I made something awesome last week: Opened Captions. At face value it just looks like a live feed of C-SPAN’s Closed Captions. This alone is actually pretty cool if you think about it, especially if you are a deaf political junkie who sits far away from the TV and can’t read the closed captions. Of […]
Tor is a program that makes you anonymous. This means that, for better or for worse, the big brothers, neighborhood hackers, and ad agencies of the world can’t tell what you are doing on the Internet without going through a lot of effort and expense.
Uh oh… I need to write a post about the Knight-Mozilla Fellowship and Chris Marstall already masterfully captured all my points last week! Thank goodness there are still a million reasons why OpenNews is awesome. By now you may have read four different accounts of my program, but if you make it through this one […]
I may have graduated, but I still get very good advice from my mentors. The most recent came from Ethan Zuckerman: “Dan, please try not to get fired in your first month. That would be really embarrassing for everyone.” His delivery reflected a hint of genuine concern. There are many reasons why he might have […]
I just finished the second week of my fellowship at The Boston Globe, so at this point I have a stronger sense of how things are done and where I might fit in. Having just come from an academic program like the MIT Media Lab there is a tinge of culture shock (for instance, everyone […]
You are about to hear an insider’s thrilling account of crashed markets, sinister minds, hunger, and inequality. For the tale to make sense you must understand a few things about the Media Lab. Thing #1: there are about 150 students and 200 “other” people spread across 25 research groups, 3 floors, and 2 buildings. In […]
This was my first week at my brand new job as a Knight-Mozilla Fellow and I can tell you already that it is going to be an awesome time. I’ve worked in a newsroom once before, as an intern in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette back during my undergraduate years, but I have a lot to learn […]
Last month, I ran a user study to test the effectiveness of Truth Goggles (a credibility layer/B.S. detector for the Internet). The tool attempts to remind users when it’s important to think more carefully. If you’re curious, you can check out the demo page. Now that the study has officially concluded, the numbers have been […]
With my thesis complete I’m about to embark on the next phase in life, and in true Millennial fashion it will last about 10 months because job security is for chumps. I’m going to be a Knight-Mozilla Fellow (feel free to call me “Mr. Fellow”) working in The Boston Globe as part of the Open […]
Remind me to never do that again. On Friday I officially handed in my thesis, titled “Truth Goggles: Automatic Incorporation of Context and Primary Source for a Critical Media Experience.” For those who don’t know already, it was about an automated bullshit detector for the Internet / an interface to help people think carefully called […]