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Your source for youth perspectives on the culture of technology, digital media, and the arts.

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Sunlight Journalism Through Code

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ProPublica is still the cool new kid in investigative journalism— less than five years in the game, and they’ve got the best toys, plenty of talent, and everyone wants to be their friend. And that doesn’t just apply to journalists. The investigative journalism outfit’s big data projects draw interest from programmers too. That’s why the Engineering and Computer Science departments at UC Berkeley asked Jeff Larson from ProPublica’s News Applications team, to talk about the new ways that coding is helping tell stories.

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(Photo Credit: Burns!)

Who Backs the Backers On Kickstarter?

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When it comes to raising money for the arts, Kickstarter has become the place to go. Since it launched in 2009, the crowd-funding site has successfully delivered over $400 million to creative projects, including three films currently up for Oscars. But for all of Kickstarter’s success, funding creative work is still risky business. A study out of Wharton counts 3.5% of funded projects drop the ball. Small, but significant enough to raise the question: what happens to that money?

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Photo Credit: Shira Golding/FlickrCC

Why Buy When You Can Swap?

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As a college student, I love this whole phenomenon of the “sharing economy.” That’s the term economists use to define a community of people who freely share and swap resources, often managed online through websites or forums. Turns out, actually paying for stuff, or just throwing it out, is so 2011–if you can share it instead.

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Young People Put A Human Face On Data

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Big data. Everyone has a slightly different definition of this new buzzword.

Rick Smolan, former photographer for National Geographic and TIME Magazine and the author of The Human Face of Big Data, defined the term for us like this:

“When you take several different sources for information and you overlap them and you look for patterns in the data… It’s a little bit like watching the planet develop a nervous system. …All of us walking around with our smartphones, we’ve become human sensors. So we’re all feeding data back into this growing mass of databases, and the ability to collect data, process it, visualize it and react to it in real time is something the human race has never had before.”

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Gamers Welcome ‘Halo 4’

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Thousands of Americans lined up last night, not to vote, but to buy one of the most anticipated new video games of the year. Halo 4 is the latest installment of the popular franchise for the Microsoft XBox 360. Some gamers refer to Halo as their Star Wars.

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