Data Science Journal, Volume 6, Open Data Issue, 17 June 2007

Smith Jr., Dwight C. "Mafia: The Prototypical Alien Conspiracy." Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science: Vol. 423, Crime and Justice in America: 1776-1976, p. 75-88.

    There seems to consistently exist a sense of fascination with conspiracy theories. In American culture, the Mafia is one specific type of conspiracy that seems to have captured the public opinion. Dwight C. Smith, Jr examines the conspiracy of the mafia in his paper, Mafia: The Prototypical Alien Conspiracy. This paper examines the worries about not external, but internal aggressors that seek to undermine the status quo or legal system.

    Smith traces the progression of various conspiracies throughout history, what is required to constitute or create a conspiracy and  the way in which these conspiracies affect the mentality of a countries citizens. The eartliest examples of these comspiracies would be the illuminati of the late 18^th century, the Bolsheviks of the late 19^th century, and now the conspiracies that have surrounded mafia activities. In each of these cases and perhaps with all conspiracies, there is a beginning in which there is only an idea or suspicion. For the Mafia, this suspicion started around October of 1890 in which New Orleans Superintendant of Police David Hennesey and a simple allegation that a group of Sicilians known as the Matrangas were the leaders of a 300 person Mafia. The significance of the Death of the Police superintnedant was clear and retaliation swift.

    The work goes on to show the progression of the Mafia as a product of cultural influence to an organization with a complex hierarchy and infrastructure. In the film “The Godfather”  one can see the complexity of the organization as well as a necessity to remain “under the radar” even if it was only a formality. For example, Don Vito tells Solozzo that he does not wish to take part in his drug trade no matter how lucrative it is because essentially it would their quiet existence within circle of government officials to public and too loud for them to continue to take part in the conspiracy. This paper offers a historical understanding of the development of a Mafioso culture as a conspiracy along with all of the political corruption that is associated with it.

Michael Cornfield's Commentary summarizes the ways in which the internet has become an essential medium of American politics. Cornfield outlines five major innovations of the Howard Dean (Joe Trippi, manager) 2004 campaign: news-pegged fundraising appeals, net-organized local gatherings, blogging, online referenda, decentralized decision-making. Cornfield examines the different Deanian techniques that Kerry and Bush utilized in their campaigns - Kerry focused more on fund-raising while Bush concentrated on grass-roots mobilization. Cornfield ultimately concludes that the Democrats started too late and were not effectively organized.

In an effort to analyze the techniques utilized by the emerging 2008 candidates, this article is useful for historicizing Internet politicking. One of the most interesting comments is Cornfield's re-imagining the concept of an "activist" - who might soon include "people who do little more than what ten minutes a month at their computers enable them to do." Although Moveon.org got 500,000 people to sign the petition against impeaching President Clinton, the House ultimately voted for impeachment. The organization's real power seems to have come from fund-raising for candidates. Is online activism now (say online petitions or virtual marches) as effective (in terms of real-world effects in policy, etc.) as live-action grassroots efforts - or could it be in the future?

This article (as its title indicates) is focused on the internet aspect of the 2004 campaign and does not offer a well-rounded examination of other campaign factors.

This article discusses Edwards' efforts to use new media to gain an edge in the 2008 elections. Formally announcing his candidacy via youtube, encouraging voters to text message their support, blogging through his own site www.onecorps.com, Edwards is, according to those quoted in the article, ahead of the online campaign curve. The article interestingly compares Edwards' approach to that of former Virginia Governor Mark Warner. Warner too utilized the online avenues but, according to Nancy Scola (former Hill staffer Howard Dean campaign volunteer) came across stiff and uneasy online. The implication here is that not only a campaign, but a particular type of personality, must be staged online to be effective. This leads me to wonder whether particular personalities translate across media - can Edwards mobilize his supporters outside of cyberspace? Although this report positively announces that twice as many Americans use the web as their primary source of news about the 2006 elections as they did in 2002, it seems to posit that the real political audience is still reached through TV. Concluding with a reference to Howard Dean, the article settles on the view that the Internet is an increasingly important medium, but still only one piece of the campaign puzzle, leaving us a bit unsure of the implications regarding Edwards' mastery of online tools. Ultimately, when it comes to presidential campaigns, does money still rule - or will the internet increasingly become THE most important piece of a candidate's strategy? In the future, could e-campaigns prove a democratizing force in the uneven playing-field of big-money politics?

Article in Harpers from 2004 describing the lack of reconstruction in Baghdad and describing Baghdad year Zero.

A much better than average report on the relationships between librarianship and the values of libraries and the values held by the media savvy, technology-centered students of today. Describes the two sets of values, and describes how libraries can adabt to the new expectation in meaningful ways.
 

pg 99 "It is clear that Millennials and others comfortable with a wide range of media and technologies will redefine the traditional manifestations of research and creative activity with these new mashed, cut and pasted creations. For them, the line between consumer and creator is blurred in a way that previously was not possible."

pg 100 "Clear rifts have emerged in the virtual terrain that is occupied by library policies, services and collections and is explored by online users. These rifts or disconnects can be grouped into three classifications for redress. These include technology (infrastructure and integration), policy (copyright, IT policy, liability), and unexploited opportunities."

Useful overview of new ways of thinking about the role of library discovery systems in the context of the networked environment.  Highlights the necessary changes to the function of library catalogs now that discovery, location, request and retrieval can be separated from one another. 

"Much of the discussion is about improving the catalogue user's experience, not an unreasonable aspiration. However, we really need to put this in the context of a more far-reaching set of issues about discovery and about the continued evolution of library systems, including the catalogue, in a changing network environment. In this environment, users increasingly discover resources in places other than the catalogue."

Argues for the usefulness of collaborative tagging, and highlights the known problems with free tagging. Points to some obvious, and some more controversial ways of limiting problems of inter-tagger inconsistency and meaningless distinctions.

In this article we look at what makes folksonomies work. We agree with the premise that tags are no replacement for formal systems, but we see this as being the core quality that makes folksonomy tagging so useful. We begin by looking at the issue of "sloppy tags", a problem to which critics of folksonomies are keen to allude, and ask if there are ways the folksonomy community could offset such problems and create systems that are conducive to searching, sorting and classifying. We then go on to question this "tidying up" approach and its underlying assumptions, highlighting issues surrounding removal of low-quality, redundant or nonsense metadata, and the potential risks of tidying too neatly and thereby losing the very openness that has made folksonomies so popular.

Looks at the development of various classification systems leading up to tagging, or user created metadata. Argues that tagging more closely mirrors the nature of web information.

Argues that ontologies are a bad ideal for organizing the world online. Points out that library classification systems are designed to optimize space on the shelves, not to describe the essences of identities. Also, that library classification systems are fundamentally about organizing books, not about organizing the enormity of human knowledge. The same flaws exists in a hierarchical file system. That it is designed with the assumption that a thing can only be in one place at one time -- it makes some attempt to have the organizional structure of ideas match the physical world, where in fact a pointer, or an idea, or a metaphorical path can be in countless places at the same time, and can have many equally important and useful relationships which describe it.

That ontologies are useful where there are expert users, clear categories and a limited domain. But, much less useful for non-expert users or large domains, and fuzzy categories. Links are the universal pointers on the web, and the addition of tags is simple, and provides a much more useful finding system than an ontology. With a system like delicious, you get to know who's doing the tagging, not just what the tags are, so you get to limit searches by people and time, limiting the size of your group [penntags tie-in].

This article examines the Neighborhood Transformation Initiative (NTI), Mayor John F. Street’s plan to revitalize Philadelphia’s distressed neighborhoods by issuing $295 million in bonds to finance the acquisition of property, the demolition of derelict buildings, and the assembling of large tracts of land for housing redevelopment. Despite its resemblance to the discredited urban renewal programs of the past, this plan offered real potential for reducing blight by leveraging substantial private investment at a time when public subsidies
for affordable housing and community development have been steadily diminishing.

However, NTI did not promote equitable development that might have fostered broader support for an inherently controversial plan. Moreover, Street’s initial leadership in proposing this bold initiative was followed by a reluctance to promote NTI aggressively after it was adopted in 2002. The  result was a watered-down effort that achieved some goals but has fallen short of what might have been accomplished.

My favorite article. I wish I could force you to read this article. please...

"And you would never ever get this organization of knowledge right. Its not a solvable problem. It cant be done. Theres not a right way of doing it because there’s no single way of organizing this stuff. Taxonomies are not reflections of nature, they’re tools. And tools depend on what you want to do. It depends on your context. So along comes tagging."

Paste a paragraph from an article, paper, etc into this search engine and get back a list of relevant or similar articles. On first inspection, it seems pretty fantastic as a search engine, but has very very limited results. Very very few sources.

The Learner's Library™ is a simple and intuitive search tool that locates relevant material from any text based content repository...our Virtual Research Assistant allows you to input whole articles, papers, notes or outlines (up to 10000 words at a time) and get back the materials you need for meaningful research....our custom publishing interface allows the easy creation of custom coursepacks and reading packs with but a few clicks.... our CiteRight® citation checking tool examines your written work and shows you what in your work needs a citation from material in the content repository.

Velikonja, Joseph.  "Italian Immigrants in the United States in the Mid-Sixties." International Migration Review: Vol. 1, No. 3, Special Issue: The Italian Experience in Emigration, p. 25-37.

This article by Dr. Joseph Velkonja discusses the history of Italian Immigration with a focus on the mid-sixties.  The article points out that the immigration and expansion of Italians in America increased exponentially due to the new Immigration act of the mid 1960s.  Prior to this, not many new immigrants were allowed into the country, which kept the amount of Italians in America at a small level.  Between the years of 1952 to 1965, the annual quota allowed for Italian Immigrants was 5,666, however these immigration laws were lifted, and an exponential increase of Italians entered the United States followed.

In addition to immigration, this article discusses Italian American’s expansion across the United States.  Much of the expansion was related to economic reasons.  Although many Italian Americans stayed on the eastern seaboard, others relocated to the Midwest and the West coast in cities such as Chicago, St. Louis and Los Angeles.  It is also shown that there was a greater number of second generation Italian Americans who expanded westward.

Much of these things directly relate to the plot of the movie.  The small number of Italians allowed into the country allowed for these citizens to create families and create a basis of power and influence on these Italian neighborhoods.  In addition, at the end of the movie, the Corleone family decides to move to Las Vegas due to the economic potential that the city and casinos possess.  Finally, Michael Corleone is second generation Italian American, thus this migration mimics the trend that this article’s statistics show.

The plot of the movie is a reflection of society during the post war era.  This correlation leads to a realistic plotline and helps one understand the overall state of society.

Smith Jr., Dwight C.  "Mafia:  The Prototypical Alien Conspiracy." Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science: Vol. 423, Crime and Justice in America: 1776-1976, p. 75-88.

 

    The article, “Mafia:  The Prototypical Alien Conspiracy,” written by Dwight C. Smith Jr. discusses the role that the “Mafia” has played in American society, and the ways in which America has tried to deal with this issue.  The term “Mafia” became popularized before the 19^th century, when people began to develop conspiracy theories against Sicilians.  Stemming from the Hennessey murder case in New Orleans, a stigma was developed against the Sicilian population of the town.  Although there was no real proof of mob ties, these Mafia rumors lived on which led to support and implementation of immigration laws. 
    During the post World War II era, the “Mafia” legend was revived.  Beginning with the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, rumors persisted about the Mafia and immigrants.  These rumors reached its pinnacle when the President’s Crime Commission agreed with the concept of a Mafia conspiracy.  Smith Jr. writes that the reason behind the creation of this “Mafia” myth is to explain the failure of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics to eliminate the existence of narcotics in America.  By using the “Mafia” as a scapegoat for their failures, the Bureau popularized this idea.  Whether or not it actually existed is debatable, but it led to changes in society.

    From the popularization of the “Mafia,” those in entertainment began to capitalize on it by selling it as a product to the public.  Mario Puzo wrote the book, The Godfather, which focused on the world that America was so worried about. 
    This article gives background into the reasoning behind the making of the movie, The Godfather, as well as providing explanation of the content of the movie.  The movie is a period film, set post World War II, which as the article has shown was the era in which the “Mafia” conspiracy was being revived.  In the movie, the reason that the five families began to fight was due to introduction of narcotics.  At this time, drugs were a big problem in America, thus showing parallels between the period of the movie and societal problems.  Also, Paramount capitalized on the publicity that the “Mafia” genre was receiving by producing Mario Puzo’s book.  This led to The Godfather becoming one of the most successful movies of all time.