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Technology has been a part of archaeology from the time it shifted from treasure hunting to academic profession, from using geography to plot a grid on a dig site, mechanics to pump out a flooded tomb, statistics to map demographic changes or now, using personal technology and global positioning software to identify the previously unknown. The latter is what Professor Chris Fisher , associate professor in CSU's Department of Anthropology, and his team from Colorado State University have done. They discovered a large, ancient urban center using rugged handheld computers and GPS. Sponsor This thousand-year-old urban center stands, overgrown with scrub and soil, in the Lake Pátzcuaro Basin in the central Mexican state of Michoacán. Fisher's team used four Trimble Recon rugged handheld computers in conjunction with GeoXH and GeoXT GPS receivers, to do real-time, on-site mapping of over 1,300 architectural features, including hundreds of "house mounds," in just one acre of the site. They took 25 to 30 data points on each feature but were still able to complete the initial full-coverage mapping in a month. "The technology accelerated our ability to get meaningful data," he said. "We were able to create an architectural typology of the site right away!" The city was part of the Purépecha Empire , also known as the Tarascan Empire. The Purépecha controlled a great chunk of western Mexico with a fortified frontier. On the other side of that frontier? The much better known Aztec Empire. The technology, and the strategy Fisher developed for its use, allowed the near-immediate capture of a frieze-like picture of the urbanization of a Purépecha center that enabled empire. The city, which prior to Fisher's work, was nothing but a couple of ruins and a pin in a map, turned out to be five square kilometers. Without the hand-held, on-site tech, it would have possibly taken seasons of painstaking mapping to develop the picture. "The Lake Pátzcuaro Basin was the geopolitical core of the empire with a dense population, centralized settlement systems, engineered environment and a socially stratified society," said Fisher. Although the city was initially discovered during the 2009 season, Fisher is currently presenting his findings officially at the Society for American Archaeology meetings in St. Louis. His team will continue mapping the city this summer. Fisher specializes in climate change archaeology, plotting changes in climate and the cultural adaptation that went with it, including identifying which strategies worked and which failed. A project studying this, Legacies of Resilience , is partially funded by the National Science Foundation. "One of the great challenges for the 21st century will be creating solutions to link social and environmental change," said Fisher. "Archaeology is uniquely poised to make a significant contribution to this debate by helping to explain trajectories of socio-ecosystem evolution over long time periods." When Fisher heads back the site on April 18, he intends to make greater use of Google SketchUp , a 3D modeling program. He already used it to make in-field sketches but this season he and his team will use it extensively to create a portfolio of walkable sketches and a three-dimensional picture of the urban center and its agriculture. The same technology we use in our daily lives is helping to make that contribution possible. I'm sorry. But exactly how cool is that? Fessin' up time. I hooked Chris up with his computer system during the time I worked for its manufacturer. I did so because the project, climate change archaeology, was so cool I almost fainted when he told me about it. Discuss
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Mobile Tech Helps Uncover Mesoamerican Lost City
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The House of Commons passed a controversial piece of legislation called the " Digital Economy Bill ." The loudly-criticized law nontheless passed 187-47, according to the Guardian newspaper. The bill purports to provide comprehensive regulation of digital services, in order to clear the way to promoting Britian as a digital econmic power. Criticism focused first on a clause that would have given broad government discretion to the closing of sites. That clause was removed, but the amendment to another was still significantly worrying to some. Sponsor From the bill itself, the amendment to clause 8 : "The Secretary of State may by regulations make provision about the granting by a court of a blocking injunction in respect of a location on the internet which the court is satisfied has been, is being or is likely to be used for or in connection with an activity that infringes copyright." A little thought on which site might be accused of being "a location on the internet" where copyright violation might have occurred, or might occur in the future, and you're likely to come up with YouTube, BitTorrent, DailyMotion, WordPress, Facebook, Twitter and Google. To start with. A second criticism focused on the way the troublesome bill was passed, during the period of time just prior to dissolution of parliament, called the "wash-up," when, to put it mildly, legislator attention is not at its peak. Discuss
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UK "Digital Economy Bill" May Allow for Website Shutdowns
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One of the emerging trends of the Mobile Web is using your phone to interact with the real world. We're not just talking about 'checking in' to locations, either. There's a world of more practical functionality that hasn't yet ramped up in the West - using your phone as a payment device (for example mobile ticketing ), getting special offers from retailers, downloading data from the Web via 'smart posters' on the street, and more. A key technology driving some of these interactions is NFC, which was one of Gartner's 8 Mobile Technologies to Watch in 2010 . It's a technology that you ought to become familiar with; whether you're a technologist, a marketer, or a consumer looking to make the best use of your smart phone (and aren't we all!). So in this post we give you an overview of what to expect from NFC. Sponsor What NFC is & Why You Should Care As we explained earlier this year , NFC (Near Field Communication) is a short-range communication technology for mobile phones. It's similar to Bluetooth and has a range of about 10 centimeters. There are three main use cases, according to its Wikipedia entry : Card emulation: the NFC device behaves like an existing contactless card; Reader mode: the NFC device is active and reads a passive RFID tag, for example for interactive advertising; P2P mode: two NFC devices are communicating together and exchanging information. Using the phone to emulate a smart card means that it can be a deployed as a payment device (similar to a credit card), identity card, security device, and more. This type of functionality is already common in Asia, but it hasn't yet taken off in the States. Using the phone as a reader allows the phone to interact with RFID-enabled objects in the real world, for example posters embedded with chips that connect to mobile web sites or applications. NFC in Mobile Phones & Services For these use cases to become a widespread reality, an NFC chip must be pre installed in most mobile devices. According to Dan Butcher from Mobile Commerce Daily , this probably won't happen until 2011 at the earliest. One issue is that NFC is not a current feature of the iPhone or Android, the tools of choice for many Web early adopters. However one handset manufacturer is showing the way with NFC: Nokia . Its Nokia 6131 NFC phone can be used as a credit card, travel card, loyalty card and a "multi-purpose smart card." Along with NFC handsets, NFC-enabled services will arise for applications such as mobile payments. As BusinessWeek reported recently , Alcatel-Lucent has announced a new mobile payment hosting service for mobile operators, in partnership with payments systems specialists Clear2Pay and PingPing. However, the article noted that other emerging mobile payment services aren't using NFC - including Nokia Money and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey's new business Square ( our review ). NFC Has its Issues, But Also The Momentum... There are issues with NFC, perhaps the biggest being its limited range. In order for NFC to work, you need to hold your mobile phone close to the RFID tag or reader device. An alternative that has a longer range is DASH7 , which we'll review in an upcoming post. However NFC holds the most promise for delivering contactless mobile payments to consumers, along with other real world use cases. Image credit: nicolasnova Discuss
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NFC: Never Mind Credit Cards, Pay With Your Phone
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, and prominent researcher Nigel Shadbolt will lead a new British Institute for Web Science with $45 million in government backing. The announcement was not without its critics, but the Institute could have a world-wide impact. The two men collaborated in helping build the excellent data.gov.uk and will now expand upon that work. Prime Minister Gordon Brown said of the move : "We are determined to go further in breaking down the walled garden of Government...This Institute will help place the UK at the cutting edge of research on the Semantic Web and other emerging web and internet technologies." Sponsor Understanding the Web of Data Berners-Lee said two years ago last month that all the pieces were in place to build the semantic web, a paradigm based on giving structured meaning to and clear links between otherwise unstructured content floating around the web. Many people believe that a web with semantic structure will be the same type of boon to innovation that common standards like HTML have been. Berners-Lee famously described his vision of the semantic web like this: I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web - the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A 'Semantic Web', which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The 'intelligent agents' people have touted for ages will finally materialize. Today's announcement came along government calls to build super-fast broadband to every home in the UK. Prime Minister Brown claimed that such a development could foster economic development and as many as 250,000 new jobs. As writer Tom Foremski pointed out this morning about the Web Science Institute, however "internet technologies have resulted in fewer jobs created than have been lost -- which is the way of all disruptive technologies." Making the Vision Real is Hard, Too Super-fast broadband to every home is a much easier thing to sell to the public than a future-web of structured, machine-readable data. After years of expectations, the semantic web remains in search of its clearly comprehensible killer-app. Earlier this month, semantic social bookmarking service Twine quietly slid into obscurity and was bought up by news recommendation service Evri . Twine was said to be possibly "the first mainstream semantic web app" two years ago . Founder Nova Spivak raised half as much money for Twine's parent company Radar Networks ($24m) as Berners-Lee's entire new institute is receiving. Twine faltered under poor usability and the leadership of Spivak, considered to be both one of the smartest people in the internet industry and a caustic egotist. Thus is the dilemma for this supposed next stage of the web. Andrew Orlowski tears into today's announcement in The Register , calling it "a confluence of two groups of people with a shared interest in bureaucracy." Orlowski says the Web of Data is a fraud as well: "Of course, most web data is personal communication that happens to have been recorded. Most of the rest is spam, generated by robots, or cut-and-paste material 'curated' by the unemployed or poor graduates - another form of spam, really." That's a funny critique but the truth is probably somewhere in between the superlatives and the condemnation. Critics like Orlowski have already grown jaded about the world-changing impact of the last iteration of the web (easy social publishing) and underestimate the platform potential of this next iteration. "I've always been sceptical of the need for a 'new discipline.' [Web Science]," says leading semantic web consultant Paul Miller . "A significant tranche of funding such as that announced by the Prime Minister this morning will be helpful in tackling some of the issues (both hard and soft) that still remain as we push more and more data out into the public sphere. I hope and expect that Nigel, Tim and others will devote at least as much attention to issues of trust, provenance, licensing etc as to the details of angle brackets, triples and ontologies." Miller did a podcast interview with Shadbolt for the UK's largest semantic web company Talis, here . For an in-depth explanation of Berners-Lee's perspective, see the two-part interview ReadWriteWeb founding Editor Richard MacManus did with him last year . MacManus has said that Berners-Lee's vision of a read/write, two-way web, was a key inspiration behind the founding of the publication you're reading now. We wish the Institute for Web Science the best of luck in delivering on its rich promise. Discuss
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Most any journalism professor, upon mention of Wikipedia , will immediately launch into a rant about how the massively collaborative online encyclopedia can't be trusted. It can, you see, be edited and altered by absolutely anyone at any moment. But how much less trustworthy is the site for breaking news than the plethora of blogs and other online news sources? Sponsor Even Moka Pantages , the communications officer for the WikiMedia Foundation , said she agreed with this sentiment when she spoke this morning at the South By South West festival in Austin, at a panel entitled " Process Journalism: Getting It First, While Getting It Right ". Here's the thing - we have to say that everything she said before answering this question seems to say otherwise. Tackling Real-Time Content The panel featured journalists from the New York Times , SeattlePI.com , Journerdism.com and Gizmodo and a common theme was that user-created content - whether tweets, YouTube videos, or otherwise - could and should be used in breaking news coverage. The panelists all agreed that this content should be verified in some way and should be presented to the audience with a high degree of transparency. Each panelist spoke about a specific case study - the New York Times' coverage of last summer's protests in Iran, for example - and discussed how they gathered crowd-sourced information and attempted to verify its authenticity. Robert Mackey, the reporter for the New York Times, gave examples of translating chants heard in YouTube videos and matching up street signs that flashed on screen with Google Maps. Once he was sure of its validity, he said, he would add it to the coverage. "When you're sitting in an office in New York and you're trying to confirm that something was shot in Tehran that day was actually shot in Tehran that day, you're not going to be able to verify that," he said. "The idea is that it's a conversation on the web about this event." The Newsroom Moves Online Monica Guzman, a reporter for SeattlePI.com, spoke similarly about her website's breaking coverage of a shooting and the subsequent day-long man hunt. SeattlePI, formerly a print publication, has existed solely online for nearly a year now. Most of the breaking information that day, she said, came from Twitter. "The media collaborated with itself and it was one big swirling newsroom on Twitter," said Guzman. "We ended up using tweets as starting points. And Twitter did end up breaking a bunch of stuff." While SeattlePI was able to send reporters out and verify some of the information in person, how was the rest of it verified? "Common sense," she answered. The Seattle Times, she said, had more than 500 people collaborating on Google Wave to gather information on the same story. Wikipedia Takes On The Mumbai Terror Attacks Then came Pantages' turn to discuss how the Wikipedia community addressed the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai . While it is said, as we started out with, that Wikipedia just shouldn't be trusted, the case we heard for its coverage of a breaking news situation far surpassed what you might often see on your average blog or even traditional newspaper. One particular user, Kensplanets , was a driving force behind the coverage, using breaking news from IBN.com as a source. In cases such as this one, the crowdsourcing aspect not only allows multiple points of view, but also allows aggregation from multiple points in a number of different languages and locations. "It's not just U.S.-centric information," Pantages explained, "You have the New York Times, Reuters, Times of India - they're all there." According to Pantages , by the end of the first day of the Wikipedia article's life, it had been edited more than 360 times, by 70 different editors referring to 28 separate sources from news outlets around the web. While this could seem like a situation rife for misdirection and misinformation, the constant discussion swirling around the creation of an article, Pantages explained, is "really similar to what you would think should be in a newsroom." Nonetheless, we still disparage Wikipedia as an untrusted source of news. Wikipedia As News Aggregator Just like other news aggregation services, Wikipedia takes many sources and puts them in to a central location, but with the added benefit of human curation instead of algorithmic collection. "There's no real-time reporting going on in Wikipedia, it's real-time aggregation," Pantages said. So the very first level of information vetting, which happens at the reporting level, has already taken place by the time it reaches the site. Then the hundreds or thousands of editors continue to scrutinize the information, discussing edits and potential changes in the back channels. The news we read in our daily newspapers, on the other hand, is curated by only a small number of people. Surely, there is the question of qualification, but many of Wikipedia's contributors and editors are, themselves, professionals. In contrast, we often accept news from other blogs as immediately trustworthy, while a Wikipedia article such as this one, which is transparent in its creation, its sourcing and its transmutation over time, we dismiss as flawed from conception. Today, the 2008 Mumbai Attacks article sits at more nearly 43,000 words with over 150 different sources cited and 1,245 unique editors. While Pantages argues that "Wikipedia should not be a source, it should be a starting off point," we would have to argue the same for news media in general. In this crowd-sourced news environment we've entered, blindly consuming news and content, from any source, is an ill-advised path to follow. With that said, if we are willing to take crowd-sourced content - whether tweets, Facebook updates, blogs, videos or whatever else - as valid sources for information about our world, then a collection of these same media as carefully poured over and curated as found in a Wikipedia article should be even more trusted, not less, than those bits on their own. Traditional media get bits of breaking news wrong all the time, but we accept that as part of the game. To vilify Wikipedia for the same errors sets unequal standards and besides, you'll likely never see the same level of transparency in traditional media about where it went wrong. With Wikipedia, it's all laid bare for the world to see. Discuss
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Why Wikipedia Should Be Trusted As A Breaking News Source
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