(more NetExplo liveblogging from Paris)

Epistemic gaming is the emerging field of games for assessment. It's an evolution from the immensely profitable field of psychometric testing, where Myers Briggs and StrengthsFinder tests promise to help us identify our individual personality traits and intelligence styles to create better harmony and results in the workplace (for a healthy per-employee fee).

NetExplo luareate ConnectCubed is a meritocratic game-based approach to job recruiting. Founder Michael Tanenbaum found himself excluded from the banking recruiting process, which made him wonder how many other qualified employees were being missed. At its most basic layer, ConnectCubed is a platform of games to help job candidates identify the best fit.

(Liveblog post from #netexplo)

In the introduction, it's mentioned that AllAfrica is hosting the anniversary of USA4Africa We Are the World, and will promote crowdsourced versions of the song (parody away).

Amadou Mahtar (@amahtarba) of AllAfrica and African Media Initiative speaks on the use of the Internet and technology in Africa as levers for democracy and economic and social change. Technology is pointless, Amadou says, unless it improves human life, particularly in the context of the African continent.

Amadou provides a disclaimer that his talk today is more of a religion than a science. It comes from his personal belief in greater connectivity to provide greater economic and human development.

I'm at NetExplo at UNESCO in Paris today. They're presenting awards to the year's most innovative technologies today and tomorrow (including our project, LazyTruth). I'll liveblog as long as wifi and battery (personal and laptop) allow!

Nanshu Lu, Assistant Professor at the University of Texas Austin, won Grand Prix for epidermal electronics, or bio-integrated peel-on electronic devices. The technology works within the metaphor of a temporary tattoo. Nanshu specializes in the material science involved (which, one can imagine, is considerable). She's worked with a team led by Professor John Rogers, a pioneer in the space.

The field of bio-integrated electronics allows new interfaces to measure human bio feedback data, like body temperature, activity, stress.

Nanshu says the team's research is motivated in large part by the imagination of science fiction writers, and specifically threatens to bring us T-2000 from Terminator.

liveblog of an MIT Facebook recruiting event by Matt Stempeck, Rodrigo Davies, and Chris Peterson (slide doctored by mstem)

We've had all of our data on Facebook for years. And advertisers have used Facebook’s self-service ad-buying platform, similar to Graph Search, to segment and target ads at us for years. But now, the rollout of Graph Search allows every Facebook user to sort their friends, friends of friends, and public profiles in great detail and by detailed refinements. You can see some fun and some creepy examples at the Actual Facebook Graph Searches Tumblr.

Exising critiques of Graph Search and its privacy implications:

(blogged by @mstem and @natematias)

Today at the Media Lab, Baratunde Thurston is taking a moment out of Vacation Mode to have a conversation with the Media Lab community. How can we describe Baratunde? His personal website labels him a "politically-active, technology-loving comedian from the future." He was director of digital at The Onion until 2012. His most recent book is How to be Black (2012). He has also started a new company, Cultivated Wit.

Liveblog of Ethan Zuckerman's Future of News keynote, composed with Nathan Matias. Errors are likely ours.

The usual conversation about innovation in journalism held by people who work in journalism assumes that there’s one main problem in the space: if we could just work out the revenue issue, we’d be fine forever. But it's also not the case that cross-subsidies from lighter matter will help us support the journalism we need for people to be effective civic actors.

What if we've got the problem wrong? Sometimes the stuff we think we're good at--producing high quality journalism that helps people figure out what they might do in society--turns out to be stuff we're not nearly as good at as we thought. This may well be one of the core problems of journalism.

Ethan offers two fairly easy arguments, and a fairly difficult one:

1) journalism matters (goes mostly unchallenged in this room)

2) civics is changing (particularly for younger people and for people who identify with the internet as their native medium)

3) journalism needs to change

MoveOn.org is already one of the more transparent, membership-driven political organizations this world has seen. Their local councils and rolling membership surveys drive the hive's priorities. This week, Justin Ruben announced that they were going one leap further, and "turning over the keys of our technological toolset to our more than 7 million members, asking them to step up and lead their own campaigns, and putting them squarely in the MoveOn driver's seat."

This is big. Here's why:

What happens when a tech-minded entrepreneur is unexpectedly chosen to lead a big city government bureaucracy? Gabe Klein was an unconventional pick to head the District of Columbia's Department of Transportation when he was hired back in 2008, by then-mayor Adrian Fenty. He'd been a Zipcar executive. He helped found a local boutique food-truck company. He grew up in a Virginia ashram called Yogaville. But he had never worked in government. Over the next 23 months Klein implemented a program of transformative innovation, rapidly rolling out bike-sharing, new bike lanes, streetcar plans and next-generation parking infrastructure. Now Klein is a year-and-a-half into his second unexpected job in government, as the head of Chicago's Department of Transportation under Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

Aaron Naparstek rolls the pre-talk film on urban cycling.

The campaign post-mortems are pouring in, unveiling the computer magic behind the Obama campaign. We should probably be thankful that the conversation has evolved from 2004-2008's obsession with social media into a newfound lay interest in data aggregation and empirically valid testing. I'm learning a lot reading these articles.

Written by @mstem & @natematias with help from our peers. See also Ethan Zuckerman's take on the event.