Social media network TikTok is testing an advertising platform that will let advertisers target users across third-party apps, as well as within TikTok.
As of 2018-08, TikTok has 500M users worldwide. 2/3 are under 30. In the US, more than half are 16-24.
"primer for developing and improving technological methods to help promote trust and accuracy, especially on the web and involving news reporting." W3C Credible Web Community Group
In January 2019, most works published in 1923 entered the public domain. If Congress does not interfere by creating new copyright extensions, this will occur every year with works from successive years.
In 2024, the first Mickey Mouse cartoon is scheduled to enter the public domain. Theoretically, anyone will be able to publish new stories using that particular image of Mickey Mouse. But later designs and characters will still be under copyright. And the publisher will have to make sure that they cannot easily be mistaken for an official Disney product, because trademark rights never expire.
Expert Summaries of the Mueller Report
Sarah Kendzior likens Trump to dictators in former Soviet republics of Central Asia. This was published in March, 2016, before Trump had won the Republican primaries.
A Brief History of Reading Instruction. Includes references to studies that support phonics as the best method for teaching reading and writing. Free textbook for phonics instruction: https://elink.io/p/free-phonics-books-98c2d4e
Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences should not be conflated with the idea of "learning styles". Most people benefit from multiple modes of learning.
"Google Maps ... is overrun with millions of false business addresses and fake names" "Online advertising specialists ... estimated that Google Maps carries roughly 11 million falsely listed businesses on any given day ... They say a majority of the listings for contractors, electricians, towing and car repair services, movers and lawyers, among other business categories, aren't located at their pushpins on Google Maps."
Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have all struck lucrative arrangements—collectively worth billions of dollars—to provide automation, cloud, and AI services to some of the world’s biggest oil companies, and they are actively pursuing more.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/silicon-valley-courts-a-wary-oil-patch-1532424600
The Chaos, Gerard Nolst Trenité (1922) - a poem that highlights about 800 irregularities in English spelling and pronunciation.
principle of least knowledge - Systems should be designed to limit the operator's access to user data.
We need laws against unethical business practices. Ethics education alone won't prevent them from happening.
Peter Jukes on problems with BBC news.
The BBC has a duty to 'inform' but absolutely no obligation to reflect widespread but evidence-free opinions about MMR vaccines, global warming, fake moon landings, 911 inside jobs, or Obama's birth certificate. The natural and logical corollary to this duty to inform is an obligation to fight misinformation.
And what bigger story could there be this year - where is the duty to inform is most pressing - than the subversion of democracy by overspending, illegal coordination and potential foreign funding of the most important constitutional vote in our lifetimes?
. . .
This constant political pressure makes the corporation risk-averse, and probably even more so with a subject like Brexit which begs big questions about the future of the country and its national security. Because of its hierarchical structure and special funding, there is a constant danger that senior BBC execs see their political masters as their most important customers rather than the license-fee paying public.
A detailed report on Russia's disinformation campaign based on the data released by Facebook, Twitter, and Google.
The list of indictments from the Mueller investigation, as of 7 Dec 2018.
Cynicism is a bigger problem than gullibility. Too many people doubt everything in the news, regardless of the source.
https://er.educause.edu/blogs/2018/11/the-values-of-open-pedagogy (Values and habits of open pedagogy.)
Mike Caulfield notes some of the tensions among these values.
Ryan Boyd reviews John Warner's Why They Can't Write, and gives concise criticism of education in the U.S.
An online discussion about screen time and its connections with digital literacy and creativity. Hosted by Drs. W. Ian O'Byrne and Kristen Hawley Turner.
Britain and America, Brexit and Trump, are inextricably entwined. By Nigel Farage. By Cambridge Analytica. By Steve Bannon. By the Russian ambassador to London, Alexander Yakovenko, who has been identified by Special Counsel Robert Mueller as a conduit between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. The same questions that dog the US election dog ours, too.
There is one vital difference on this between the US and the UK. America has the Mueller investigation. And Britain does not.
Shipping & Transit’s campaign continued for years against a variety of targets. In 2016, it was the top patent litigator in the entire country, mostly targeting small businesses. One judge described its tactics as “exploitative litigation.” The court explained:
Plaintiff’s business model involves filing hundreds of patent infringement lawsuits, mostly against small companies, and leveraging the high cost of litigation to extract settlements for amounts less than $50,000.
For many years, this strategy worked. Shipping & Transit/Arrivalstar is reported to have collected more than $15 million from defendants between 2009 and 2013.
Profile of FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel
Evaluation, when it is not asked for, and when it has consequences as it does in school, is a threat. It narrows the mind... it inhibits new learning, new insights, and creative thought—the very processes that some people think school is supposed to promote. -- Peter Gray
. . .
Why is it clear to us that it's degrading and objectifying to measure and rank a girl’s physical body on a numeric scale, but we think it’s perfectly okay to measure and rank her mind that way?
. . .
what an oak tree actually needs is not your opinion but soil and water and light and air, and what a child needs is love and stories and tools and conversation and support and guidance and access to nature and culture and the world. If a kid asks for your feedback, by all means you can give it; it would be impolite not to. But what we should be measuring and comparing is not our children but the quality of the learning environments we provide for them.
Todd Bol, Creator of the Little Free Library Movement, Dies at 62 (nytimes obituary)
Republican Senators have been holding judicial confirmation hearings during Senate recess, with no Democrats present.
Why do people troll? Eight factors are given, which might boil down to:
As a recap, Chegg discovered on September 19th a data breach dating back to April that "an unauthorized party" accessed a data base with access to "a Chegg user’s name, email address, shipping address, Chegg username, and hashed Chegg password" but no financial information or social security numbers. The company has not disclosed, or is unsure of, how many of the 40 million users had their personal information stolen.
Australia's Digital Transformation Agency has been researching potential government uses for blockchain.
“Our position today, and this is an early write-up, is that blockchain is an interesting technology that would be well worth being observed, but without standardisation and a lot more work, for every use of blockchain that you would consider today there is a better technology,” Mr Alexander told the hearing.
. . .
“We’re not saying that blockchain doesn’t have potential but today, without standardisation, there is the challenge of blockchain becoming a little fragmented. When we get to the standardised blockchain then the opportunities for it will grow.”
Research shows Russian trolls working both ends of the political spectrum.
Federal prosecutors on Friday alleged that a Russian woman is the chief accountant of Project Lakhta, a sprawling Kremlin campaign to influence politics in the U.S. and European Union. It’s an operation that the FBI, in a criminal complaint, says is ongoing.
The complaint accuses the woman, Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova, of keeping detailed records of payouts to a social-media campaign of which the St. Petersberg-based troll farm, the Internet Research Agency, is just one component. Its chief financing, the FBI complaint continues, comes from Concord Management and Consulting, run by the oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin, sometimes called “Putin’s Chef.”
When students are shown quick techniques for judging the veracity of a news source, they will use them. Regardless of their existing beliefs, they will distinguish good sources from bad sources.
Literary association PEN America has filed a lawsuit against Trump for using government power to harass the press.
We must be careful to distinguish between blockchain ledgers and proof-of-work, because they are separate things that just happen to have been combined to make Bitcoin. There are energy-efficient ways of managing blockchain ledgers, such as proof-of-stake algorithms. Some of these algorithms are already being implemented by rival cryptocurrency schemes
. . .
PoW is obscenely wasteful, consuming more electricity than all of Ireland to generate an endless stream of mathematical garbage.
The Online Disinhibition Effect (John Suler, 2004) - the lack of restraint shown by some people when communicating online rather than in person. (It can be good as well as bad. How can we reduce the bad behavior?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_disinhibition_effect http://truecenterpublishing.com/psycyber/disinhibit.html
The bureau agreed not to interview Kavanaugh or Christine Blasey Ford, who accused him of sexually assaulting her, or to respond to many people stepping forward with new information. They agreed not to follow up on possible lies Kavanaugh is accused of telling in his Senate testimony. And they made other concessions unknown to the public or even Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
According to the New York Times’s reporting, White House lawyer Don McGahn made sure relevant questions went deliberately unexplored because, he believed, “a wide-ranging inquiry like some Democrats were demanding — and Mr. Trump was suggesting — would be potentially disastrous for Judge Kavanaugh’s chances of confirmation to the Supreme Court.”
Apple says that they intend to move to all recycled materials. But they won't let recyclers repair their products for reuse.
The basic assumption that underlies typical reading instruction in many schools is that learning to read is a natural process, much like learning to talk. But decades of scientific research has revealed that reading doesn't come naturally. The human brain isn't wired to read. Kids must be explicitly taught how to connect sounds with letters — phonics.
. . .
But this research hasn't made its way into many elementary school classrooms. The prevailing approaches to reading instruction in American schools are inconsistent with basic things scientists have discovered about how children learn to read. Many educators don't know the science, and in some cases actively resist it.
https://www.apmreports.org/story/2018/09/10/further-reading-hard-words
A file containing personal information of 14.8 million Texas residents was discovered on an unsecured server. It is not clear who owns the server, but the data was likely compiled by Data Trust, a firm created by the GOP.
Pinterest also has problems with misinformation and algorithms that recommend increasingly radical content.
Historian Richard Frankel:
I do think there's certainly a very strong possibility that it's not going to end well -- and that's from the perspective of a German historian. And as a historian, my natural tendency is to always try to stop people from invoking Hitler. In most cases it was not appropriate to make such a comparison. But now, with Trump, my resistance and that of other historians to making that comparison is being overcome.
Maintained by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality [AHRQ], part of the Department of Health and Human Services, the database is known as the National Guideline Clearinghouse [NGC], and it’s scheduled to “go dark,” in the words of an official there, on July 16.
...
“Guideline.gov was our go-to source, and there is nothing else like it in the world,” King said, referring to the URL at which the database is hosted, which the agency says receives about 200,000 visitors per month. “It is a singular resource,” King added.
...
The vetting role played by the NGC is a critical one, says Roy Poses, with the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute.
“Many guidelines are actually written mainly for commercial purposes or public relations purposes,” said Poses, and can be subtly shaped to promote a given course of treatment.
It is clear that the intelligence and law enforcement communities of the United States — adhering to the principles of patriotism enumerated by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on Friday — felt that a message needed to be sent to the Russians that we were on to them.
Typically, the president would deliver such a message, but this president has proven to be the staunchest defender of Putin and the most active advocate of covering up or denying these attacks. He did it again this week even while aware of the indictments.
...
Trump may deny collusion. But given that this the attack continues, denying it is collusion, distracting from it is collusion, obstructing the investigation of it is collusion — because all these things enable it to go on.
Microsoft is doing some kind of work for ICE.
Microsoft condemned family separation by ICE in a statement to Gizmodo but declined to specify if specific tools within Azure Government, like Face API—facial recognition software—were in use by the agency. The company also did not comment on whether it had assisted in building artificial intelligence tools for ICE, something the agency has been seeking (and courting Microsoft over) for some time.
For most of last year, Ross served as secretary of commerce while maintaining stakes in companies co-owned by the Chinese government, a shipping firm tied to Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, a Cypriot bank reportedly caught up in the Robert Mueller investigation and a huge player in an industry Ross is now investigating. It’s hard to imagine a more radioactive portfolio for a cabinet member.
To this day, Ross’ family apparently continues to have an interest in these toxic holdings.
...
Absurdly, maintaining all those conflicts of interest appears to be entirely legal—a reflection of ethics laws woefully unprepared for governing tycoons like Donald Trump and Wilbur Ross.
Ross appears to have broken one law, however: submitting a sworn statement to federal officials in November saying he divested of everything he had promised he would—even though he still held more than $10 million worth of stock in financial firm Invesco, his former employer.
So the idea of zero tolerance under the stated policy is that we don’t care why you’re afraid. We don’t care if it’s religion, political, gangs, anything. For all asylum seekers, you are going to be put in jail, in a detention center, and you’re going to have your children taken away from you.
...
So if you cross any other way besides the bridge, we’re prosecuting you. But . . . you can’t cross the bridge.
...
The zero-tolerance policy really started with Jeff Sessions’s announcement in May.
...
And so we saw about six hundred children who were taken away from October to May, then we saw an explosion of the numbers in May. It ramped up. The Office of Refugee Resettlement taking in all these kids says that they are our children, that they are unaccompanied. It’s a fabrication. They’re not unaccompanied children.
...
the idea that these parents don’t have the ability to obtain very simple answers—what are my rights and when can I be reunited with my kid before I’m deported without them?—is horrible. And has to go far below anything we, as a civil society of law, should find acceptable.
...I remain convinced that if American civil society and the American press fail to come to grips with just how radically theocratic the Christian Right is, any kind of post-Trump soft landing scenario in which American democracy recovers a healthy degree of functionality is highly unlikely.
...
readers of major news outlets are presented with an unrealistically benign picture of a darkly authoritarian, cult-like branch of Protestantism.
Reporting, and therefore repeating, Trump’s tweets just gives him more power. There is an alternative. Report the true frames that he is trying to pre-empt. Report the truth that he is trying to divert attention from. Put the blame where it belongs. Bust the trial balloon. Report what the strategies are trying to hide.
Access to books increases children’s future prospects and has a significant influence on the level of education they will attain, their productivity, their health, and their quality of life.
If we want kids to read more, and be better readers and writers, we need to give them access to lots of books, starting with ones they are most interested in. (This short article is specific about ways to improve book access for all kids.)
Old Navy / Gap is using stolen designs on clothing. Instead of settling with the artist, they are denying copyright infringement, and fighting the artist in court. Sleazy.
What can we build that would allow people to 1.) annotate terms of service related to tools they adopt in a classroom? and 2.) see an aggregated list of all current annotations. Last, if we were to start critically analyzing EdTech Terms of Service, what questions should we even ask?
E-cigarettes and vaping are not necessarily less harmful than smoking tobacco.
19-year-old in Nova Scotia has been charged with "unauthorized use of a computer" for downloading documents that were available through URLs.
Shaun King sees Marvel's Black Panther as a historically significant film.
It’s going to make well over a billion dollars and may actually do so within a month. From a pure business standpoint, it is to film what Michael Jackson’s Thriller was to music.
. . .
There is a movement we call Afro-Futurism, where we imagine a Black way of life free of white supremacy and bigotry. Black Panther, I think, is the first blockbuster film centered in the ethos of Afro-Futurism, where the writers, and directors, and makeup and wardrobe team all imagined a beautiful, thriving Black Africa without colonialism.
Wakanda showed us our families in one piece. No war on drugs. No mass incarceration. No KKK. No lynching. No racial profiling. No police brutality.
Tim Berners-Lee offers some broad suggestions for improving the web.
expand access to the world’s poorest through public access solutions, such as community networks and public WiFi initiatives.
. . .
A legal or regulatory framework that accounts for social objectives
Because we can't count on Google, Facebook, etc. to act in the public interest on their own initiative.
. . .
Two myths currently limit our collective imagination: the myth that advertising is the only possible business model for online companies, and the myth that it’s too late to change the way platforms operate. On both points, we need to be a little more creative.
. . .
Let’s assemble the brightest minds from business, technology, government, civil society, the arts and academia to tackle the threats to the web’s future.
Mark Galeotti says he regrets coining the term "Gerasimov Doctrine" for Russia's supposed strategy of hybrid warfare. Gerasimov's speech was actually about how the Kremlin perceives US actions in the Middle East and Europe.
"There is no denying that the West is facing a multivectored, multi-agency campaign of subversion, division, and covert political 'active measures' by Russia"<br> ...<br> "there is no single Russian 'doctrine'<br> ...<br> "There is a broad political objective -- to distract, divide, and demoralize -- but otherwise it is largely opportunistic, fragmented, even sometimes contradictory. Some major operations are coordinated ... but most are not."<br> ...<br> "more emphasis ought to go on counterintelligence and media literacy, on fighting corruption ... and healing the social divisions the Russians gleefully exploit"
Fact-checking at The New Yorker an excerpt from The Art of Making Magazines: On Being an Editor and Other Views from the Industry
Larry Berger, CEO of Amplify, explains why he no longer believes in the "engineering model" of personalized learning.
Here's the problem: The map doesn't exist, the measurement is impossible, and we have, collectively, built only 5% of the library.
NBC News is sharing a database of 200,000 tweets from accounts that pushed Russian propaganda during the 2016 US election.
Session replay scripts are being used on websites to record your keystrokes, mouse movements, and scrolling actions.
A study from Finland's Leppeenranta University of Technology and Berlin-based Energy Watch Group claims that the entire world could transition to 100% renewable electric power by 2050.
21 Dec 2017: Six defendants who were arrested during protests at Trump's inauguration were found not guilty of all charges.
Nevertheless, the Justice Department prosecutors still intend to take nearly 200 other defendants to trial.
14 Dec 2017. The FCC just voted 3-2 to repeal net neutrality. Here, the ACLU explains what comes next. The Congressional Review Act could allow Congress to undo this action.
Traffic sent to and from Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft was briefly routed through a previously unknown Russian Internet provider Wednesday under circumstances researchers said was suspicious and intentional.
I was listening today to hearings on the FBI, where the fact that FBI agents gave to Democratic candidates was cited as prima facie evidence of corruption. We saw this in summer 2016 too, where fact that people in the DNC didn’t like Sanders was presented as a massive conspiracy.
. . .
There has been a massive conflation of opinion (personal belief), bias (personal action), and agenda (structurally embedded goals). These things often line up, but strong institutions and processes can help stop opinion from becoming bias and bias from becoming an unintentional agenda. And where institutions don’t mitigate these things in appropriate ways they should be reformed.
But if we collapse this chain, if opinion = bias = agenda, well, then everything immediately becomes corrupt, because everyone has an opinion.
In the case of Republican congressmen, this isn't a matter of perception. They're lying to protect Trump.
There is virtually no competition in broadband Internet service in the US. 129 million people have only one option, and 146 million have only two options.
At MuniNetworks.org, we provide resources for those joining the movement to build broadband networks that are directly accountable to the communities they serve. Case studies, fact sheets, and video are some of the media we offer to help leaders make decisions about community owned networks.
EFF explains aspects of the Internet that Ajit Pai pretends not to understand.
Ajit Pai pretends not to understand that the only job of an ISP is to provide a connection to the network and transmit packets. He also pretends DNS is an information service provided by ISPs.
Ajit Pai is a liar.
Most of the recent advances in AI depend on deep learning, which is the use of backpropagation to train neural nets with multiple layers ("deep" neural nets).
Neural nets consist of layers of nodes, with edges from each node to the nodes in the next layer. The first and last layers are input and output. The output layer might only have two nodes, representing true or false. Each node holds a value representing how excited it is. Each edge has a value representing strength of connection, which determines how much of the excitement passes through.
The edges in an untrained neural net start with random values. The training data consists of a series of samples that are already labeled. If the output is wrong, the edges are adjusted according to how much they contributed to the error. It's called backpropagation because it starts with the output nodes and works toward the input nodes.
Deep neural nets can be effective, but only for single specific tasks. And they need huge sets of training data. They can also be tricked rather easily. Worse, someone who has access to the net can discover ways of adding noise to images that will make the net "see" things that obviously aren't there.
A mental map (or cognitive map) is our mental representation of a place. It includes features we consider important, and is likely to exclude features we consider unimportant.
(Urban planner Kevin Lynch, early 1960s)<br> Elements of mental maps
Modern maps could use augmented and virtual reality to help clarify those elements, making a place easier to navigate and use. But they can also add useless noise that makes the place seem more confusing than it actually is.
Mike Hearn, formerly with Google, calls a recent report on Twitter bots promoting Brexit "deliberate lying, or if you like, fake news."
Without having looked into it further than reading his response, I'm doubtful about his doubtfulness. I suspect the kind of bots he was trying to identify were a different variety. He says he never saw "cyborg" accounts. He doesn't mention that Russia is known to employ people for social media propaganda.
List of technology-related ethics courses.
New York is one of 29 states (plus the District of Columbia) that have legalized medical marijuana––a trend that 94 percent of Americans support, according to an August Quinnipiac poll. But on December 8, all of that could begin to change.
Congress has until that day to decide whether to include the Rohrabacher-Farr Act (also known as Rohrabacher-Blumenauer) in a bill that will fund the government through the next fiscal year. Right now, that law, made up of just 85 words, blocks the Department of Justice from using any money to prosecute medical marijuana in states where it's legal.
. . .
“I believe it would be unwise for Congress to restrict the discretion of the Department to fund particular prosecutions, particularly in the midst of an historic drug epidemic and potentially long-term uptick in violent crime," Sessions wrote in his letter.
Jeff Kao found 1.3 million comments to the FCC that were generated by substituting similar phrases into the same comment against net neutrality.
ACLU explains the importance of net neutrality.
Data analysis can be a very useful tool in software development.
Digital Hydra: Security Implications of False Information Online (NATO StratCom COE, Nov 2017)
As Uri Treisman said, “The most common use of algebra in the adult world is helping their kids with algebra.”
CUNY found that more students went on to graduate when they were allowed to take statistics instead of remedial algebra. And the results were the same regardless of race or ethnicity.
We invite all scientists to endorse this global environmental article and engage with a new alliance concerned about global climate and environmental trends
Jonathan Albright says that Instagram is another major channel of Russian propaganda.
IRA (Internet Research Agency) - a Russian troll factory.
David Karpf argues that actual user engagement among US citizens can be hard to estimate, since a lot of apparent activity comes from fake accounts.
For the last few years, Intel CPUs have Intel Management Engine, which runs its own OS, the Unix-like MINIX. You have no access to it. But it has complete access to your computer.
This (“[hearts] increased likes by a billion!”) is said by an actual employee of Twitter as if it means something, but it means nothing. Clicking on a heart is not some inherent good like increasing exercise, or upping the amount of fiber in your diet, or decreasing poverty. It’s a decision to provide Twitter with more data. That’s it.
The truth is many people working these jobs are so far into the machine they don’t see the difference between platform engagement (clicking on hearts) and civic and personal engagement (enjoying life more fully, thinking about things more deeply, empathizing more broadly, imagining and building a better world). They upped the click rate on a heart which is good for marketing. They are food scientists trying to tweak a flavor profile to get people to consume thirteen more Doritos a day.
EFF recommendations for Congress regarding data security and data breaches like the one at Equifax.
https://www.ftc.gov/datasecurity<br> FTC guide to data security for businesses.
Bitcoin mining uses a lot of electricity -- currently as much as Ecuador.
The cryptocurrency network Ethereum recently announced that it will try "proof of stake" rather than "proof of work".
Missile defense systems are nowhere near as reliable as some politicians pretend they are.
YouTube videos aimed at children are becoming disturbingly strange.
Climate Science Special Report Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4), Volume 1
Everyone has a right to free speech, but in practice many individuals have very little access to free speech. When we try to address this on platforms, by clamping down on things like harassment or bots, it’s portrayed as “curtailing” free speech, in the same way that making the rich pay more tax or follow regulations is seen by conservatives as “curtailing” economic opportunity.
2 Nov 2017
A 58 percent majority say they approve of Mueller’s handling of the investigation while 28 percent say they disapprove, the Post-ABC poll finds. People’s views depend in large part on their political leanings, but overall, Americans are generally inclined to trust Mueller and the case he has made so far.
Millions of Americans believe (or are willing to claim that they believe) insane bullshit. So what happens if Mueller finds evidence that Trump committed a crime, and the right-wing media says he didn't, or it doesn't matter?
Robert Mercer's hedge fund owes the IRS $7 billion.
Since the IRS found in 2010 that a complicated banking method used by Renaissance and about 10 other hedge funds was a tax-avoidance scheme, Mercer has gotten increasingly active in politics. According to data from the Center for Responsive Politics, he doled out more than $22 million to outside conservative groups seeking to influence last year’s elections, while advocating the abolition of the IRS and much of the federal government.
What group chat is good for, and its many drawbacks.
The US Justice Dept. "has identified more than six members of the Russian government" involved in hacking the DNC. Arrests and prosecutions are unlikely, but they have made a habit of filing charges as a way of discouraging foreign hackers.
Russian accounts on Facebook were attempting to incite violence within the U.S.
Kris Schaffer distinguishes bots, sockpuppets, and trolls, and talks about how to identify botnets. Twitter and other social media sites should be able to eliminate many of the bogus accounts. But they don't.
Author Maggie Stiefvater presents evidence that illegal downloads often do mean lost sales.
While I've experimented with many alternatives to traditional assessment, I have primarily relied on self-assessment. I turn in final grades at the end of the term, but those grades usually match the grades students have given themselves. (I do tell students 'I reserve the right to change grades,' but this is rare and I mostly have to raise them, because students are often their own harshest critics.)
Why is all the focus on teaching lay people how to code, and not teaching computer scientists and people who work in tech companies to center empathy and humanity in their work?
. . .
I think there should be an element of infusing discussions of ethics, humanity and social consequences into computer science curricula, and I believe that even human-centered design does not go far enough; I suggest that designers of tech consider more “empathetic and participatory design” where there is some degree of involving people who are not in the tech company as autonomous persons in product design decisions, and not just using them as research/testing subjects.
27 Oct 2017
- A federal grand jury in Washington, DC, on Friday approved the first charges in the investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller, according to sources briefed on the matter.
The charges are still sealed under orders from a federal judge. Plans were prepared Friday for anyone charged to be taken into custody as soon as Monday, the sources said. It is unclear what the charges are.
A timeline of Paul Manafort's ties to Russia.
... "Frontline" will give consumers not just a story via a two-part documentary on Vladimir Putin, "Putin's Revenge," which begins tonight and looks at the evolution of his thinking about, and animus toward, the United States.
At 10 p.m., it will post online virtually every bit of all its interviews, or 70 hours of 56 interviews. They're with figures big and small, ranging from former big-time U.S. intelligence officials such as James Clapper and John Brennan to Putin confidantes, journalists, policy experts and others whom you don't know but have a lot to say on this important and ambiguous topic.
Both the video and transcripts will be easily searchable and annotated right here.
http://go.pardot.com/e/273262/frontline-film-putins-revenge-/23b4b/70048029
In 2012, the U.S. Congress passed the Magnitsky Act, which targets Russian human-rights abusers: It freezes their assets and deprives them of visas.
. . .
The Magnitsky Act drives Putin nuts. It means that his men can’t act as they always have, i.e., with impunity. Now there are consequences, which is a problem for Putin. Four countries have Magnitsky acts: the U.S., Britain, Estonia, and now Canada. (They passed theirs last week.)
Browder is a driver behind these Magnitsky acts, and Putin hates him for it, understandably. Twice in 2013, he tried to add Browder to Interpol’s wanted list, and twice he failed, because Interpol knew that Putin was politically motivated. Browder is not a criminal. He is an anti-criminal, which is why Putin targets him.
. . .
In the wake of Canada’s new Magnitsky act, Putin has tried again. Tried for a fifth time. Interpol has accepted his request. Worse, the U.S. government seems in partnership with the Kremlin: Our government has revoked Browder’s visa. (American-born, Browder is a British citizen.)
Flying insect populations in Germany have dropped 76% since 1989. Pesticides may be the main cause.
Twitter took 11 months to close a Russian troll account that claimed to speak for the Tennessee Republican Party even after that state's real GOP notified the social media company that the account was a fake.
The account, @TEN_GOP, was enormously popular, amassing at least 136,000 followers between its creation in November 2015 and when Twitter shut it down in August
The Bystander Effect - Crowds sometimes fail to help someone in trouble: everyone assumes someone else will do it.
Similarly, people in groups often fail to check facts as carefully as they would if they were alone. They assume someone else has already checked.
Careless people, and bots, tend to share news quickly, without bothering to fact check. Once something has been shared thousands of times, even fairly careful people are likely to assume it must be true.
Again, if social media was to think a bit bigger, there are ways to apply this insight to deprivilege the influence of the quickest, and privilege the influence of those making informed decisions.
Telcos are apparently selling API access to your phone's location, along with your name and address.
Mike Monteiro's short history of Twitter from the point of view of a long-time user. They went bad when they started tolerating racists for the sake of continued growth. And now Trump's tweets are a genuine threat to the entire world.
The abuse is the free speech issue. Kicking Nazis off of Twitter reduces the platform of a small number of people who are using that platform to terrify and silence others. Leaving them on suppresses, in all meaningful terms, the voices of entire classes of female intellectuals, people of color, and any other subgroup the mob decides to turn it spotlight towards when that subgroup gets a little too uppity.
You have probably heard about the hunt for dark matter, a mysterious substance thought to permeate the universe, the effects of which we can see through its gravitational pull. But our models of the universe also say there should be about twice as much ordinary matter out there, compared with what we have observed so far.
Two separate teams found the missing matter – made of particles called baryons rather than dark matter – linking galaxies together through filaments of hot, diffuse gas.
Back in 2012, Zeynep Tufecki pointed out that election campaigns driven by big-data and social media could be bad for democracy.
AT&T has a habit of pushing unlimited data plans for an extra $5 per month -- without telling you that the deal will remove your tethering ability, for which they now want an additional $30 per month.
DEFCON, the world’s largest hacker conference, will release its findings on Tuesday, months after hosting a July demonstration in which hackers quickly broke into 25 different types of voting machines.
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Though the report offers no proof of an attack last year, experts involved with it say they’re sure it is possible—and probable—and that the chances of a bigger attack in the future are high.
“From a technological point of view, this is something that is clearly doable,” said Sherri Ramsay, the former director of the federal Central Security Service Threat Operations Center, which handles cyber threats for the military and the National Security Agency. “For us to turn a blind eye to this, I think that would be very irresponsible on our part.”
Some ways to identify bots on Twitter.
What it means to be poor, with many additions in the replies. It is a shame that people are made to feel shame for accepting help or asking for help. If your charity group is giving kids something for Christmas, that's great. But don't put them on the local news.
Wage Stagnation in Nine Charts
According to this, Sweden has had great success reducing prostitution by:
EFF warns that "any tactic used now to silence neo-Nazis will soon be used against others."
Cosette - an automated prover for checking equivalence of SQL queries. From the Database Group at the University of Washington.
The request from the DOJ demands that DreamHost hand over 1.3 million visitor IP addresses — in addition to contact information, email content, and photos of thousands of people — in an effort to determine who simply visited the website. (Our customer has also been notified of the pending warrant on the account.)
That information could be used to identify any individuals who used this site to exercise and express political speech protected under the Constitution’s First Amendment. That should be enough to set alarm bells off in anyone’s mind.
4,997 English words rated on a scale from 1 (humorless) to 5 (humorous) by 821 participants.
Pros and cons of pair programming.
Everywhere you look at the moment, you see people projecting their fantasies back into history, rather than allowing the past to be different from the present. This comes from people across the political spectrum, but what they all have in common is that they only really care about history as far as it serves modern political goals. They're only interested in the past to the extent that it supports their modern prejudices, whatever those happen to be
MIT is running a master's program in data, economics, and development policy with unique admission requirements. Anyone can apply after completing five online courses through edX with in-person exams.
James Kirchick says Democrats need to acknowledge that the Obama administration was far too soft on Russia. As it is, their concern over Russian interference in the 2016 election looks partisan.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07592
Bot tweets are retweeted by humans at the same rate as human tweets. Stories propped up by 1,000 bots spread just like stories propped up by a thousand humans.
Hunter S. Thompson saw the Hell's Angels of the 1960s as an example of a problem that was going to get much worse -- people left behind, who therefore have nothing to do but demonstrate their growing resentment for society.
The backfire effect is getting turbocharged online. I think we’re getting more angry and convinced about everything, not because we’re surrounded by like-minded people, but by people who disagree with us. Social media allows you to find the worst examples of your opponents. It’s not a place to have your own views corroborated, but rather where your worst suspicions about the other lot can be quickly and easily confirmed.
An open letter from Tim Wu to Tim Berners-Lee, urging caution regarding a proposed DRM standard for the Web (Encrypted Media Extensions), and the possible abuse of anti-circumvention laws.
Native English speakers tend to be very poor at using English as a lingua franca.
there are two different measurements for the length of a foot in the United States: the International Foot (also commonly called the foot) and the U.S. Survey Foot. The International Foot (which we were all taught in school) is defined as 0.3048 meters, whereas the U.S. Survey Foot is defined as 0.3048006096 meters. The difference of the two equates to 2 parts per million.
For example, in a measurement of 10,000 feet, the difference would be 0.02 feet (just less than one-quarter of an inch). In a measurement of 1 million feet, the difference is 2 feet.
Multnomah County Republican Party Approves far-right militia groups Oath Keepers and Three Percenters as Private Security -- "where such volunteers are certified to provide private security service by the Oregon Department of Public Safety Standards and Training."
The GOP intends nation-wide voter suppression.
Max Bergmann, a former State Department employee, says Rex Tillerson is wrecking it.
In January 2018, the World Press Photo Foundation, in association with Newcastle University’s Open Lab, University of California Irvine and ArtEZ in the Netherlands will launch Talking Pictures, an open course in critical visual storytelling.
What happens if Trump tries to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller?
Maryland and the District of Columbia have filed a lawsuit against Trump concerning his violations of the Emoluments Clause.
Trump cabinet meeting.
First, he boasted of his accomplishments as president. He doesn't have any.
Then, the cabinet members took turns praising Trump.
Alison Darcy of Stanford has designed a chatbot to help treat anxiety and depression using CBT, cognitive-behavioral therapy.
The Shouting Class -- people who criticize things as a way of life.
we’re at a pivotal point not just in the life of our democracy, but in how we think, read, and make choices. Selective information is being presented to us in a way that encourages selective reading and offers psychological and social rewards for, to put it bluntly, being stupid and submissive and spreading stupid to submit others.
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What’s different now is that this propaganda is being gamed by professionals in a massive, orchestrated data campaign at a volume, pace, and consistency that not only muddies the truth, but completely eclipses the truth. Destroys the very notion of truth.
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The truth about the truth is that we believe because we want to, because our ability to think independently is a point of pride for Americans. The people behind the curtain are telling us the same story we tell ourselves about ourselves. But this is also a vulnerability: Independence is in its purist form a kind of division. If you exploit it the right way, you can turn a democracy against itself.
You might think it’s hyperbole for Winer to say that Facebook is trying to kill the open web. But they are. I complain about Google AMP, but AMP is just a dangerous step toward a Google-owned walled garden — Facebook is designed from the ground up as an all-out attack on the open web.
Analysis of a subreddit for Trump supporters, based on comparisons of the users of various subreddits.
Two men killed and a third wounded in knife attack by a deranged racist on a Portland train.
GOP operative Aaron Nevins has admitted to receiving and sharing stolen DCCC documents from Guccifer 2.0. The DHS and DNI believe Guccifer 2.0 works for Russia.
Gardner Campbell on self-directed learning.
There will always be an impulse toward self-directed learning, and part of my job as a teacher is to amplify, and make even more effective, the students' disposition toward it, as well as point them toward more opportunities for self-directed learning.
But then we come to the second part of my answer, which is that while self-directed learning may establish a kind of ecosystem of its own, it's not an ecosystem in which learning will necessarily live up to its potential. And it's not an ecosystem that will necessarily bring forward considerations of what it means to be an individual in a community, who works for the common good.
So at some point, self-directed learning, which is now an absolutely vital concept in higher learning, has to be considered as part of a larger conceptual framework. The larger framework incorporates the institution, the curriculum, and the faculty that you asked about.
That larger framework should stress the role of expert-directed study and expert-facilitated encounters, especially in opportunities for self-directed learning.
The history of the Seth Rich conspiracy theory.<br> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/05/20/the-seth-rich-conspiracy-shows-how-fake-news-still-works/
Tools that might be able to decrypt files encrypted by the WannaCry ransomware. With a little luck, and if the victim hasn't rebooted, the keys can be found in memory.
Michael Flynn and other advisers to Donald Trump’s campaign were in contact with Russian officials and others with Kremlin ties in at least 18 calls and emails during the last seven months of the 2016 presidential race, current and former U.S. officials familiar with the exchanges told Reuters.
Lawrence Lessig is concerned about impeachment happening while polls show that only 2% of Trump voters would change their vote. He says it's our duty to convince them Trump needs to go -- in spite of "how impossibly hard that seems".
ASCII was designed with four delimiter characters:<br> 31 Unit Separator<br> 30 Record Separator<br> 29 Group Separator<br> 28 File Separator
Trump's speech for Black History Month was so absurdly stupid, it reads like satire. So McSweeney's simply republished it.
The Republican's Guide to Presidential Behavior
Certain HP laptops have flawed audio drivers that record all your keystrokes to: C:\Users\Public\MicTray.log
If these files exist, delete them: C:\Windows\System32\MicTray64.exe C:\Windows\System32\MicTray.exe
The ongoing fight to preserve net neutrality.
Participatory Propaganda - an analysis of current techniques for exploiting our online behavior. https://twitter.com/lageneralista
Texans planning protests May 30 to June 2, 2017 at the public offices of Senator John Cornyn to demand an independent non-partisan investigation of Trump-Russia. The Senate Intelligence Committee's "investigation" has been a joke.
The FCC is investigating Stephen Colbert for a line he delivered during his monologue, addressing Donald Trump: "The only thing your mouth is good at is being Vladimir Putin's c--k holster."
Web comic explaining the backfire effect -- our tendency to react hostilely to information that contradicts our core beliefs. Trying to argue past this tendency is usually futile. The best thing we can do is to be aware of it within ourselves, and try to raise the same awareness in others. The kind of examples given here seem like a good way to do that.
North Korea may be determined to build nuclear weapons capable of deterring an attack from the US. They may also hope to coerce South Korea into a union on their terms. Maybe worse -- if they have the technology to strike the US, they can sell that technology.
Sebastian Gorka's claimed PhD might be bogus.
Detection of fake news in social media based on who liked it.
we show that Facebook posts can be classified with high accuracy as hoaxes or non-hoaxes on the basis of the users who "liked" them. We present two classification techniques, one based on logistic regression, the other on a novel adaptation of boolean crowdsourcing algorithms. On a dataset consisting of 15,500 Facebook posts and 909,236 users, we obtain classification accuracies exceeding 99% even when the training set contains less than 1% of the posts.
New Hampshire state legislator discovered to be the founder of the misogynistic online group The Red Pill.(Which has nearly 200,000 subscribers. Yikes.)
Google is countering fake news and extremism by updating their search rankings, and taking direct feedback from users.
Experimental news site created by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.
A second parchment copy of the Declaration of Independence was discovered in a records office in Chichester, UK.
Dhawal Shah, founder of class-central.com, outlines the price schemes of the major MOOC providers. Courses from these providers started out free in 2011, but have gradually put more content behind paywalls. (Some of them haven't really been MOOCs for a long time now.)
https://twitter.com/grandeped/status/855435067400826881 Matt Crosslin points out that they were never completely free. You can't take one without a fairly new computer and fast Internet connection.
digital identity, as a practice, operates counter to the collaboration and cooperation that need to be part of digital citizenship.
This is our contemporary contradiction: identity as a construct in contemporary social media spaces makes for pretty rotten social spaces.
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We’re algorithmically manipulated. We’re surveilled. We’re encouraged to speak rather than listen. We’re stuck engaging in visibility strategies, whether we admit it or not, in order simply to be acknowledged and seen within a social or professional space.
Our digital identities do not – and at the level of technological affordances and inherent structure, cannot – create a commons that is actually a healthy pro-social space.
The president of the European parliament has said Britain would be welcomed back with open arms if voters changed their minds about Brexit on 8 June, challenging Theresa May’s claim that “there is no turning back” after article 50.
The key changes we can make in the short term (without requiring sites to relinquish their business models) are to teach social software to forget, to give it predictable security properties, and to sever the financial connection between online advertising and extremism.
Orwell imagined a world in which the state could shamelessly rewrite the past. The Internet has taught us that people are happy to do this work themselves, provided they have their peer group with them, and a common enemy to unite against. They will happily construct alternative realities for themselves, and adjust them as necessary to fit the changing facts.
Finally, surveillance capitalism makes it harder to organize effective long-term dissent. In an setting where attention is convertible into money, social media will always reward drama, dissent, conflict, iconoclasm and strife. There will be no comparable rewards for cooperation, de-escalation, consensus-building, or compromise, qualities that are essential for the slow work of building a movement. People who should be looking past their differences will instead spend their time on purity tests and trying to outflank one another in a race to the fringes.
Obviously, in this situation whoever controls the algorithms has great power. Decisions like what is promoted to the top of a news feed can swing elections. Small changes in UI can drive big changes in user behavior. There are no democratic checks or controls on this power, and the people who exercise it are trying to pretend it doesn’t exist
On Facebook, social dynamics and the algorithms’ taste for drama reinforce each other. Facebook selects from stories that your friends have shared to find the links you’re most likely to click on. This is a potent mix, because what you read and post on Facebook is not just an expression of your interests, but part of a performative group identity.
So without explicitly coding for this behavior, we already have a dynamic where people are pulled to the extremes. Things get worse when third parties are allowed to use these algorithms to target a specific audience.
any system trying to maximize engagement will try to push users towards the fringes. You can prove this to yourself by opening YouTube in an incognito browser (so that you start with a blank slate), and clicking recommended links on any video with political content.
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This pull to the fringes doesn’t happen if you click on a cute animal story. In that case, you just get more cute animals (an experiment I also recommend trying). But the algorithms have learned that users interested in politics respond more if they’re provoked more, so they provoke. Nobody programmed the behavior into the algorithm; it made a correct observation about human nature and acted on it.
The U.S. Navy strike force that was supposedly racing to North Korea won't be there until sometime next week.
White House officials said on Tuesday they were relying on guidance from the Defense Department. Officials there described a glitch-ridden sequence of events, from a premature announcement of the deployment by the military’s Pacific Command to an erroneous explanation by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis — all of which perpetuated the false narrative that an American armada was racing toward the waters off North Korea.
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The Carl Vinson is now on a northerly course for the Korean Peninsula and is expected to arrive in the region sometime next week, Defense Department officials said. The White House declined to comment on the misunderstanding, referring all questions to the Pentagon. “Sean discussed it once when asked, and it was all about process,” said a spokesman, Michael Short.
Phishing attack that uses Unicode characters to fake a domain name.
The xn-- prefix is what is known as an ‘ASCII compatible encoding’ prefix. It lets the browser know that the domain uses ‘punycode’ encoding to represent Unicode characters. In non-techie speak, this means that if you have a domain name with Chinese or other international characters, you can register a domain name with normal A-Z characters that can allow a browser to represent that domain as international characters in the location bar.
What we have done above is used ‘e’ ‘p’ ‘i’ and ‘c’ unicode characters that look identical to the real characters but are different unicode characters. In the current version of Chrome, as long as all characters are unicode, it will show the domain in its internationalized form.
The ACLU of Iowa reports that 11 percent of eligible Iowa voters--260,000 people--don’t have a driver’s license or non-operator ID, according to the US Census and the Iowa Department of Transportation, and could be disenfranchised by the bill.
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So far in 2017, 87 bills have been introduced in 29 states to restrict access to the ballot, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. (And that’s on top of the 21 states that already passed new voting restrictions since 2010.)
The Initiative for Open Citations I4OC is a collaboration between scholarly publishers, researchers, and other interested parties to promote the unrestricted availability of scholarly citation data.
Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Flynn, partnered this year with a controversial technology company co-run by a man once convicted of trying to sell stolen biotech material to the Russian KGB espionage agency.
Jared Goes to Iraq! A Picture Story
Trump's "whataboutism".
Google is adding a Fact Check feature to Google Search and Google News. When fact checks are available from one or more approved publishers, they will appear in the search results.
One requirement for publishers to be cited is to use the schema.org ClaimReview markup, or the Share the Facts widget.
Dave Winer is concerned that news organizations are too eager to work with platforms like Facebook and Twitter. They can't be independent there. They belong on the open web.
Dave Winer points out that interoperability of software is important. Don't shun an existing standard just because you think your way is better. If you hate using some standard technology, find or write a module to convert between the standard and your preferred format.
https://connectedlearning.uci.edu/
new Connected Learning Lab (CLL) at UC Irvine, an interdisciplinary research center dedicated to studying and mobilizing learning technologies in equitable, innovative, and learner-centered ways.
JavaScript's var, let, const, and variable hoisting.
Google's DeepDream neural network applied to Joy of Painting with Bob Ross. Very creepy.
Alan Kay is on quora.
On the importance of social skills for PhD candidates -- and anyone, actually.
Eric Elliott on taking, and giving, tech interviews for programmers and web developers.
Trump-Russia sock puppets posing as "Bernie bros" targeted women and black men with harassment on Twitter when they expressed support for Hillary Clinton.
Many of the most productive and accomplished scientists, mathematicians, writers, and musicians do most of their work in no more than 4-6 hours per day. The musicians break that time up into shorter sessions. During that time, they are focused, and engage in deliberate practice. They tend to take a nap during the afternoon.
The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters, Tom Nichols
These are dangerous times. Never have so many people had so much access to so much knowledge and yet have been so resistant to learning anything. In the United States and other developed nations, otherwise intelligent people denigrate intellectual achievement and reject the advice of experts. Not only do increasing numbers of lay people lack basic knowledge, they reject fundamental rules of evidence and refuse to learn how to make a logical argument.
2 April, 2017 - International Fact-Checking Day Lesson plan and several how-to guides.
It looks like French voters might make the same stupid mistakes Americans and British made -- either falling for bullshit lies, or failing to vote at all because they don't think their vote matters or they aren't thrilled with their options.
Between 2010 and 2012, the number of deaths in Texas due to complications of pregnancy and childbirth jumped from 72 to 148. This coincided with a 2011 budget cut that forced 82 family planning clinics to close.
Details about the personal data ISPs are now permitted to sell, and what you can do about it.
Open: The Philosophy and Practices that are Revolutionizing Education and Science
Thanks to Republicans, ISPs may soon be free to sell your personal data to anyone they please. Here's info about using HTTPS and VPNs to protect your privacy.
26 March 2017. Russians protest government corruption. Police gave an estimate of 7,000 protesters in Moscow. Hundreds were detained.
Suggestion for a programming language in which commands are displayed as comic strip panels, with each one showing the output up to that point.