Here’s a better explanation from the monarchy’s website:

Although The Queen was born on 21 April, it has long been the tradition to celebrate the Sovereign’s birthday publicly on a day in the summer, when good weather is more likely.  Trooping the Colour is carried out by fully trained and operational troops from the Household Division (Foot Guards and Household Cavalry) on Horse Guards Parade in Whitehall, watched by members of the Royal Family, invited guests and members of the public.

This military ceremony dates back to the early eighteenth century or earlier, when the colours (flags) of the battalion were carried (or ‘trooped’) down the ranks so that they could be seen and recognised by the soldiers.  Since 1748, this parade has also marked the Sovereign’s official birthday. From the reign of Edward VII onwards, the Sovereign has taken the salute in person at Trooping the Colour.

During the ceremony, The Queen is greeted by a Royal salute and carries out an inspection of the troops.  After the massed bands have performed a musical ‘troop’, the escorted Regimental Colour is carried down the ranks.

The Foot Guards and the Household Cavalry then march past Her Majesty, and The King’s Troop, Royal Horse Artillery, rank past.  The Queen rides in a carriage back to Buckingham Palace at the head of her Guards, before taking the salute at the Palace from a dais. The troops then return to barracks.  Her Majesty then joins other members of the Royal Family on the palace balcony for a fly-past by the Royal Air Force.  The Queen has attended Trooping the Colour every year of her reign, except in 1955 when a national rail strike cancelled the event.

As usual, I took some pictures (full album with video here).  You can also watch the BBC’s full broadcast (in the UK) or see highlights.

Facebook and Google and Yahoo and Microsoft can have the best encryption and security protocols in the world, but that doesn’t mean anything if your password is “shinyobjects321″.  It may be easy for you to remember, but it’s also easy to guess.  And, chances are, you use it for every account you have.  Sound familiar?

So, please, do these three simple things and feel much safer about the security of your accounts.

Enable Facebook’s Security Features

Facebook has gone ahead and made this one real easy.  Your password could even be sub-par and you still have a great way of securing your account.

Step One. Visit your Facebook Account Settings page.

Step Two. Under “Account Security” enable all of those nifty check boxes (except the 3rd, unless you want to).

The first box forces Facebook to encrypt all data it transmits from your computer over the Internet.  You’ll notice your URL switch to “https://” and nice friendly notification from your browser that you’re surfing securely.  How nice.  This is key if you’re accessing Facebook in a public area, like a coffee shop.  It’s amazing how easy it is to ‘sniff packets’ on a public network. That’s for another post.

The second and third notify you by email and phone, respectively, when you (or someone) log into your account from a new device.  When you log in from a library computer, for example, you enter your password and then name the computer you’re on.  That way, even if someone knows your password, Facebook will notify you when the account logs in.  You can revoke access from devices at any time.

The final one is the best, but possibly the least convenient. When you log into your account from a friend’s computer, or any other device that hasn’t been previously authorized, you will receive a text message with a short code in it that must be entered before accessing the site.  If you always have your phone, this is easy.  If you never have you phone, don’t check it.  If you’re missing or have lost your phone, you’ll need to log in to a previously authorized computer and change your number or disable the feature.

Step Three. Check your list of authorized applications. It’s not a bad idea to clear out the ones you don’t remember or don’t care about.  Keep a handle on what and who has access to your Facebook details and account.

The point of this is to protect your bad password from wreaking havoc on your privacy.  However, if you do not enable the “two-step verification” by checking the fourth box, someone can still access your account if they know your password – you’ll just find out about it.

Wasn’t that easy?  Well, it gets a bit more complicated from here.

Enable Google’s Two-Step Verification

Google was the first major email provider and online service to provide simple two-step verification to all its customers.  The first step if your password, same as always. The second step is a 6-digit code generated by a piece of software on your phone, called Google Authenticator.

If you’ve ever worked as a government employee or in a company that has little key fob security tokens, this is no different.  Instead of an annoying keychain, it’s app for your iPhone, Blackberry or Android.  You can also have the token texted to you, or Google will call and read it to you.

Step One. Visit your Google Account settings page.  Click “Enable Two-Step Verification” and set up the account with your phone number.  Download the necessary application to your phone, and you’re all set.  Take note of the set of tokens Google has generated in the event you lose your phone.  Place them in a password-protected cloud storage system…or, a desk drawer.

Step Two. This is the part that can be a little annoying at first, but once it’s set up you’ll be fine.  Each application that accesses your Google account must have a new password.  Google has made managing these passwords very easy.  If you use an email client, access your email from your phone, gchat from a chat client, etc, you must create special passwords for each application.  It will take you ten minutes, but is well worth the effort.

Step Three. When accessing Google from a new device, you’ll be asked to enter that security token from your phone.  If you’ve lost your phone, Google provided you a set of tokens that you should have kept handy.  Where are they?  Or, just access your account from a previously authorized device.

If you stop and think for a moment about the information available from your Google account, this security feature doesn’t seem as inconvenient.  We routinely receive emails from banks, family, business and others that contain information that could easily be used to piece together a very comprehensive picture of our lives.  Feigning ignorance is no longer an option.

Start Using Password Management Software

There are some wonderful browser plugins and software packages that will take care of remembering your passwords for you.  I use 1Password, for example.  LastPass is also very popular.  Password management software allows you to use long, random digit passwords for your websites without the hassle of remembering them.  The password files themselves are encrypted and locked behind a master password.  Of course, that one password had better be good and I hope you change it every once in a while.

Aside from remembering your passwords, 1Password will remember your personal and bank information for easy completion on web forms.  When it’s type to create a password, it will auto-suggest one that is very strong, then save it for later use.  There are plugins for all major web browsers, and a standalone software package to manage everything easily.  With an application for your phone, you have access to it even when you’re on a friend’s computer.

I think I sound a little paranoid. Perhaps that’s a fair point.  In reality, I think it’s just about using common sense.  You don’t need a 28-character password for every little site you sign on to.  A password generator will happily suggest a pronounceable, 8-letter password that is just as good for that antiques forum you like.

However, in a day when more of our information is moving to the cloud and our lives’ small details are available with a few clicks, little emphasis has been put on the one thing locking most of it away – your password.  Don’t be caught off-guard with a dinky childhood pet’s name and yell at the Internet for being unsafe.  Yell at yourself for having a terrible password.

Dave and I were terribly unsuccessful in our attempts to eliminate communications devices from our lives every Sunday, lasting only a month before just giving up.  Oddly, it wasn’t because we needed to reach out to others, it was because we felt the pressure to be plugged in was simply too great.  We were missing out on something, we were sure of it.  What if friends wanted to go out?  What if there was a breaking news story that we weren’t even remotely involved in but obviously HAD to know about?  Were we letting friends down by not being available all the time?  I think we were pretty surprised at the feelings raised by this challenge.

I’ve always been an advocate of technology as a means to connect people through communication.  Whether it’s breaking down social, geographic or economic barriers, information communications technologies (ICTs) have provided enormous benefits to society.  But, what I came to LSE to study is how these technologies have changed the way we converse with one another, not just the media we use to do it.

Sherry Turkle, Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, spoke at LSE this week on the topic and it prompted me to write a little more about it.  I read her book, Alone Together, this spring and enjoyed her qualitative research through interviews and analysis of personal communications in the United States.  She was once noted as an evangelist of the positive power of ICTs in society, but today says something is “amiss” and we would be wise to take a closer look at how shifts in conversation are affecting society as a whole.  It is a collection of corrections to the “heroic narratives” of the Internet – “the effusions of digital evangelists who confuse technological advance with human progress.”

We insist that our world is increasingly complex, yet we have created a communications culture that has decreased the time available for us to sit and think uninterrupted.  As we communicate in ways that ask for almost instantaneous responses, we don’t allow sufficient space to consider complicated problems. (176)

Avoidance of the telephone because it’s “too intimate”, demands to answer complex questions via email with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’, punting of sensitive discussion in favour of passive action on social networks and texting – all of these trends are thoroughly discussed by Turkle and given appropriate substantiation from interviews with teens and businessmen and parents alike.

At times, I’ve read aloud paragraphs to friends sitting nearby and each has related their own stories of frustration and remorse at how they used to, or would like to, communicate.  It’s as if we’ve placed this collective pressure on each other to communicate as a means of satisfaction instead of proper discourse; confusing frequency and rapidity for progress and quality of discussion.

Turkle interviewed a high school student in New Jersey (emphasis my own):

“If I’m upset, right as I feel upset, I text a couple of my friends … just because I know that they’ll be there and they can comfort me. If something exciting happens, I know that they’ll be there to be excited with me, and stuff like that. So I definitely feel emotions when I’m texting, as I’m texting…. Even before I get upset and I know that I have that feeling that I’m gonna start crying, yeah, I’ll pull up my friend … uh, my phone … and say like … I’ll tell them what I’m feeling, and, like, I need to talk to them, or see them.”

After Julia sends out a text, she is uncomfortable until she gets one back: “I am always looking for a text that says, ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ or ‘Oh, that’s great.’” Without this feedback, she says, “It’s hard to calm down.” Julia describes how painful it is to text about “feelings” and get no response: “I get mad. Even if I e-mail someone, I want the response, like, right away.  I want them to be, like, right there answering me. And sometimes I’m like, ‘Uh! Why can’t you just answer me?’ . . . I wait, like, depending on what it is, I wait like an hour if they don’t answer me, and I’ll text them again. ‘Are you mad? Are you there? Is everything okay?’” Her anxiety is palpable. (184)

What is this altered discourse doing to our ability to relate to one another and form relationships based on intimate conversation and trust – especially in a world in which our conversations and sharing are mediated on a platform whose creator believes that privacy is a discourse of the past?  This desire to alleviate pain and fear with reciprocated concern from friends is obviously not new, but if the first reaction in times of difficulty is to reach to others for superficial expressions of concern instead of coping internally and finding the strength within, what is that doing to our sense of self?

I, like Turkle, am not a technological determinist and do not believe that technology is forcing us to change the way we communicate – it’s simply enabling us to give in to our basic human impulses without regard for the larger picture.  We sacrifice internal deliberation and self-awareness for the immediate satisfaction provided by constant communication with others.  Examples are everywhere, from business to friends to relationships.

While the social pressures of giving up these devices and networks is not realistic for many of us, we can change the way we communicate and do what we can to engage others in less fragmented forms of discussion in favour of more meaningful expressions of friendship and connectedness.

Perhaps that should be the challenge after all – don’t give it up, just change the way you use it.

Updated: The podcast of her lecture is now available.

More from Professor Turkle:
TEDx Talk at UIUC – A very brief version of the talk she gave at LSE
Andrew Keen interviews Turkle – Well-known cyber-skeptic Andrew Keen questions Turkle on privacy
Who Am We? – Wired magazine article on faceted identities from 1996

Photo: Jean-Baptiste Labrune (on Flickr!)

I suppose I’m a bit used to this, though.  Google Latitude, an app in my browser and iPhone, has been tracking my location since it was released.  I’ve enabled it and disabled periodically, but it has a rather detailed history of my precise movements since June 2010 (yet another reason I use two-step verification on my Google account).  It’s not public, and I don’t broadcast it.  My immediate family uses it and that’s it – my Mom calls it her Weasley Clock, after the magical device from the Harry Potter series.

It’s the personal uses for data like this that interest me.  I’m the guy that imports his Foursquare check-ins into his Google Calendar (and I’m not alone), geotags his photographs and keeps a detailed calendar that covers over a decade of events.  Aren’t we all moving toward behavior like this?  Our thoughts are increasingly on public display, our Facebook conversations with friends recorded for eternity (it seems) and our seemingly innocuous tweets will be studied by researchers far in the future.  Every time we check-in, comment, update or broadcast, the location of our devices is recorded and sometimes broadcast along with it.  It wouldn’t be hard to take an active social media user’s profiles and pin their locations to a map.

I’m not defending Apple’s collection of this information, though.  And, if it comes out that they were collecting it or transmitting it, they’ll have a rather large problem.  But, for the moment, it’s an interesting look into the data collected by our devices and the trust we place in their makers.  It appears as though the data isn’t even all that precise, having been pulled from cell tower triangulation instead of GPS.  What’s more, it’s a good example of how programmers and geeks are ferreting out the little programming nuances that the rest of us are unable to find ourselves.  It’s like a crowd sourced system of checks and balances!

Here’s a snapshot of the data collected by my iPhone since July 2010, when I installed iOS 4 and, unknowingly, this little iPhone tracker.

Click on an image below to view a sampling of the photos.  View the full album here.

The campaign is only one week with enormous limits on funding.  This was the first year that websites were allowed, and I think I spent more time fielding questions about the site than actually building it.  We had fun, and I was happy to help out a good friend that will surely go on to big things.

Here are some examples of the photography I used and some snaps from the site itself.  It was hosted at danielkroop.com

I asked Mr. Ross about the State Department’s funding of internet censor busting technologies given the secretary’s speech in February and the recent (rather idle) threat from some members of Congress to take it away.

In her first major speech on the subject last January, Secretary Clinton warned, “nations that censor the internet should understand that our government is committed to helping promote internet freedom” and subsequently backed that up with $30 million in grant funding provided by Congress.  The available grants, ranging from $500,000 to $8 million, have been slowly awarded to projects that enable activists and citizens around the world to circumvent censorship technologies like the Tor Project.  Training and education programs are also funded.

This week, it appeared that both parties in the US Senate proposed to remove that money from the State Department and transfer it to the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the independent agency responsible for  Radio Free Europe – Radio Liberty, Voice of America and others.  Mr. Ross responded by suggesting that a faction of Republicans was upset the money hadn’t been spent quickly enough and were primarily interested in busting through China’s censors.  The State Department, he continued, is taking its time to fund the right projects and is mindful of censorship around the world while ensuring that education and training is a large part of the effort.

I don’t know enough of the politics on Capitol Hill today to know whether it is a Republican-led effort, but I do know that the Republican proposal, placed in their version of the continuing resolution, transfers $5 million less than the Democrat’s proposal.  Either way, I’ll side with the State Department on this one as Mr. Ross and his team are a competent group of progressive thinkers that actually understand how the internet works and what is needed to enable citizens around the world to use the power of the internet to advance their freedoms.

Secretary Clinton spoke about the importance of these grants in her second major speech on internet freedom:

In the last three years, we have awarded more than $20 million in competitive grants through an open process, including interagency evaluation by technical and policy experts to support a burgeoning group of technologists and activists working at the cutting edge of the fight against internet repression. This year, we will award more than $25 million in additional funding. We are taking a venture capital-style approach, supporting a portfolio of technologies, tools, and training, and adapting as more users shift to mobile devices.

We have our ear to the ground, talking to digital activists about where they need help, and our diversified approach means we’re able to adapt the range of threats that they face. We support multiple tools, so if repressive governments figure out how to target one, others are available. And we invest in the cutting edge because we know that repressive governments are constantly innovating their methods of oppression and we intend to stay ahead of them.

Photo: London School of Economics (via @lsepublicevents)

I subscribe to The Times, the daily London newspaper published since 1785.  It has been owned by News Corporation since 1981 and has operated online behind a paywall since July 2010.  The move, echoed by many of News Corp’s publications, was controversial and is analyzed frequently by media scholars.  My issue is personal.

This morning, I read an article about the LSE and its current imbroglio concerning a PhD granted to Saif Gaddafi, son of the falling dictator in Libya.  I went to share it on Facebook to show friends back home how ‘proud’ I am.  This is what I encountered.

If you’ve shared a link before, you know that it pulls the article title and usually the first paragraph so that your friends understand what you’re sharing. Since The Times is behind a paywall that stops even Facebook’s robots, we get nothing of use.  Click on the link, and you get an invitation to subscribe instead of the article.  Useless.  I guarantee you I won’t share it and my friends won’t see it.  I’ll go to The Guardian, thanks.

What’s interesting, is that The Times actually encourages readers to share links. In each article is a Facebook Share button.  Ok, so maybe I’ll take their preferred route and share the way they want me to share.  What happens?

Rubbish!  How is this in any way social?  No one will click on that link.  It tells us nothing about the article and is certainly not helping drive traffic to their website.  What is the point of this wall in front of social media?

Shortly after the paywall went up, rival The Guardian printed a story claiming The Times saw a 90% decrease in online readership.  Statistics have been provided by the paper itself, although not in robust form, disallowing any sort of deep analysis of the drop.  Clay Shirky looked at the drop in readership, estimated to be in the low tends of thousands, and concluded the Times must not be worried:

One way to think of this transition is that online, the Times has stopped being a newspaper, in the sense of a generally available and omnibus account of the news of the day, broadly read in the community. Instead, it is becoming a newsletter, an outlet supported by, and speaking to, a specific and relatively coherent and compact audience.

But why not allow people to share articles online?  Surely, there must be a way to allow subscribers to share one article with a friend without bugging them to pony up a pound. Allow them to read the article, and begin the pay wall at any click beyond it.  Even award points to subscribers that convert their friends to subscribers.  It’s a model that embraces the shareable nature of news, instead of penalizing the limited audience of subscribers from engaging their friends and colleagues.  This used to be possible, but they’ve since stopped the practice, leaving many people scratching their heads.  Roy Greenslade notes the obvious, immediate impact – “What we can be sure about is the way in which The Times has dropped out of the national and international conversation on the web.”

LSE’s Charlie Beckett highlights the importance of creating such a community to justify the existence of a paywall, concluding that The Times does not achieve it.  Shirky continues:

If you are going to produce news that can’t be shared outside a particular community, you will want to recruit and retain a community that doesn’t care whether any given piece of news spreads, which means tightly interconnected readerships become the ideal ones. However, tight interconnectedness correlates inversely with audience size, making for a stark choice, rather than offering a way of preserving the status quo.

The Times doesn’t seem to mind that its audience has become a small conservative faux-community of active readers that don’t care about sharing articles with friends.  It’s unclear yet whether the numbers justify the business model.  I know it doesn’t work for me.  If I can’t share my articles, I won’t share my pounds.  Good bye, Times.

That consultant would have been full of it, obviously.  He would have been equally ridiculed in the 2004 presidential election, but what about 2008 or 2012?  Social media today presents the possibility of aggregating these broadcasts and creating some sort of prediction.  But is it credible?

The uprisings in the Arab world have caused the latest buzz around social media and the power of analyzing its aggregate.  Of course, most attention is paid to the use of social media to organize and communicate quickly and many are still asking the useless question of “does it matter”.  Internet pessimists, or social media pessimists, should be sitting in dark corners cursing Malcolm Gladwell for making such discussion popular.

Stop asking whether it has an impact.  Ask where it’s going to have an impact next.  Even if it’s not being used to start a revolution, it represents the opinions and thoughts of millions of the world’s citizens.  That’s something worth looking at.

I’m getting to the point of my studies at LSE where I need to write a dissertation.  I’ve got pages (in Evernote, of course) filled of notes and ideas on what could possibly be entertaining enough to spend about 5 months obsessing over.  Well, this is it.

I used social media analytics in my last job to help clients begin to understand public sentiment about their brand or stance on legislation.  We monitored trends over time, sentiment, frequency of discussion, demographics and targeted key-influencers.  It’s all rather standard, but surprisingly foreign to the DC crowd.

These tools were useful, but they only told a fraction of the story.  After all, “sentiment” was decided by a computer program, not a human, and it only felt confident to code it about 14% of the time. Does this sample provide an accurate subset of sentiment for the remaining, un-tagged data?  It’s not clear.  Does the sentiment applied to conversations actually reflect the nuances of the author’s intent?  Again, unclear.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is improving rapidly, just see IBM’s Watson on Jeopardy.  But, this computing power isn’t widely available yet.  Software-based social media analysis is a booming business with dozens of reputable companies making huge profits.  Firms specializing in more traditional research methodologies using the same data are a bit less common, but still in demand, and far more expensive.

I hope to ask whether social media analysis can predict the outcome of political elections, or at least get a good idea of when it’s wrong.  I’ll take some time over the coming months to write about what I’m finding.  I don’t reach a very large audience here, but I’d welcome feedback from whomever might visit.  It should be a fun process, answering this question.  I’m excited to get moving.

Photo: Neoformix (rather standard graph of Twitter mentions of Toyota brand over time with popular keywords called out)