Weekly Link Roundup and Upcoming Events

Here are of some of our favorite stories from the past week:

An algorithm for tracking viruses (and Twitter rumors) to their source  (GigaOm) –

“Essentially, the algorithm starts by looking at a small collection of points within a network and working back from there to determine the origin, kind of like how investigators can zero in on a cell phone’s location using triangulation.”

Renewed Violence in Iraq (Council on Foreign Relations) –

“Iraq remains a fragile state deeply traumatized and riven by thirty years of war, sanctions, occupation, and civil strife. Although there are numerous positive signs of progress in Iraq—violence has fallen to its lowest level since 2003, its economy is growing modestly, oil production recently surpassed that of Iran, and foreign investment is beginning to restore infrastructure decayed by years of war and sanctions—the risk of acute instability and renewed conflict remains.”

Monopolizing power in Egypt (Foreign Policy) –

“Eighteen months after an uprising against Egypt’s domineering and all-powerful authoritarian leader, the transition to a democratic political order has produced a president with executive and legislative power and extensive oversight authority over the drafting of the country’s constitution. On paper, the president has dictatorial power.”

Crowdsourcing and diplomacy in the Pacific (Lowy Institute for International Policy) –

“Using cleaned and verified data from local partners such as these can make the mass of digital information more manageable for large agencies and can improve the technical capacity on the ground vital to correcting false rumours, coordinating tangible responses to diplomatic and humanitarian crises and collecting accurate data on aid and development projects.”

How Big Data Became So Big (New York Times) –

“The term itself is vague, but it is getting at something that is real,” says Jon Kleinberg, a computer scientist at Cornell University. “Big Data is a tagline for a process that has the potential to transform everything.”