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November 2016

High-Tech Nation: How Technological Innovation Shapes America’s 435 Congressional Districts

The purpose of this report is to shed light on just how widely diffused the country’s innovation-driven, high-tech economy really is, so members of Congress and other policymakers can find common cause in advancing an agenda that builds up the shared foundations of national strength in a globally integrated marketplace. The report draws on 20 indicators of the innovation economy to paint statistical portraits of all 435 US congressional districts, 50 states, plus the District of Columbia. Putting innovation, productivity, and competitiveness in the center of the national economic agenda requires that policymakers look beyond the confines of traditional partisan ideology—including the left’s “demand-side” focus on getting money into middle-class pockets and the right’s “supply-side” focus on increasing the supply of capital—and instead embrace a strategy that is grounded in several essentials:

  • A highly educated and skilled workforce;
  • Robust public investment in research and development;
  • World-class digital-age infrastructure;
  • “Smart government” policies, including how agencies procure and implement technology in their own operations, and how government spurs adoption of emerging information technologies more broadly (e.g., Internet of Things, smart cities, etc.);
  • Tax and regulatory policies that encourage firms to invest in technology; and
  • Strong connections to the global marketplace, but through a rules-based, carefully enforced trading system.

What President-elect Trump’s $1 trillion infrastructure plan means for red and blue states

[Commentary] Details of President-elect Trump’s plan are murky, but at an estimated $1 trillion over 10 years is twice as long and nearly four times as big as the five-year, $275 billion effort championed by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Analysis from Onvia’s State & Local Procurement Snapshot for Q3 2016 suggests that the possible trickle-down effects of increased investment in the nation’s aging infrastructure would naturally have a positive impact on state and local government investments.

For municipalities with “shovel-ready” infrastructure projects, the thought of increased Federal funding for infrastructure projects is an exciting one. Studying project specifications, scopes of work and bid documents to benchmark proposals and pricing from other agencies who have already issued similar solicitations is a time-saving tactic that can help expedite getting the contracts out the door for public bidding.

[Ben Vaught is the Director of Onvia Exchange]

Has the Internet become a failed state?

[Commentary] In the first decade after the Internet we use today was switched on, in January 1983, cyberspace was a brave new world – a glorious sandpit for geeks and computer science researchers. But from 1993 onwards, all that began to change. The main catalysts were the world wide web, the Mosaic browser and AOL. The web provided non-geeks with an answer to the question: what is this Internet thing for? Mosaic, the first modern browser, showed them what the web could do and, more importantly, what it could become. Demand for access to the Internet exploded. AOL met the demand by providing a reliable, easy-to-configure, dial-up service for millions of people, and so brought the “redneck hordes” – ie people unfamiliar with the mores and customs of the netizen era – on to the Internet.

Scenting profits, companies and pornographers scrambled for a piece of the action, closely followed by scammers and spammers and all kinds of other undesirables. The result was that the parallel universes gradually merged, and we wound up with the composite networked world we now inhabit – a world that has the affordances of both cyberspace and meatspace. Which helps to explain why we are having such trouble coming to terms with it.

[John Naughton is professor of the public understanding of technology at the Open University. ]

Fake News Is Not the Only Problem

[Commentary] The web that we’ve built — the social web, search engines, and spaces governed by algorithmic systems attuned to social signals (clicks, shares, likes, comments) — makes it increasingly difficult to locate a definitive response to fabrications like Clinton funding ISIS. There’s a broad range of not-fake-but-not-completely-true information. Leaving out information makes for a much more cohesive story but also may nudge a reader in a desired direction. There are other models of automated filtering and downgrading for limiting the spread of misleading information (the Facebook News Feed already does plenty of filtering and nudging).

But again, who decides what’s in or out, who governs? And who gets to test the potential bias of such an algorithmic system? If our collective goals include increasing trust in institutions and supporting an informed public, there is a lot of work to be done, and not only by Facebook. A number of actors, including publishers, social networks, content distributors, and forums, are all important in this space. By pointing our fingers at Facebook and looking at the extremes of fake news, I fear we’re missing out on an opportunity to actually make a difference.

[Gilad Lotan is the Chief Data Scientist at betaworks]

We Tracked Down A Fake-News Creator In The Suburbs. Here's What We Learned

A lot of fake and misleading news stories were shared across social media during the 2016 election. One that got a lot of traffic had this headline: "FBI Agent Suspected In Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead In Apparent Murder-Suicide." The story is completely false, but it was shared on Facebook over half a million times. We wondered who was behind that story and why it was written. It appeared on a site that had the look and feel of a local newspaper. Denverguardian.com even had the local weather. But it had only one news story — the fake one. We tried to look up who owned it.

Eventually we found our man: Jestin Coler. Coler's company, Disinfomedia, owns many faux news sites — he won't say how many. But he says his is one of the biggest fake-news businesses out there, which makes him a sort of godfather of the industry. Below are highlights of NPR's interview with Coler.

What is the future of news? Bleak, probably.

A Q&A with Brooke Binkowski, managing editor of Snopes.com.

Brooke Binkowski is the managing editor of Snopes.com, a website dedicated to debunking bogus stories, Internet rumors, and malignant falsehoods. Snopes has done the thankless work of online fact-checking since 1995. Unsurprisingly, the site has seen its traffic spike by 85 percent over the past year. The conventional view is that social media is the main culprit in terms of spreading misinformation online. Indeed, Mark Zuckerberg was compelled recently to address Facebook’s role in disseminating “fake news.” Binkowski, who worked for many years as a reporter for CNN, has a slightly different take. For her part, social media is the low-hanging fruit in this discussion. The real problem is the collapse of faith in media as a trusted and credible institution.

CNN Brings In the Social App Beme to Cultivate a Millennial Audience

With millions of people regularly tuning in to his YouTube video blogs every morning, Casey Neistat has a millennial fan base coveted by both marketers and media companies. Now, one of those big media outlets is bringing Neistat — and, it hopes, his youthful audience — in-house. CNN announced that it had agreed to acquire the technology and talent behind Beme, the social media app built and started by Neistat and Matt Hackett, a former vice president of engineering at Tumblr. Beme’s 12 employees will join CNN as part of the deal, the terms of which were not publicly disclosed.

Beme was intended to be a social sharing application that Neistat described as “more authentic,” a way of putting four-second bursts of video out into the social sphere without giving users the ability to edit or tweak the content. Taking video was as simple as holding a smartphone’s front-facing sensor to one’s body, as if the camera were an extension of one’s chest. Neistat hopes to bring that idea of authenticity to a news and media environment to draw in a younger audience largely untapped by the cable news network. CNN will shut down the Beme app, which had 1.2 million downloads before losing steam.

National Press Club’s Broadcast Committee
December 1, 2016
7:00 PM
http://www.press.org/events/trump-victory-and-2016-election-what-media-g...

Panel moderator and Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan, Hillary Clinton campaign reporter Abby Phillip of the Washington Post, Republican National Committee chief strategist and communications director Sean Spicer, NBC News national correspondent Peter Alexander, and former Bill Clinton White House press secretary and Commission on Presidential Debates co-chair Mike McCurry will look back on a truly unprecedented presidential campaign cycle.

The National Press Club’s Broadcast Committee invites you to join them and your fellow Club members for a lively panel discussion regarding synergies and conflicts between the candidates and the media that covered them on Thursday, Dec. 1 at 7:00PM. The event is free for NPC members, but they must pre-register online. Guests are $10 each.


Let’s rethink market power in tech

[Commentary] In a nutshell, the traditional approach to assessing market power is to first define “market” and then define “power.” But what if markets are rapidly changing so that defining one is illusive? And what if what appears to be power is fleeting or is actually earned by a company simply doing a great job for customers?

It’s time to look for a new approach. Market boundaries and market outcomes result from basic conditions and people’s decisions. In tech, by the time we observe the boundaries and outcomes, they are no longer relevant, and we should therefore rely instead on analyses of the basic conditions and decisions.

[Mark Jamison is the director and Gunter Professor of the Public Utility Research Center at the University of Florida and was selected by President-elect Donald Trump to lead his FCC transition team.]

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