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A Mathematical Theory of Communication

"A Mathematical Theory of Communication" is an article by mathematician Claude Shannon published in Bell System Technical Journal in 1948. It was renamed The Mathematical Theory of Communication in the 1949 book of the same name, a small but significant title change after realizing the generality of this work. It has tens of thousands of citations, being one of the most influential and cited scientific papers of all time, as it gave rise to the field of information theory, with Scientific American referring to the paper as the "Magna Carta of the Information Age", while the electrical engineer Robert G. Gallager called the paper a "blueprint for the digital era". Historian James Gleick rated the paper as the most important development of 1948, placing the transistor second in the same time period, with Gleick emphasizing that the paper by Shannon was "even more profound and more fundamental" than the transistor.

Mozilla Tech Speakers: A pilot for technical evangelism

The six-week pilot version of the Mozilla Tech Speakers program wrapped up at the end of May. We learned a lot, made new friends on several continents, and collected valuable ...

Sharing Notes about Collective Intelligence — Pop Junctions

Last week, my travels took me to San Antonio where I delivered one of the keynote addresses at the Educause Learning Initiative conference -- a gathering focused on the application of technology for learning at the college and university level. My presentation, "What Wikipedia Can Teach Us Ab

Decision to join W social network - a Freedom of Information request to Communication

https://bsky.app/profile/vonderleyen.ec.europa.eu/post/3moiosz24yk2j I wish to obtain any document that explains this decision, such as internal communication explaining the advantages of W, or contact with communications advisors who recommended this action. Yours faithfully, Alexander Fanta Follow the Money Rue Auguste Orts 2 1000 Bruxelles

Operation Voder: AT&T, Bell Labs, and the Labor of Techno-Utopia at the 1939 New York World’s Fair

This article explores the labor demands of the Voder, the electrical speech synthesis machine developed by Bell Labs for AT&T’s 1939 New York World’s Fair exhibit. The article situates the Voder within the historical context of the fair, with the United States emerging from the Great Depression and political tensions escalating across the globe. By examining the decision to incorporate the machine’s young female operators into the exhibit, the article argues that AT&T executives used Voder operators to normalize a new vision of technological utopia that relied heavily and conspicuously on the infrastructural labor of women. Moreover, the article highlights the previously unacknowledged engineering contributions of Voder operators in the years before the fair, writing women into the origin story of a machine that laid critical groundwork for speech recognition and voice encryption technology.

mai ishikawa sutton

My work lies at the intersection of technology and the solidarity economy. I’m passionate about strengthening the digital commons, in which people control and steward communication technologies as collective goods.

Starting from scale in the design of the AT Protocol - Paul's Leaflets

Bluesky was founded in 2022 to produce a protocol which Twitter could adopt. The product goals changed, but the requirements didn't.

My fireside chat about agentic engineering at the Pragmatic Summit

I was a speaker last month at the Pragmatic Summit in San Francisco, where I participated in a fireside chat session about Agentic Engineering hosted by Eric Lui from Statsig. …

First post: A history of online public messaging

From BBS to Facebook, here’s how messaging platforms have changed over the years.

On open-science research labs on discord, and getting more people.

Note that the audio doesn't follow the post verbatim;it's still essentially the same content though. (audio version below) …

The Conversation Canada (@ca.theconversation.com)

Written by academic experts, edited by journalists, backed by evidence ✉️ Newsletter: http://bit.ly/2W8X3Ev 🎧 Podcast: http://bit.ly/39v1EE0 ➕ Donate: http://bit.ly/3GV1uam

Wiki Radio 📻

The thrilling sound of random Wikimedia