Facebook threatens with legal action NY academics seeking to study Facebook's political ad targeting because their Ad Observer is a "scraping tool". The project collects data unavailable on Facebook's political ad archive: targeting data, geography, political contest, etc.., which they say now violates their rules established i…

"If a scientific paper's findings are surprising, there's a very, very good chance that it's wrong: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence... the solution is to check, to revisit, to reanalyze. And then there's journalism, where reporters come out with shocking and surprising stories every day, and no one ever gets to reanalyze the…

"the International Barcode of Life (iBOL), a consortium of universities, natural history museums and research institutes, are asking people around the world to gather samples. Then, back in their labs, scientists can identify the species by sequencing a section of its DNA" - IBM and SAP open up big data platforms for citizen science | Guardian Su…

To think I almost worked on their dotcom project 12 years ago (shiver): "Lots of researchers post PDFs of their own papers on their own web-sites. It’s always been so, because even though technically it’s in breach of the copyright transfer agreements that we blithely sign, everyone knows it’s right and proper. Preventing people from making their…