Today, we met with Dr. Mark Hansen, a professor at Colombia Journalism School and learned about how he modern journalism is beginning to use more and more data science and statistics as well as some of the many things that Dr. Hansen and his students have done. One of their coolest projects (in my opinion) is Sneakercon. Sneakercon is about things called “Sneaker nets” in Venezuela. Because the government monitors the internet, people can’t really browse the web freely. So they have a really cool workaround – Sneakernets. People would set up different mesh nets, give out thumb drives disconnected from the network, and even use Raspberry Pis (small computer boards, similar to Arduinos) as bridging devices to access the internet unrestricted. What Dr. Hansen and his students did was organize Sneakercon, a conference to teach more people about sneakernets and other types of offline/independent internet connections.
