Berkman Buzz: February 15, 2013

A new bill mandating OA to federally-funded research was just introduced into both houses of Congress. It's called the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research, or FASTR. It was introduced in the Senate by John Cornyn (R-TX) and Ron Wyden (D-OR), and in the House by Mike Doyle (D-PA), Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), and Kevin Yoder (R-KS).

Join us throughout the Spring 2013 semester for a series of special webcasts featuring discussions from Professor Terry Fisher's Copyright course, hosted on the edX online learning platform. Each of the events features a guest expert and examines a difficult issue growing out of, or adjacent to, copyright law. In the courses overall, and in the special events in particular, considerable attention is devoted to the relationship between copyright law and creative expression in a variety of fields: literature; music; film; photography; graphic art; software; comedy; fashion; and architecture.

Mobile ads that use real-time location data beat ones that use zip+4 address, but get less than half the mobile spend http://bit.ly/VYVrBQ
—John Deighton (@HBSmktg)

On Sunday, the Times ran an article by John Broder on driving the Tesla S, an all-electric car made by Elon Musk’s company, Tesla. The article was titled “Stalled Out on Tesla’s Electric Highway,” which captured the point quite concisely.

Musk on Wednesday in a post on the Tesla site contested Broder’s account, and revealed that every car Tesla lends to a reviewer has its telemetry recorders set to 11. Thus, Musk had the data that proved that Broder was driving in a way that could have no conceivable purpose except to make the Tesla S perform below spec: Broder drove faster than he claimed, drove circles in a parking lot for a while, and didn’t recharge the car to full capacity.

Boom! Broder was caught red-handed, and it was data that brung him down. The only two questions left were why did Broder set out to tank the Tesla, and would it take hours or days for him to be fired?

Except…

For me, thinking about one of the Obama administration's latest initiatives to keep us all safe online is like one of those pattern recognition puzzles (you know, like "What is the next term in this sequence: O, T, T, F, F, S, S, E, N, __?"). Here, the sequence is:

cyber bullies, scammers, gangs, sexual predators, ________?

The pattern, you see, is perceived online threats against which the White House has taken action. In a February 5 post on the White House Blog, we get the administration's answer to what goes in the next blank: "online radicalization to violence."

The narrative of civics in crisis is one that resonates with other popular narratives about American culture in crisis. Robert Putnam made a compelling and controversial case in Bowling Alone that American civic life reached a peak with generations born from 1900 through the 1940s, and has been on the decline ever since – the “crisis in civics” narrative suggests that not only have we dropped out of bowling leagues, but our schools are no longer preparing us to be good citizens and good neighbors. There’s a common narrative about decreasing American achievement in comparison to other developed nations – decreasing civic knowledge is consistent with a narrative that shows the US falling behind in math and science as compared to OECD peers. And there’s a rich vein of commentary that suggests that technology – whether it includes television, video games or the internet – is making us less focused, more distracted, lonelier and stupider – in other words, less able to participate as civic actors.

So it’s somewhat surprising to discover that, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, students haven’t meaningfully shifted in civic knowledge between 1998 and 2010.

Meet a 17-year old Sierra Leonean roboticist - http://t.co/Rk8ZTIAw - via @dsengeh, a 20-something Sierra Leonean biomechatronicist.
—Ethan Zuckerman (@ethanz)

An anonymous blogger in China who ignited the country's curiosity with intimate details of incoming Chinese President Xi Jingping‘s comings and goings has revealed himself to be a college dropout unaffiliated with the communist party.

Bombarded with interview requests from the media and faced with mounting speculation over his real identity, Zhang Hongming, a migrant worker from China's southwestern Sichuan province, revealed in an exclusive interview with the Associated Press that he is the mastermind behind the “Xuesifensituan“ (Learning from Xi Fan Club) page on the popular Chinese micro-blogging website Sina Weibo.