• Régulièrement, the Economist fait la promotion enthousiaste des derniers jouets meurtriers livrés par le complexe militaro-industriel. Aujourd’hui : le mini-drone qu’il est top-mignon.

    Technology monitor : Joining the drones club | The Economist
    http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/08/technology-monitor?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/joiningthedronesclub

    Future Ravens may be able to strike as well as scout. The American army has experimented with turning the drones into miniature bombers, capable of delivering grenade-sized weapons. Such bombs would be enough to destroy a small vehicle or take out the occupants of a particular room with high precision and little collateral damage.

    For greater punch, AeroVironment has a prototype version of a lethal drone called Switchblade. This resembles Raven, but is a flying bomb, packed with explosives. Its guidance software enables it to lock on to and follow a rapidly moving target, even if that target is trying to evade its attention. A mixture of Ravens and Switchblades could thus make an effective hunter-killer team.

    As electronics get ever smaller, small drones get more capable. At the moment, Ravens cost around $56,000 each, and economies of scale should bring this down. By contrast, machines like the Predator cost at least $5m, and another $5,000 an hour to fly. That is how the Pentagon can afford to buy so many Ravens, compared with just a few dozen Predators and Reapers each year. From the army’s point of view, small is definitely beautiful.

  • Jack Dorsey rejoins #Twitter: Returning to the nest | The Economist
    http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/03/jack_dorsey_rejoins_twitter

    A recent study by researchers at Yahoo! found that just 20,000 users were producing roughly 50% of all tweets. If it is to flourish in future, Twitter will need to convince many more people to send tweets, not just read those generated by a bunch of über-prolific types.

    • L’étude en question. Intéressante, notamment la partie en rapport avec les médias (la « two-step theory »).

      Who Says What to Whom on Twitter | Yahoo ! Research
      http://research.yahoo.com/pub/3386

      We study several longstanding questions in media communications research, in the context of the microblogging service Twitter, regarding the production, flow, and consumption of information. To do so, we exploit a recently introduced feature of Twitter---known as Twitter lists---to distinguish between elite users, by which we mean specifically celebrities, bloggers, and representatives of media outlets and other formal organizations, and ordinary users. Based on this classification, we find a striking concentration of attention on Twitter---roughly 50% of tweets consumed are generated by just 20K elite users---where the media produces the most information, but celebrities are the most followed. We also find significant homophily within categories: celebrities listen to celebrities, while bloggers listen to bloggers etc; however, bloggers in general rebroadcast more information than the other categories. Next we re-examine the classical ``two-step flow’’ theory of communications, finding considerable support for it on Twitter, but also some interesting differences. Third, we find that URLs broadcast by different categories of users or containing different types of content exhibit systematically different lifespans. And finally, we examine the attention paid by the different user categories to different news topics.

    • Dans le PDF :

      In particular, we find that although audience attention has indeed fragmented among a wider pool of content producers than classical models of mass media, attention remains highly concentrated, where roughly 0.05% of the population accounts for almost half of all posted URLs.

  • SXSW blog, day three: Meet the curators | The Economist
    http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/03/sxsw_blog_day_three?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/meetthecurators

    But the serious point is that “aggregation” or “curation” of other people’s coverage is becoming recognised more and more as one of the indispensable elements of journalism.

    You might say that you don’t need to be a journalist to cobble together a list of links. But actually, given the huge proliferation of sources these days, you do. Being able to scan a vast range of material, determine what’s reliable, relevant and sufficiently objective, decide what will actually interest your particular readers and arrange it in a way that they can use are not trivial skills. 

    #internet #curation #seenthis