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Accountants, nurses, chemists, surveyors, cooks, clerks and janitors are among the wide range of jobs that get paid more on average in the federal government than in the private sector.

Overall, federal workers earned an average salary of $67,691 in 2008 for occupations that exist both in government and the private sector, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The average pay for the same mix of jobs in the private sector was $60,046 in 2008, the most recent data available.

These salary figures do not include the value of health, pension and other benefits, which averaged $40,785 per federal employee in 2008 vs. $9,882 per private worker, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Federal pay has become a hot political issue in recent months because of concerns over the federal budget deficit and recession-battered wages in the private sector.

Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., made federal pay an issue in his successful campaign to fill Edward Kennedy's seat and is fighting for a pay freeze.

The federal government spent about $224 billion in 2008 on compensation for about 2 million civilian employees.

"The data flip the conventional wisdom on its head," says Cato Institute budget analyst Chris Edwards, a critic of federal pay policy. "Federal workers make substantially more than private workers, not less, in addition to having a large advantage in benefits."

But National Treasury Employees Union President Colleen Kelley says the comparison is faulty because it "compares apples and oranges." Federal accountants, for example, perform work that has more complexity and requires more skill than accounting work in the private sector, she says.

"When you look at the actual duties, you see that very few federal jobs align with those in the private sector," she says. She says federal employees are paid an average of 26% less than non-federal workers doing comparable work.

Office of Personnel Management spokeswoman Sedelta Verble, says higher pay also reflects the longevity and older age of federal workers.

USA TODAY used Bureau of Labor Statistics data to compare salaries in every federal job that had a private-sector equivalent. For example, the federal government's 57,000 registered nurses working for the Veterans Administration and elsewhere were paid an average of $74,460 a year, $10,680 more than the average for private-sector nurses.

The BLS reports that 216 occupations covering 1.1 million federal workers exist in both the federal government and the private sector. An additional 124 federal occupations covering 750,000 employees air-traffic controllers, tax collectors and others did not have direct equivalents, according to the BLS.

Federal jobs have more limited salary ranges than private-sector jobs, some of which have million-dollar payouts.

Key findings:

Federal. The federal pay premium cut across all job categories white-collar, blue-collar, management, professional, technical and low-skill. In all, 180 jobs paid better average salaries in the federal government; 36 paid better in the private sector.

Private. The private sector paid more on average in a select group of high-skill occupations, including lawyers, veterinarians and airline pilots. The government's 5,200 computer research scientists made an average of $95,190, about $10,000 less than the average in the corporate world.

State and local. State government employees had an average salary of $47,231 in 2008, about 5% less than comparable jobs in the private sector. City and county workers earned an average of $43,589, about 2% more than private workers in similar jobs. State and local workers have higher total compensation than private workers when the value of benefits is included.

Job comparison

Average federal salaries exceed average private-sector pay in 83% of comparable occupations. A sampling of average annnual salaries in 2008, the most recent data:

Job	Federal	Private	Difference
Airline pilot, copilot, flight engineer	$93,690	$120,012	-$26,322
Broadcast technician	$90,310	$49,265	$41,045
Budget analyst	$73,140	$65,532	$7,608
Chemist	$98,060	$72,120	$25,940
Civil engineer	$85,970	$76,184	$9,786
Clergy	$70,460	$39,247	$31,213
Computer, information systems manager	$122,020	$115,705	$6,315
Computer support specialist	$45,830	$54,875	-$9,045
Cook	$38,400	$23,279	$15,121
Crane, tower operator	$54,900	$44,044	$10,856
Dental assistant	$36,170	$32,069	$4,101
Economist	$101,020	$91,065	$9,955
Editors	$42,210	$54,803	-$12,593
Electrical engineer	$86,400	$84,653	$1,747
Financial analysts	$87,400	$81,232	$6,168
Graphic designer	$70,820	$46,565	$24,255
Highway maintenance worker	$42,720	$31,376	$11,344
Janitor	$30,110	$24,188	$5,922
Landscape architects	$80,830	$58,380	$22,450
Laundry, dry-cleaning worker	$33,100	$19,945	$13,155
Lawyer	$123,660	$126,763	-$3,103
Librarian	$76,110	$63,284	$12,826
Locomotive engineer	$48,440	$63,125	-$14,685
Machinist	$51,530	$44,315	$7,215
Mechanical engineer	$88,690	$77,554	$11,136
Office clerk	$34,260	$29,863	$4,397
Optometrist	$61,530	$106,665	-$45,135
Paralegals	$60,340	$48,890	$11,450
Pest control worker	$48,670	$33,675	$14,995
Physicians, surgeons	$176,050	$177,102	-$1,052
Physician assistant	$77,770	$87,783	-$10,013
Procurement clerk	$40,640	$34,082	$6,558
Public relations manager	$132,410	$88,241	$44,169
Recreation worker	$43,630	$21,671	$21,959
Registered nurse	$74,460	$63,780	$10,680
Respiratory therapist	$46,740	$50,443	-$3,703
Secretary	$44,500	$33,829	$10,671
Sheet metal worker	$49,700	$43,725	$5,975
Statistician	$88,520	$78,065	$10,455
Surveyor	$78,710	$67,336	$11,374

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, USA TODAY analysis

CloudMade, which provides collaborative data and tools to developers and OEMs for mapping and navigation applications, has raised $12.3 million in series B funding led by Greylock Partners with existing investor Sunstone Capital participating in the round. This brings the startup's total funding to $15.7 million.

CloudMade's platform allows third parties to create applications with stylized and customized map tiles, fully featured turn-by-turn navigation, in-app advertising, local search and data sets relevant to thousands of consumer activities. CloudMade distributes its collaborative mapping, package maps, geo services and advertising to developers and businesses; its main customers are mobile developers, OEMs and network operators. Some of the 12,000-plus developers using CloudMade's API include Skobbler, OffMaps, Geocaching, Trails, Ride the City, GayCities, Dopplr and MotionX GPS.

The startup uses data from partnership with OpenStreetMap (OSM), a wiki map of the world that has over 250,000 users worldwide (and is adding 3,500 new users per week), making over 7,000 edits per hour. CloudMade's CEO Juha Christensen likens the relationship between his company and OSM to that of the Mozilla Corporation and the non-profit arm Mozilla Foundation. In fact, OpenStreetMap founder Steve Coast works at CloudMade.

The company will use the funding to attempt to build the world's most comprehensive map and geo database, and serve this data to developers, device manufacturers and mobile
operators. The investment will also be used to build out and add to CloudMade's suite of consumer-focused mapping products, Mapzen.

Christensen believes that collaborative mapping will do to the mapping industry what Wikipedia did to encyclopedias. Of course, the startup faces competition in space, including Google. But CloudMade has built a loyal base of developers and OpenStreetMap seems to have no lack of participation from the crowd, making its data incredibly valuable.

When the first immersive 3D games came out, I asked a programmer if he knew of anyone who had used that technology to create a Virtual Ancient Rome or Virtual Ancient Athens. I loved the idea of walking around in a place whose current face was changed out of all recognition from its golden age. He shook his head. Creating virtual worlds was way too time consuming and required too much specialist knowledge and so was too expensive. A virtual Rome wouldn't create the profit that Doom did.

Fast forward a decade and the programming necessary becomes easier to do and the number of people who know how to do it have increased substantially. The costs involved in creating a virtual world have decreased at the same time that academic and scholarly institutions have become much more willing to invest in it.

Sponsor

Now that it's quite a bit easier to find a virtual ancient city to stroll through, I thought I would survey a few options and provide you with a short virtual atlas of the ancient world.

Rome Reborn
Working with international partners, the Virtual Heritage Laboratory at the University of Virginia has created a series of "3D digital models illustrating the urban development of ancient Rome from the first settlement in the late Bronze Age (ca. 1000 B.C.) to the depopulation of the city in the early Middle Ages (ca. A.D. 550)." They stared with Rome in 320 A.D., after which date few civic buildings were added to the city. Click through for a video tour of the city.

Ancient Spaces: Acropolis of Athens
Ancient Spaces is a "a student-built, 'massively multiplayer' world based on classical antiquity" at the University of British Columbia. Among their projects are a set of 3D video tours of areas in classical Athens' Acropolis, including the Parthenon and the Propylaea.

Prof. Antonio Serrato-Combe: Tenochtitlan
University of Utah's Serrato-Combe reconstructed the main public spaces of the Aztec city under Moctezumah. He produced a digital model of the "Great Temple" complex in that city on the eve of the Spanish invasion. Like all good historical digital modeling, the spaces are built on rigorous archaeological and architectural study. Prof. Serrato-Combe's work formed the basis of the British Museum's exhibition "Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler."

IBM and the Palace Museum: The Forbidden City
IBM and the Palace Museum, which oversees this Chinese national treasure, worked together to create a virtual walkable version of the Forbidden City, headquarters of Imperial China from about 1420 to 1912. The City, which requires you download a proprietary client to run the interaction, allows you to create an avatar, talk to other visitors and even practice archery.

In the same way that data visualization can be used to look at statistics and render them more immediate and meaningful, virtual or digital or 3D modeling, whether in graphics or video, can do the same thing for history. The present reality of the artifacts of history can exert a tyranny of their own. For instance, most people don't know that the majority of Greek and Roman statuary was painstakingly painted. Digital models can help elbow aside the dictatorship of the present for a flash of insight into the past.

Sharing these re-imaginings via Web services, from video sharing sites to downloadable models, is a radical distribution model we can only have dreamt of not long ago. In the past.

Column photo by Cliff

When Assange turned sixteen, he got a modem, and his computer was transformed into a portal. Web sites did not exist yetthis was 1987but computer networks and telecom systems were sufficiently linked to form a hidden electronic landscape that teen-agers with the requisite technical savvy could traverse. Assange called himself Mendaxfrom Horace's splendide mendax, or nobly untruthfuland he established a reputation as a sophisticated programmer who could break into the most secure networks. He joined with two hackers to form a group that became known as the International Subversives, and they broke into computer systems in Europe and North America, including networks belonging to the U.S. Department of Defense and to the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In a book called Underground, which he collaborated on with a writer named Suelette Dreyfus, he outlined the hacker subculture's early Golden Rules: Don't damage computer systems you break into (including crashing them); don't change the information in those systems (except for altering logs to cover your tracks); and share information.

Around this time, Assange fell in love with a sixteen-year-old girl, and he briefly moved out of his mother's home to stay with her. A couple of days later, police turned up, and they carted off all my computer stuff, he recalled. The raid, he said, was carried out by the state police, and it involved some dodgy character who was alleging that we had stolen five hundred thousand dollars from Citibank. Assange wasn't charged, and his equipment was returned. At that point, I decided that it might be wise to be a bit more discreet, he said. Assange and the girl joined a squatters' union in Melbourne, until they learned she was pregnant, and moved to be near Claire. When Assange was eighteen, the two got married in an unofficial ceremony, and soon afterward they had a son.

Hacking remained a constant in his life, and the thrill of digital exploration was amplified by the growing knowledge, among the International Subversives, that the authorities were interested in their activities. The Australian Federal Police had set up an investigation into the group, called Operation Weather, which the hackers strove to monitor.

In September, 1991, when Assange was twenty, he hacked into the master terminal that Nortel, the Canadian telecom company, maintained in Melbourne, and began to poke around. The International Subversives had been visiting the master terminal frequently. Normally, Assange hacked into computer systems at night, when they were semi-dormant, but this time a Nortel administrator was signed on. Sensing that he might be caught, Assange approached him with humor. I have taken control, he wrote, without giving his name. For years, I have been struggling in this grayness. But now I have finally seen the light. The administrator did not reply, and Assange sent another message: It's been nice playing with your system. We didn't do any damage and we even improved a few things. Please don't call the Australian Federal Police.

The International Subversives' incursions into Nortel turned out to be a critical development for Operation Weather. Federal investigators tapped phone lines to see which ones the hackers were using. Julian was the most knowledgeable and the most secretive of the lot, Ken Day, the lead investigator, told me. He had some altruistic motive. I think he acted on the belief that everyone should have access to everything.

Underground describes Assange's growing fear of arrest: Mendax dreamed of police raids all the time. He dreamed of footsteps crunching on the driveway gravel, of shadows in the pre-dawn darkness, of a gun-toting police squad bursting through his backdoor at 5 am. Assange could relax only when he hid his disks in an apiary that he kept. By October, he was in a terrible state. His wife had left him, taking with her their infant son. His home was a mess. He barely ate or slept. On the night the police came, the twenty-ninth, he wired his phone through his stereo and listened to the busy signal until eleven-thirty, when Ken Day knocked on his door, and told him, I think you've been expecting me.

Assange was charged with thirty-one counts of hacking and related crimes. While awaiting trial, he fell into a depression, and briefly checked himself into a hospital. He tried to stay with his mother, but after a few days he took to sleeping in nearby parks. He lived and hiked among dense eucalyptus forests in the Dandenong Ranges National Park, which were thick with mosquitoes whose bites scarred his face. Your inner voice quiets down, he told me. Internal dialogue is stimulated by a preparatory desire to speak, but it is not actually useful if there are no other people around. He added, I don't want to sound too Buddhist. But your vision of yourself disappears.

It took more than three years for the authorities to bring the case against Assange and the other International Subversives to court. Day told me, We had just formed the computer-crimes team, and the government said, Your charter is to establish a deterrent.' Well, to get a deterrent you have to prosecute people, and we achieved that with Julian and his group. A computer-security team working for Nortel in Canada drafted an incident report alleging that the hacking had caused damage that would cost more than a hundred thousand dollars to repair. The chief prosecutor, describing Assange's near-limitless access, told the court, It was God Almighty walking around doing what you like.

Assange, facing a potential sentence of ten years in prison, found the state's reaction confounding. He bought Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle, a novel about scientists and technicians forced into the Gulag, and read it three times. (How close the parallels to my own adventures! he later wrote.) He was convinced that look/see hacking was a victimless crime, and intended to fight the charges. But the other members of the group decided to coperate. When a judge says, The prisoner shall now rise,' and no one else in the room standsthat is a test of character, he told me. Ultimately, he pleaded guilty to twenty-five charges and six were dropped. But at his final sentencing the judge said, There is just no evidence that there was anything other than sort of intelligent inquisitiveness and the pleasure of being able towhat's the expressionsurf through these various computers. Assange's only penalty was to pay the Australian state a small sum in damages.

As the criminal case was unfolding, Assange and his mother were also waging a campaign to gain full custody of Assange's sona legal fight that was, in many ways, far more wrenching than his criminal defense. They were convinced that the boy's mother and her new boyfriend posed a danger to the child, and they sought to restrict her rights. The state's child-protection agency, Health and Community Services, disagreed. The specifics of the allegations are unclear; family-court records in Australia are kept anonymous. But in 1995 a parliamentary committee found that the agency maintained an underlying philosophy of deflecting as many cases away from itself as possible. When the agency decided that a child was living in a safe household, there was no way to immediately appeal its decision.

The custody battle evolved into a bitter fight with the state. What we saw was a great bureaucracy that was squashing people, Claire told me. She and Assange, along with another activist, formed an organization called Parent Inquiry Into Child Protection. We used full-on activist methods, Claire recalled. In meetings with Health and Community Services, we would go in and tape-record them secretly. The organization used the Australian Freedom of Information Act to obtain documents from Health and Community Services, and they distributed flyers to child-protection workers, encouraging them to come forward with inside information, for a central databank that they were creating. You may remain anonymous if you wish, one flyer stated. One protection worker leaked to the group an important internal manual. Assange told me, We had moles who were inside dissidents.

In 1999, after nearly three dozen legal hearings and appeals, Assange worked out a custody agreement with his wife. Claire told me, We had experienced very high levels of adrenaline, and I think that after it all finished I ended up with P.T.S.D. It was like coming back from a war. You just can't interact with normal people to the same degree, and I am sure that Jules has some P.T.S.D. that is untreated. Not long after the court cases, she said, Assange's hair, which had been dark brown, became drained of all color.

Assange was burned out. He motorcycled across Vietnam. He held various jobs, and even earned money as a computer-security consultant, supporting his son to the extent that he was able. He studied physics at the University of Melbourne. He thought that trying to decrypt the secret laws governing the universe would provide the intellectual stimulation and rush of hacking. It did not. In 2006, on a blog he had started, he wrote about a conference organized by the Australian Institute of Physics, with 900 career physicists, the body of which were sniveling fearful conformists of woefully, woefully inferior character.

He had come to understand the defining human struggle not as left versus right, or faith versus reason, but as individual versus institution. As a student of Kafka, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn, he believed that truth, creativity, love, and compassion are corrupted by institutional hierarchies, and by patronage networksone of his favorite expressionsthat contort the human spirit. He sketched out a manifesto of sorts, titled Conspiracy as Governance, which sought to apply graph theory to politics. Assange wrote that illegitimate governance was by definition conspiratorialthe product of functionaries in collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population. He argued that, when a regime's lines of internal communication are disrupted, the information flow among conspirators must dwindle, and that, as the flow approaches zero, the conspiracy dissolves. Leaks were an instrument of information warfare.

These ideas soon evolved into WikiLeaks. In 2006, Assange barricaded himself in a house near the university and began to work. In fits of creativity, he would write out flow diagrams for the system on the walls and doors, so as not to forget them. There was a bed in the kitchen, and he invited backpackers passing through campus to stay with him, in exchange for help building the site. He wouldn't sleep at all, a person who was living in the house told me. He wouldn't eat.

Earlier this year, you probably heard that Apple blocked Adobe's Flash-to-iPhone App converter from the App Store on the eve of the tool's launch. That may have crushed Adobe's dream of allowing developers to write their Flash apps once and deploy them wherever they'd like, but its AIR platform still works with Mac, PC, and Linux, with support for Android devices coming later this year. That means developers will soon be able to write applications that will work on both the desktop and smartphones.

Of course, the prospect of running cross-platform applications is a lot more impressive when you can see one in action. Which is why Adobe Technical Evangelist Christophe Coenraets has put together a demo showing off what AIR can do when it's used to deploy the same application across both Android and desktop computers. He's built a basic video conference app in 30 lines of code, which he demos in the YouTube clip above (the heavy lifting was pre-written, powered by Adobe's LiveCycle Collaboration Services module). Obviously the application is quite basic, but it's pretty impressive nonetheless.

I've never been a big fan of AIR I've yet to run into an AIR app on my Mac that didn't feel a bit out of place, with quirky window behavior and decidedly non-native UI (though this may be the fault of third-party app developers building on the platform). Still, it's hard not to see the benefit of being able to build an application that runs on both mobile and PC.

Editor's note: This guest post is written by Edward James Bass, editor of Audio Silver Lining an online resource and blog covering cloud based and collaborative music production.

The last few years have seen the emergence of online music production services and tools such as Indaba, Audiotool and Soundation that offer artists and producers the chance to record, edit and mix tracks from within their web browsers rather than using installed applications.

Aside from being incredibly impressive and a lot of fun I feel this new technology offers some considerable benefits for music makers of all levels. Here's a few of the more prominent ones

Collaboration

As is the case with all cloud based applications collaboration is a key feature here. Since some existing online music production services have built strong communities around their services, the process of finding and communicating with musicians and producers to work with has become a fairly positive experience.

Admittedly questions have been raised about potential IP issues if a track ever gets commercial success but there is a strong argument for the fact that working via these services allows a means for artists to better track who contributed what and constantly monitor and review the terms of their working agreements.

Work anywhere

Having a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) that is no longer physically tied to a specific machine is a potential winner for bands and artists on the move.

Not merely does it offer the chance to easily record and edit demo tracks from just about any location with connectivity but also a low value online backup of material. Finally that lost laptop no longer means a great lost album.

Try before you buy

The free signup and simplified features of online DAW's and sequencers like Indaba, Audiotool and Soundation gives those who are new to music production the opportunity to try out recording, mixing and synthesis without having to shell out in advance.

For the Myspace generation already used to incorporating technology into their creative process this will likely prove to be less of hurdle than to older producers who are tied to their expensive desktop tools.

Social streaming

Whilst its relatively easy to mix down a track and upload it to Soundcloud or Myspace it is still time consuming and stifles the ability to share the moment with your friends and fans. Embedded widgets for social media and websites allow instant streaming of new tracks to the masses. So far two services Audiotool and Indaba offer this feature and some nice looking widgets too

Shaking up the market

The existing non-cloud DAWs have been somewhat feature-stale for some time now, not to mention slow with regards to addressing the opportunities of social media.

This advancement offers them the chance to re-invigorate their products by creating online or hybrid versions that offer all of the above features combined with the reassurance of an established brand.

Ableton has already taken a step forward with regards to collaboration by offering a function that allows its users to share tracks and control who accesses them via an online interface its fairly likely other vendors will follow suit soon.

Will the Cloud ever replace music production software completely?

Currently some professional and home studio producers have a certain reticence to this bold new area of music tech and see cloud based apps as pointless, simplified versions of their own tools. Indeed it will be sometime before online DAWs and sequencers can fully match the capability of systems such as Pro Tools, Cubase or Reason but it is certainly not the impossible vision some have supposed just a case of developing on a different platform from the standard one.

As ever, improving technology is the driver here better connectivity both via standard broadband and mobile connections as well as the proliferation of devices that use cloud based operating systems and apps will provide an environment where online music production is likely to thrive due to better stability and access.

Ultimately though, neither the naysayers and doubters or those enthused like myself can fully predict the route that music recording technology will take in the future. What has surprised me recently however is that some seem to think it will remain the same at it is now and surely that's the least likely situation of all.

Original title and link for this post: How the Cloud will change music production forever

Computer science is an interesting field to go into. There are a number of opportunities in computer science that you can take advantage of. With computers increasingly becoming a regular part of life, those who can work with computers have good opportunities. You can find a good salary with a program in computer science, and as long as you are careful to keep up your skills. Here are 50 free opencourseware classes that can help you learn more about computer science:

Introduction to Computer Science

Learn the basics of computer science, and get a foundation in how computer science works.

1. Introduction to Computer Science: Learn about the history of computing, as well as the development of computer languages. A great basic course on introductory computer science.
2. Introduction to Computer Science and Programming: A series of video lectures from MIT about computer science, and the basics of programming.
3. Introduction to Computers: UC Berkeley offers a course on the basics of computing and science.
4. Artificial Intelligence: Learn about the basics of artificial intelligence and how it has been developed for computer applications.
5. Breadth Topics in Computing Science: This class from Capilano University offers a wide view of computer science. Learn about design, programming and more for different opportunities in computer science.
6. The Anthropology of Computing: This MIT course offers an interesting look into the development of computers and their impact on human society.
7. Human Computer Interaction: Basic information on how humans interact with computers, and how to better design usability, from the University of Washington.

Comprehensive Computer Science Collections

If you are interested in courses that are a little more comprehensive in nature, you can get a good feel for computer science from the following collections:

1. Computer and Computer Systems: An overall view of computers and how they are organized into systems.
2. Science and Technology: Connexions, from Rice University, offers a comprehensive course on different types of computer science.
3. Information and Technology: Many of the courses offered by the University of Tokyo include English translations, so you can get a good grasp of information and technology.
4. Electrical and Computer Engineering: Choose from a variety of courses that can give you a good grasp of the principles behind computer engineering.
5. Electrical Engineering and Computer Science: Learn about electrical engineering and computer science can be combined to create amazing technology.
6. Science and Technology: Choose from a variety of courses on technology and computers, as well as science, from OER Commons.

Programming and Languages

Get a handle on computer programming, and learn about different computer languages used in programming.

1. Building Programming Experience: Helpful hints for building up your programming capabilities.
2. Computer Language Engineering: Overview of how computer languages are developed, and how to program them.
3. Programming Languages: Provides a basic overview of programming languages, offering special insight into Scheme +.
4. AJAX: Land of Code offers this tutorial related to programming with AJAX.
5. C Programming: The University of Strathclyde provides this course on using the C programming language.
6. Fundamentals of C++: This course is offered at free-ed.net, and provides insight and helpful hints on programming with C++.
7. Java Programming: This course is written by a computer science professor at Orange Coast College, and is provided through the Sofia Open Content Initiative.
8. Perl Lessons: Learn about Perl, and how to use it, especially with CGI.
9. PHP Tutorial for Beginners: Get an overview of PHP, and how it can be used in a variety of circumstances.
10. Ruby Programming: Learn about Ruby, and learn how to use it for your projects.

Computer Software

Learn about software development, and the importance of software in computer programming.

1. Designing the user interface: This software design course from The Open University helps you learn the principles of usability.
2. Modelling object-oriented software: Learn about object-oriented software, and how it can be used to structure systems.
3. Software development for enterprise systems: An overview of how to design software meant for business.
4. Software Engineering for Web Applications: Learn about how to design software for web apps.
5. Elements of Software Construction: MIT takes you through the basics of constructing software.
6. Software Engineering Concepts: Learn the fundamental concepts behind engineering and developing software.

Computer Systems and Information Technology

Learn how to construct computer systems, and get the basic outlines of information technology.

1. Systems Design and Administration: Learn how to design and administer computer systems from Dixie State College.
2. Applied Parallel Computing: Learn about how you can use parallel computing systems.
3. Machine Structures: UC Berkeley offers a course on the structure of computers, and how they can interact in systems.
4. Operating Systems and System Programming: Get a handle on operating systems, how they work, and how to program them properly.
5. Information Technology and the Labor Market: Learn about IT, the demand for it, and how IT is reshaping the way things are done.
6. Global Issues in Information Technology: Weber State University introduces different issues in IT.
7. Finding information in information technology and computing: An overview of how information is arranged, and how to look for what you need.

Computer Processes and Data

Learn more about computer processing and data management.

1. An introduction to data and information: The Open University offers a helpful course on data and how it works in a computer environment.
2. The database development life cycle: A basic overview of how data development takes place.
3. Introduction to Algorithms: Algorithms are necessary for processing information. This MIT course introduces you to them.
4. Introduction to Communication, Control, and Signal Processing: Learn how computers process information and data.
5. Data Structures: Learn how data is structured, and how you can create your own structures.
6. Data and processes in computing: Follow data and processes development as part of computer science.
7. Representing and manipulating data in computers: A course in how you can use data for specific purposes.

Web Development

Part of computer science is being able to develop programs, applications and systems for the Internet.

1. Understanding Computers and the Internet: A look at computers and their importance to the Internet.
2. Digital Typography: Get an understanding of how to design typography for the Internet.
3. Information Visualization: Learn how to visualize information, and present it in a way that others can relate to.
4. User Interface Design and Implementation: A course from MIT about how you can design a usable interface, and implement it.
5. Communicating in Cyberspace: Learn how to communicate effectively using computers.
6. Search Engines: Technology, Society and Business: Get a handle on how search engines work, and how important they have become to society and to business.
7. Communications and Information Policy: Learn about different policies involved with communicating online.

At ProjectVRM we call EmanciPay a relationship management and voluntary payment framework in which buyers and sellers can present to each other the requirements and options by which they are willing to engage, or are already engaging. These include preferences, policies and choices about what to pay and how. (Actual payment would be carried out by PayPal, Google Checkout or some other system built for the purpose.)

All of this is new stuff for buyers, and we're not building it all out at once. In fact, we're starting with a small piece of code for the seller's side, so they can signal willingness to engage with buyers in the free and open marketplace, rather than only in the sellers' own silos. If they want to signal that willingness (which we might call VRM-friendliness), they'll include a bit of RDFa code in their Web pages. If that code is present, the seller's r-button goes from a default gray to red. If the user already has a relationship (or has had some other interaction) with the seller, the buyer's side r-button also turns red. So, in this mocked-up example

I can see that KQED is VRM-friendly, and that I already have had some kind of dealings with the station.

Right now the code for both sides is in the works, and is also a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project. It builds to a large extent on Tipsy, described as a a framework for voluntary donations to bloggers, musicians, and other content creators on the web. Tipsy is the creation of Oshani Seneviratne and Adam Marcus, both grad students at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), whom I got to know through David Karger, a professor at CSAIL, whom I got to know through Keith Hopper, who fathered ListenLog. Our GSoC programmer is Ahmad Bakhiet, a student at Kings College London.

When we're through with the current stage, we'll be ready to test out the seller's side code with stations (or with anybody), which will include means for deciding what happens when the user clicks on the right-side r-button. What matters most at the first stage is the signal of VRM-friendliness, which is a huge state-change form the old silo'd business-as-usual. What it says is I'm open to what you bring to the market space between us, and to a potential relationship.

We have this in the real brick-and-mortar commercial world, but not in the e-commerce world, for the simple reason that we have lacked mechanisms for creating the open market spaces between buyers and sellers the space in the middle here:

Phil Windley of Kynetx gives a perfect History of E-Commerce slide in his talks. It goes,

1995: Invention of the cookie.

The End.

Cookies are bits of code that sites put in your browser to help them remember stuff about you. These are handy in many ways, but they also put all responsibility in the hands of those sites of the sellers.

And if you want to do serious shopping, you can't just put down cash or a credit card, do your business and walk away. No, you have to register. And to do that you need to accept terms of service that are known in the legal trade as contracts of adhesion. These are usually not read by users for several reasons, the most important of which is that they are not negotiable. Whether or not they are unconscionable, or enforceable, is beside the point. If you want to do business, you have to agree.

Where contracts of adhesion apply, markets are not conversations.
Needing to accept these contracts is a big source of friction in the online marketplace. It's one of those areas where things are slower online than off. It is also therefore one of those areas where the better model is the familiar offline brick-and-mortar one. (In fact, one could argue that loyalty cards bring to the brick-and-mortar world one of the more annoying inventions of online retailing.)

So that's a big part of EmanciPay's challenge, and something we've been working on at ProjectVRM. What we're working to create is a two-sided approach to eliminating the need for users to accept one-sided contracts. We're creating code with easily-understood wording and symbols, which can be read by lawyers, ordinary users, and machines (ideals first articulated by Creative Commons.) This code can be used for expressing preferences, policies and bases on which each side can trust the other. There's much more that can go on both sides, but those are a start.

When you click on the seller's r-button in EmanciPay, you might see a pop-down menu that looks like this:

The new item there is the symbol I've labeled terms. It's one half of the iconic scales of justice. A similar one might be on the buyer's drop-down menu as well. Also there might be preferences, standing requests for products or services, links to personal data stores, or whatever we feel like putting in there.

We see the r-buttons and their affordances as places where both the buyer and the seller (or the individual and any organization this needn't be limited to commercial settings) can offer, selectively, means of engagement and the data required.

But one of the first jobs here is to get the paranoid lawyers out of the room and the engagement-oriented ones in the room, to help describe new terms of engagement that yield little or nothing in real protection, while offering means for engagement that reduce or eliminate the frictions to which we have become too accustomed over the last fifteen years.

While we're still baking EmanciPay, I want to visit some questions about what my actual or potential interactions with KQED, WBUR, WWOZ and other stations on my ListenLog might be. There are many possibilities here. One might be to take a budget that I pay down proportionately through time. Another might be to just throw some money now and then at sources of programs that I've found especially good or that I like right now, for that matter. We can be real-time about this. Another might be to pledge money to stations where which I spend more than X amount of time. The list can go on.

I can also, at my discretion, also share some or all of my data with stations and other parties (such as program hosts or producers).

And I can also open myself to programmatic approaches, created by other parties, that work inside the EmanciPay framework. The possibilities are endless here, and suggestions are welcome.

At this stage we plan to test out and play with EmanciPay at first by using Tipsy's lottery model. In this one, listeners pay one source, on (say) a monthly basis, with the source being chosen as the winner of a lottery. In other words, if you look at the list of stations on my ListenLog, I would budget $X per month to pay out to some lucky public radio station. Code on the station's side (the same code that lights up the seller's r-button) would make them eligible for winning my monthly lottery. At the end of the month, the lucky station gets paid. Get enough listeners and stations involved, and we can have some fun with it.

But that's just a small first step. The ones that follow will shake down richer and more symmetrical, involved and cross-informative relationships between stations and listeners and then expand out into other territory, I hope starting with the music industry. From there we can move on to other content industries, and then to the broader marketplace in general.

If all goes according to plan, r-buttons will be commonly used and well-understood symbols. Of course, plans can change. Alternative ideas are sure to emerge, along with many improvements to this one, which is among many others in the VRM movement. It just happens to be the one I've been working on most.

Meanwhile, big thanks to to Vince Stehle (who has moved on from Surdna, but made the grant happen when we needed it most), to Keith Hopper and NPR, to Jake Shapiro and the crew at PRX, to many other friends in public radio (and to ones in free commercial radio as well, such as Bill Goldsmith of Radio Paradise), to Daniel Choi, Oshani Seneviratne, Adam Marcus, Ahmad Bakhiet and other helpful programmers, to the VRM community, and to the Berkman Center, which has kept faith with me and with ProjectVRM through the years required to get things off the ground.

We're still getting started here. But we've come a long way too.

Shared by phillip
Of most actively seeded (popular), not all.

The large majority of content found on BitTorrent is illegal, a new study out of the University of Ballarat in Australia has confirmed. Researchers from the university's Internet Commerce Security Laboratory scraped torrents from 23 trackers and looked up the content to determine whether the file was confirmed to be copyrighted. They found that 89 percent of the files they sampled were confirmed to be illegally shared, and most of the remaining ambiguous 11 percent was likely to be infringing.

The total sample consisted of 1,000 torrent filesa random selection from the most active seeded files on the trackers they used. Each file was manually checked to see whether it was being legally distributed. Only three cases0.3 percent of the fileswere determined to be definitely not infringing, while 890 files were confirmed to be illegal.

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Crowdflower, a labor-on-demand provider who routes tasks from companies with labor needs to crowdsource markets like Gambit and Amazon's Mechanical Turk, recently released an API and have begun working with online payment platform TrialPay. In hopes of being able to track reputation and quality scores for crowdsource workers across marketplaces, Crowdflower is also looking to employ a social login such as Facebook.

We spoke with Lukas Biewald on Monday at Crowdflower's crowdsourcing work meetup, held in the company's San Francisco office, about some of these new developments. First, the company has added Trialpay as a crowdsource labor pool. Since Trialpay is one of the first alternative payment options for Facebook Credits, this partnership could potentially allow crowdsource laborers to earn Credits for their work. It could be especially useful for younger social gamers who might not have a credit card or a source of income necessary to pay for offers like magazine subscriptions or to purchase Credits directly.

A new API from Crowdflower allows anyone to embed available crowdsource labor tasks into their site or application. The RESTful API allows for automated interaction with the Crowdflower platform, using URL-encoded key value pairs and JSON responses to perform functions such as notifying users when completed tasks have been judged.

Lastly, Biewald described his desire to get the crowdsource industry using a social login such as the Facebook Login plugin. If crowdsource laborers signed in through Facebook, Crowdflower could track their performance and create persistent reputation profiles. High-quality workers could then instantly tackle more difficult, high pay tasks if they started working through a new marketplace. Meanwhile, inaccurate, flaky workers would be unable to hide from their poor past performance by switching crowdsource employers. It would also facilitate another dream of Biewalds': to see Crowdflower reputation ratings included in job applicant rsums.

Looking forward, Biewald said they are thinking about potential integrations with the Facebook Credits system. We'll have more details on that as they become available. To learn more about Crowdflower's features, pricing and clients, including Facebook which used the service to task laborers with moderating flagged images, check out their excellent Slideshare.

Crowdflower: Toward a crowdsourced world from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

One of the most interesting start-ups that keeps popping up on my radar screen is Crowdflower, which connects nonprofits and companies with people around the globe looking to work on crowdsourced tasks.

It's a fascinating glimpse at future contract labor models and at how work relationships are becoming more distributed, global, ephemeral and efficient.

Crowdflower takes simple tasks and breaks them down, using a global network of workers to determine, say, if a tweet about a brand is negative or positive, or if a piece of content violates a site's community guidelines.

The person might spend 2 minutes on a task, an hour, or more. The advantage is that the person doesn't have to drive to work, they don't even have to sign up for a website. They can just come to a job post, accomplish a task and get paid in minutes, says Crowdflower CEO and founder Lukas Biewald.

I spent three minutes chatting with Lukas at an extremely noisy rooftop party at South by Southwest Interactive. The video won't win any awards for aesthetics I was being jostled while holding a Kodak Zi8 hi-def camcorder but it's evidence that when you meet interesting people, it's good to have a handheld recorder in your pocket.

Watch, embed or download the video on Vimeo

One mind-blowing angle: You'd be surprised at the number of people willing to perform tasks, such as in a Facebook game, in exchange for virtual currency that can buy them more trees in Zynga's Farmville or more weapons in Mafia Wars. People don't realize how much this virtual money means to people, he says.

Its website says Crowdflower provides access to an elastic workforce of more than a half million workers in over 70 countries including refugee camps and developing nations where a few dollars go a long way.

As I understand this, CrowdFlower workers (they call them customers) complete large-scale jobs on a piecemeal basis in a quick, efficient and inexpensive manner. Similar in some respects to Amazon's Mechanical Turk, the arrangement is task-based and avoids the need for lead time and overhead associated with traditional hiring and outsourcing.

Samasource, which we've written about in here and here, has a similar but somewhat different model that's focused on ongoing work relationships with specific groups in developing countries.

Both Lukas and Samasource CEO Leila Chirayath were on a panel at the Commonwealth Club this spring that I caught. Crowdlower, Samasource, Ushahidi and FrontlineSMS were also involved in Haiti relief efforts using crowdsourcing and mobile phones, which we wrote about in February.

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Harnessing the crowd for social goodJD Lasica works with nonprofits, social change organizations and businesses on social media strategies. See his profile, visit his business blog, contact JD or leave a comment.

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