school pleasure reading comparison

As I said in class, I noticed a few things.

1) I should have included more kinds of readings, at least work reading, and quite possibly news reading (which I lumped into pleasure reading, though it’s not really that.)

2) That one spike when I was researching two projects at once has shown me that I need to juggle things better.

3) I tend to read for pleasure at meals (at least while taking classes.) Even when I had free time this term, I didn’t spend much of it reading. I think that was a change from before I started this program, but I’m not sure.

4) I wonder about the time of day I did these readings. I feel like I did most of the school reading in the mornings, but I don’t know for sure.

5) When I was reading for pleasure, I was mostly re-reading books I enjoyed. I don’t know why. Maybe it;s because I didn’t feel like I had enough time to spend it on a new book that I may not like.

Overall, taking a look at one of my habits was interesting and it has made me think not just about how much I read, but the patterns of my reading.

Over the holiday weekend, news that Facebook had hired a PR firm to “make claims” about George Soros dropped.

FB went after Soros because he has ties to the Freedom from Facebook Foundation, which is trying to break up FB into its component parts.

Soros says that it’s a smear campaign, and is demanding a Congressional investigation.

COO Cheryl Sandberg claims to know nothing about this, and MArk Zuckerberg can’t be reached for comment.

An outgoing executive is likely to take the fall for this.

I don’t see how anyone could be surprised by this.

One thing that gets me about some people I know. They’ve quit FB, and said that “They’re free of it”, while continuing to use Instagram. When I (or others) point out that IG is owned by FB, people tend not to react well.

The Tumblr app has been removed from the Apple store

We have been focusing on Facebook, Amazon, and other entities, but we really haven’t discussed Tumblr.

Tumblr is a microblogging site. Many people use it to post fanfiction (An Archive of Our Own is another site for that), others use it to explore hobbies, or discuss politics. I have a Tumblr that consists mostly of bad jokes, things I’m interested in (mostly related to history, linguistics, and politics) and pictures I’ve taken at various museums I’ve visited.

However, Tumblr has always had a dark side. The alt-right has found a home there, for example. That isn’t what got Tumblr in trouble, though. Child pornography is. Apparently users have managed to post it on Tumblr despite Tumblr’s filters.

Tumblr is saying that it’s working on fixing this. We’ll see.

Farivar’s Habeas Data is an interesting read that discusses what happens at the intersection of technology, government, and privacy.

Perhaps the most salient point for me is that the law is just simply not keeping up with the changes in technology. I am not sure that it can, honestly. Cases take time to work their way through the legal system. Something that was an issue in, say, 2015, might be resolved by the time the case is heard in an appellate court in 2018.

The geography of the Appellate court system adds to this problem. In the United States, we have twelve appellate courts, and they frequently make decisions that contradict one another, which forces cases to the Supreme Court, which also adds time.

Part of the problem here is that sometimes it’s difficult view the technology through the lens of the relevant parts of the Constitution, say, the Fourth Amendment,

For instance, in the Riley case, the lawyers representing the police claimed that finding photos on a cell phone was just like finding those same photos in the defendant’s pocket, that they were in plain sight and, therefore, a warrant wasn’t necessary.

The Supreme Court said otherwise, and I;m inclined to agree. The phone is there, but what is on it isn’t obvious at all.

Of course, this is just the United States. Other countries have different issues.

One thing that struck me early in the piece was the conflict between Google and Germany over Google Street View. Here in the United States, we didn’t bat an eye when Google drove around recording our streets. Germany had a huge problem with it. Google eventually dropped the project in Germany.

The author states that Germans put up greater resistance to large scale data gathering because of their historical experience with the Nazi government and the Stasi in East Germany. I wonder if this feeling is not just limited to Germany, but common across Europe, which would lead to being more receptive to the Right to be Forgotten.

But, again, in the Uhnited States, we have different issues. For instance, the amount of data the Oakland Police Department collected just with their license plate photography program.

They weren’t just tracking suspects, or recent parolees, they were tracking everyone. Which leads us to the question, “Do we want our habits to be that well-known?”

I would say probably not.

Law and technology is a fascinating. scary place.

Facebook has it rough lately, and this article describes how the powers that be there have been reacting.

Some men are learning that their children aren’t necessarily their biological children.

Cold cases solved via online DNA profiles.

We talked about this sort of thing earlier in the term, though, perhaps, not in this way.

In just a few years, the DNA every white person whose family is from Northern Europe will be identifiable in GEDMatch’s database.

I guess that;s great for people who want to find family members, but our DNA isn’t really private. That’s an issue. It can go down a bunch of different rabbit holes, most of them unpleasant.

Apparently it’s not a thing in the Big Data universe. Everything from how data is collected, to who sees it, to how it is processed and analyzed

As O’Neil points out in Weapons of Math Destruction, this is just part of the problem, but it comes back again and again.

The lack of transparency prevents any real analysis of effectiveness of the various WMD’s. Not only do we not know what data is collected, we don’t know how it is measured.

So, if the WMD is inaccurate, we really don;t have any recourse. We can protest it, but, more often than not, the powers that be will say, “This is what the data show.” They accept it as correct even though they don’t know what it’s doing.

The opaqueness of the process also prevents correction. These are closed systems. They don’t change until the coders decide they need to. the coders may be resistant to change. After all, they came up with the data analysis to begin with, they might think they got it right and resist evidence to the contrary.

I’m not saying that other issues aren’t important, they absolutely are, but the lack of transparency just gets to me every time.

The Government Is Blacklisting People Based on Predictions of Future Crimes

We were talking about this sort of thing last week, The government is putting people on the No Fly List based on things people might do, not what they have actually done.

Further, despite promises to the contrary, the government is not providing reasons why citizens are on the list, nor does it really give those on the list any real way to appeal the decision.

Meantime, This post says we should be suspicious of tech companies going to the federal government for privacy legislation,

This post points out that much of the consumer privacy protection legislation is being done at the state level. It was interesting to read how different states are doing things.

However, the author believes that the industry is appealing to the federal government to negate the legislative work done in the states. It is doing it using terms like “privacy regulation” because that has popular support right now.

Granted, both of these are from the ACLU’s website, so they might be slanted, but they raise disturbing issues.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/09/26/651849441/cornell-food-researchers-downfall-raises-larger-questions-for-science

I thought it was relevant because it discusses the use and misuse of big data, but from a different direction than what we have been discussing. Unlike FB and Google, which are businesses and are gathering/manipulating data for capitalist purposes, this one is academic.

Basically, the researcher involved kept analyzing data sets until he came up with something, which can be a good thing — we should look at data from many different directions, but he seems to have been involved in p-hacking, which is the manipulation of data to make certain points stand out and look more significant than they are.

(I think. I’ve never heard of this before, and I’m totally going on the article. Stats isn’t really my field. I could be very wrong here.)

The npr article linked to this article, which deals with p-hacking and its effects. I haven’t read it, but will try to for next week.