The text version can be found here.
Past statements about rival teams are now coming back to bite certain Australian players.
Month: March 2018
For centuries, lexicographers have attempted to capture the entire English language. Technology might soon turn this dream into reality – but will it spell the end for dictionaries?
This is an intriguing insight into the effort to organise language. It is interesting to think about this exercise in regards to Google Books and machine learning. I feel that this is as much about world views and perspective.
It was in Oct. 2016, in Berlin, during Michelberger Music. Between each show of the festival, we were kidnapping a person in the audience, which we were taking to a secret room where an artist was waiting. Between the two of them, a unique experience : a One To One concert.
There were seven performances recorded, featuring artists such as Bon Iver:
And Damien Rice:
There is something about the space of these performances that is really captivating. I imagine that watching these performances would be hard.
In a keynote at 21st Century Learning International Conference, Ewan McIntosh identifies three characteristics of success:
- They know their why
- They are provocative
- They have a clear process in place
The activist and internet entrepreneur Maciej Ceglowski once described big data as “a bunch of radioactive, toxic sludge that we don’t know how to handle.” Maybe we should think about Google and Facebook as the new polluters. Their imperative is to grow! They create jobs! They pay taxes, sort of! In the meantime, they’re dumping trillions of units of toxic brain poison into our public-thinking reservoir. Then they mop it up with Wikipedia or send out a message that reads, “We take your privacy seriously.”
Paul Ford proposes the creation of a Digital Protection Agency to clean up the toxic data spill. This touches on what Mike Caulfield calls Info-Environmentalism.
If you granted permission to read contacts during Facebook’s installation on Android a few versions ago—specifically before Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean)—that permission also granted Facebook access to call and message logs by default. The permission structure was changed in the Android API in version 16. But Android applications could bypass this change if they were written to earlier versions of the API, so Facebook API could continue to gain access to call and SMS data by specifying an earlier Android SDK version. Google deprecated version 4.0 of the Android API in October 2017—the point at which the latest call metadata in Facebook users’ data was found. Apple iOS has never allowed silent access to call data.
Isn’t WhatsApp built on access to your contacts? And isn’t it owned by Facebook?
Just because Japanese restaurants wanted to serve exotic recipes to American customers from day one doesn’t mean that American patrons were ready to eat them. Instead, attracting interest and long term commitment meant creating recipes that introduced change incrementally, one new and interesting ingredient at a time.
McNamee no longer invests in tech companies. “Philosophically, it wasn’t a good fit,” he says. In Facebook, he notes, one can clearly see the impact that certain philosophies have had on corporate culture. “The two most influential people on [Facebook’s] board of directors over the last seven to eight years have been Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, both of whom are brilliant men whose economic and political philosophy is deeply libertarian. So in a world where we already prioritize the individual over the collective and we take the Ayn Randian view that none of us are responsible for the downstream consequences of what we do, Mark was surrounded by people who were particularly deep believers in that philosophy, with no contrary voices.”
Roger McNamee shares his efforts to get Facebook to fix its business model, but has come to the realisation that the libertarian values prevent this.
Perhaps then when inside of social platforms people would not so easily give away their data and when they did they would have a better understanding of the scope. What if we were really transparent with the data that learning systems have about students and focused on making the student aware of the existence of their data and emphasised their ownership over their data? What if we taught data literacy to the student with their own data? If decades ago we would have focused on student agency and ownership over platforms and analytics I wonder if Cambridge Analytica would have even had a product to sell to political campaigns let alone ever been a big news story.
There’s always the chance that #deleteFacebook will simply serve to deflect criticism away from the dominant ethos of surveillance capitalism by redirecting it at Facebook. Thus, people rage against Facebook instead of the ideology that Facebook shares with many other companies. It’s easy to imagine Google trying to capitalize on the current mayhem at Facebook by using the current frustration as an opportunity to relaunch Google+ (they could create tools that make it easy to import an old Facebook account). But that would just be trading one surveillance capitalism platform for another. And though there are certainly hardcore privacy and crypto advocates who will point to various “secure” services or “really private” alternatives it seems that many such arguments are only a bit better than “no suggestion at all” – especially as (at least as of yet) there still isn’t a genuine alternative to Facebook on offer. Though #deleteFacebook may appear ready to take a bite out of Facebook, it risks being a technological solution that defangs the push for broader systemic change and critique.
There several laws that might plausibly give rise to legal claims against Facebook, Kogan or Cambridge Analytica. Without more information it is difficult to say which of these, if any, might actually lead to a viable legal claim, but each one merits further study. (I am leaving aside for now the potential claims under British and European law, but those add to this list considerably.)
Andrew Woods provides a list of legal approaches that might be used to prosecute Cambridge Analytica:
- Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
- State-level Computer Crime Laws
- U.S. Common Law Claims (Contract & Tort)
- Federal Trade Commission Rules
- U.S. Securities Law
via TL:DR
I know that I have pushed the use of phones in our classrooms before on this blog, how I have written about using them purposefully, but I will no longer subscribe to the notion that when kids use their phones it is only because they are bored. It is too easy to say that if teachers just created relevant and engaging lessons then no child would use their phones improperly in our rooms. That’s not it, all of us with devices have had our attention spans rewired to constantly seek stimulus. To instantly seek something other than what we are doing. To constantly seek something different even if what we are doing is actually interesting. And not because what we seek out is so much better, look at most people’s Snapchat streaks and you will see irrelevant images of tables and floors and half faces simply to keep a streak alive. It is not that our students are leaving our teaching behind at all times because they are bored, it is more because many of us, adults and children alike, have lost the ability to focus on anything for a longer period of time.
Pernille, you might be interested in a Douglas Rushkoff’s recent reflection at the beginning of a Team Human episode. He wonders why is it so easy for people to lose sight of the design and purpose behind these platforms? He argues that other than teaching media, social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc) should never be used by schools. I think that this crosses over to the smartphone debate.
John Johnston (John’s World Wide Wall Display)I find my self on Aaron Davis’ blog a lot these days. He is doing what I’d like to do if I could squeeze a few more hours into a day exploring the IndieWeb. Great to see an edublogger diving deep into this stuff.
Thanks John. We all have our part to play.
It’s good business for me, too. This “market research” of giving away e-books sells printed books. What’s more, having my books more widely read opens many other opportunities for me to earn a living from activities around my writing, such as the Fulbright Chair I got at USC this year, this high-paying article in Forbes, speaking engagements and other opportunities to teach, write and license my work for translation and adaptation. My fans’ tireless evangelism for my work doesn’t just sell books–it sells me.
The golden age of hundreds of writers who lived off of nothing but their royalties is bunkum. Throughout history, writers have relied on day jobs, teaching, grants, inheritances, translation, licensing and other varied sources to make ends meet. The Internet not only sells more books for me, it also gives me more opportunities to earn my keep through writing-related activities.
GitHub is where people build software. More than 27 million people use GitHub to discover, fork, and contribute to over 80 million projects.
I think that this would be a useful addition. Although it is easy enough to use HTML tag;
It is just another thing to consider. Thinking about the ‘user’, anytime that such steps can be baked in is a good thing.
School libraries have been called instructional media centres, media centres, information centres, information commons, iCentres, learning labs, learning commons, digital libraries, and cybraries (Farmer, 2017). These terms are in some ways faddish and transitory. ‘Library’, however, has a deep and long tradition associated with it, although the spaces and tools of libraries change over time. Librarians in schools have also had many names, such as teacher librarian, library teacher, library media specialist, library media teacher, cybrarian, information navigator, information specialist, information professional, informationist, and information scientist (Farmer, 2017; Lankes, 2011). Lankes (2011) argues that the terms ‘library’ and ‘librarian’ are entwined with the concept of knowledge and learning. I have said before that those claiming disruption should embrace interrogation of their ideas. Does ‘library’ need to be disrupted, in what ways, and why (or why not)?
Deborah Netolicky reflects on her recent investigation into libraries. This included their history, how they and those who work within them are defined. Her review of literature found that libraries are:
- Neutral and democratising;
- Participatory and connected locally and globally;
- Centred around learning, literacy, research, and knowledge; and
- Facilitators of interdisciplinarity.
She also created a tri-venn diagram to represent the contested nature of the space:
I have written about the future of libraries before, however Netolicky’s deep dive takes it a step further.
There are several things we need to assume as we work with digital tools.
You will be hacked
You may have already been hacked and don’t know it
You will have to change your passwords quickly when you are hacked
You will most likely have to change passwords often
One the first steps in discussing privacy and security in online spaces usually involves your passwords. The challenge is that far too many of us have a…
Ian, I was recently caught up in a civil debate about password management. The question was why I did not simply store my passwords in Google. I said that it was my choice not to, but then got caught out not really having a reason why I did not store them within the browser.
I was wondering where that sat with your discussion of passwords and ‘security’. I raised the concern that storing passwords in Google was a lot of eggs to put in the one basket, but then isn’t that what happens with LastPass etc…
I am sure I am missing something here, just thought I would ask.
Consider this a rational corrective to centuries of dismissive shrugs, then: look for the gorilla. Do what we already automatically do with male art: assume there is something worthy and interesting hiding there. If you find it, admire it. And outline it, so that others will see it too. Once you point it out, we’ll never miss it again. And we will be better for seeing as obvious and inevitable something that previously – absent the instructions – we simply couldn’t perceive.
Lili Loofbourow tries to rewrite the wrong that has male art is epic, universal, and profoundly meaningful, while Women’s creations as domestic, emotional and trivial. This critique of gender has ramifications far beyond fiction. When I think of music and the world of producers, it is another field dominated by males.
One interesting quote to come out of the piece was from Susan Sontag:
A famous Susan Sontag meditation on this aesthetic paradigm bears repeating: “The great advantage men have is that our culture allows two standards of male beauty: the boy and the man. The beauty of a boy resembles the beauty of a girl. In both sexes, it is a fragile kind of beauty and flourishes naturally only in the early part of the life cycle. Happily, men are able to accept themselves under another standard of good looks – heavier, rougher, more thickly built … There is no equivalent of this second standard for women. The single standard of beauty for women dictates that they must go on having clear skin. Every wrinkle, every line, every grey hair, is a defeat.”
Profile Picture for Alan Levine aka CogDog Alan Levine aka CogDog (CogDogBlog)I’m a huge fan and repeat user of Martin Hawksey’s Twitter TAGS.
If you are doing a class or project with activity around a hashtag, and you are not using this tool, just stop everything and set one up. It’s rather brilliant, a Google Spreadsheet with some Hawksey-ian script genius underneath…