July 2014

Beneath its slick interface and crystal clear GPS-enabled vision of the world, Google Maps roils with local rivalries, score-settling, and deception. Maps are dotted with thousands of spam business listings for nonexistent locksmiths and plumbers. Legitimate businesses sometimes see their listings hijacked by competitors or cloned into a duplicate with a different phone number or website.

In January, someone bulk-modified the Google Maps presence of thousands of hotels around the country, changing the website URLs to a commercial third-party booking site (which siphons off the commissions).

Small businesses are the usual targets. Attacks happen because Google Maps is, at its heart, a massive crowdsourcing project, a shared conception of the world that skilled practitioners can bend and reshape in small ways using tools like Google’s Mapmaker or Google Places for Business.

Total enrollment in the nation’s journalism schools has dropped, research by a team at the University of Georgia shows, triggering a variety of responses from the schools and raising questions about the future of journalism education.

At the prestigious Missouri School of Journalism, enrollment fell 9 percent over a recent two-year period, then rebounded after the university moved aggressively to boost financial aid to attract more incoming students into all majors.

Enrollment declines have been steeper at other schools -- falling 33 percent over five years at Columbia College Chicago, for example, and 20 percent over five years at Indiana University-Bloomington, according to data collected by the Georgia team. At Indiana, the journalism program is merging this summer with related fields in the arts and sciences college.

Collectively, enrollments in journalism and communication schools nationwide recently fell two years in a row for the first time in two decades, according to an annual study conducted by the University of Georgia’s James M. Cox Jr. Center for International Mass Communication Training and Research. The nationwide decline covered the years starting in fall 2011 and fall 2012, and came at a time of growth for universities overall.

[Commentary] One surprise from the widespread use of information technology has been the enormous value created out of just data. Information about what individuals do has created corporations worth billions of dollars.

While storage of vast amounts of data has led to hugely valuable benefits from analysis and correlation, it also has led to a significant erosion, if not almost complete destruction, of any meaningful concept of privacy.

Barring some civilization-threatening disaster, the next 25 years of cyberspace will see a growing gush of data, an increasingly rapid spreading of interconnected devices into every aspect of our lives, in our cars, throughout our homes, and indeed, into our bodies. If, however, the use of robotics and the deterioration of the environment develop as now expected, there could be an increase in societal dislocations and discontent from unemployment and climate-related disasters. That very discontent would increase the desire of government security entities to want more data for more control.

Privacy advocacy groups will probably be overwhelmed by corporate interests, the security industrial complex, and by a public that perceives benefits from the, frequently free, data-yielding devices and applications.

Privacy may then be a commodity that only the wealthy can acquire, but only briefly and in special sanctuaries while taking expensive off-the-grid vacations in locations without surveillance cameras or the tracking devices we call mobile phones.

[Clarke is chairman and chief executive of Good Harbor Security Risk Management, a provider of cybersecurity services and former White House adviser for the past three presidents on matters including cybersecurity and counterterrorism]

[Commentary] In the good old days, the secretary did all the hard work and the boss did two things: dictating and editing. But email has made secretaries of us all; we spend up to 38% of our day managing email. The future email systems will have integrated artificial intelligence that will know you as well as the secretary of 1978 once did, and you will be able to dictate to it.

It will automatically sort your inbox, file and archive, prioritize, and even come up with reasonable responses, which you simply review, edit and send.

[Ayyadurai, faculty lecturer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology]