle East and elsewhere could be forgiven for thinking that a full-scale global revolution is underway, caused by digital social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter.  Several media commentators, at least in the western world, create a narrative where authoritarian regimes in far-off lands such as Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, and now Libya, are dramatically undermined by the free flow of information enabled by new technologies. In this simple formula, Internet growth is equated with democratization. Technology does play a pivotal role in contemporary social protests, but its role is actually a lot more complex, and definitely not causative. It is worthwhile though to first consider why such techno-centric explanations of social change capture our imagination in the first place.

text: Why Facebook doesn’t cause protests Anyone who has followed the recent spate of political unrest in the Middle East and elsewhere could be forgiven for thinking that a full-scale global revolution is underway, caused by digital social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter.  Several media commentators, at least in the western world, create a narrative where authoritarian regimes in far-off lands such as Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, and now Libya, are dramatically undermined by the free flow of information enabled by new technologies. In this simple formula, Internet growth is equated with democratization. Technology does play a pivotal role in contemporary social protests, but its role is actually a lot more complex, and definitely not causative. It is worthwhile though to first consider why such techno-centric explanations of social change capture our imagination in the first place.

year: 2011-04

title: Lexical attraction for text compression

authors: Bach, Joscha

subjects: computer science

abstract: New methods of acquiring structural information in text documents may support better compression by identifying an appropriate prediction context for each symbol. The method of “lexical attraction” infers syntactic dependency structures from statistical analysis of large corpora. We describe the generation of a lexical attraction model, discuss its application to text compression, and explore its potential to outperform fixed-context models such as word-level PPM. Perhaps the most exciting aspect of this work is the prospect of using compression as a metric for structure discovery in text.

text: Lexical attraction for text compression New methods of acquiring structural information in text documents may support better compression by identifying an appropriate prediction context for each symbol. The method of “lexical attraction” infers syntactic dependency structures from statistical analysis of large corpora. We describe the generation of a lexical attraction model, discuss its application to text compression, and explore its potential to outperform fixed-context models such as word-level PPM. Perhaps the most exciting aspect of this work is the prospect of using compression as a metric for structure discovery in text.

year: 1999-01

title: Census 2018 and Implications for Māori

authors: Kukutai, Tahu

abstract: The population census is a universal tool of governance but has come under increasing pressure as governments look to reduce costs, gain efficiencies and counter declining response rates. In Aotearoa New Zealand, the census transformation strategy has a short-term focus on modernising the census and a long-term vision of a fully administrative census. The digital-first 2018 Census was an ambitious step towards modernisation but there are growing concerns that it may fail to deliver high-quality data, particularly for Māori and iwi. This research note considers the implications of lower response rates and reflects on the steps that might be taken to retain the trust and confidence of Māori in the census, including possibilities for Māori data governance across the official statistics system.

text: Census 2018 and Implications for Māori The population census is a universal tool of governance but has come under increasing pressure as governments look to reduce costs, gain efficiencies and counter declining response rates. In Aotearoa New Zealand, the census transformation strategy has a short-term focus on modernising the census and a long-term vision of a fully administrative census. The digital-first 2018 Census was an ambitious step towards modernisation but there are growing concerns that it may fail to deliver high-quality data, particularly for Māori and iwi. This research note considers the implications of lower response rates and reflects on the steps that might be taken to retain the trust and confidence of Māori in the census, including possibilities for Māori data governance across the official statistics system.

year: 2018