4,560 Matching Annotations
  1. May 2021
    1. Derek Thompson. (2021, May 17). Weeks ago, Gov. Abbott made Texas the first state to abolish its mask mandate and lift capacity constraints for all businesses. So, what changed? Nothing. There was ~no effect on COVID cases, employment, mobility, or retail foot traffic, in either liberal or conservative areas. Https://t.co/M8aeKOKJuP [Tweet]. @DKThomp. https://twitter.com/DKThomp/status/1394294260787261447

    1. Charlotte Jee recently wrote a lovely fictional intro to a piece on a “feminist Internet” that crystallized something I can’t quite believe I never saw before; if girls, women and non-binary people really got to choose where they spent their time online, we would never choose to be corralled into the hostile, dangerous spaces that endanger us and make us feel so, so bad. It’s obvious when you think about it. The current platforms are perfectly designed for misogyny and drive literally countless women from public life, or dissuade them from entering it. Online abuse, doxing, blue-tick dogpiling, pro-stalking and rape-enabling ‘features’ (like Strava broadcasting runners’ names and routes, or Slack’s recent direct-messaging fiasco) only happen because we are herded into a quasi-public sphere where we don’t make the rules and have literally nowhere else to go.

      A strong list of toxic behaviors that are meant to keep people from having a voice in the online commons. We definitely need to design these features out of our social software.

    1. Amidst the global pandemic, this might sound not dissimilar to public health. When I decide whether to wear a mask in public, that’s partially about how much the mask will protect me from airborne droplets. But it’s also—perhaps more significantly—about protecting everyone else from me. People who refuse to wear a mask because they’re willing to risk getting Covid are often only thinking about their bodies as a thing to defend, whose sanctity depends on the strength of their individual immune system. They’re not thinking about their bodies as a thing that can also attack, that can be the conduit that kills someone else. People who are careless about their own data because they think they’ve done nothing wrong are only thinking of the harms that they might experience, not the harms that they can cause.

      What lessons might we draw from public health and epidemiology to improve our privacy lives in an online world? How might we wear social media "masks" to protect our friends and loved ones from our own posts?

    1. “For one of the most heavily guarded individuals in the world, a publicly available Venmo account and friend list is a massive security hole. Even a small friend list is still enough to paint a pretty reliable picture of someone's habits, routines, and social circles,” Gebhart said.

      Massive how? He's such a public figure that most of these connections are already widely reported in the media or easily guessable by an private invistigator. The bigger issue is the related data of transactions which might open them up for other abuses or potential leverage as in the other examples.

    1. Social media platforms work on a sort of flywheel of engagement. View->Engage->Comment->Create->View. Paywalls inhibit that flywheel, and so I think any hope for a return to the glory days of the blogosphere will result in disappointment.

      The analogy of social media being a flywheel of engagement is an apt one and it also plays into the idea of "flow" because if you're bored with one post, the next might be better.

    1. Dr. Tom Frieden. (2021, April 30). Globally, the end of the pandemic isn’t near. More than a million lives depend on improving our response quickly. Don’t be blinded by the light at the end of the tunnel. There isn’t enough vaccine and the virus is gathering strength & speed. Global cooperation is crucial. 1/ [Tweet]. @DrTomFrieden. https://twitter.com/DrTomFrieden/status/1388172436999376899

    1. But “humane technology” is precisely the sort of pleasant sounding but ultimately meaningless idea that we must be watchful for at all times. To be clear, Harris is hardly the first critic to argue for some alternative type of technology, past critics have argued for: “democratic technics,” “appropriate technology,” “convivial tools,” “liberatory technology,” “holistic technology,” and the list could go on.

      A reasonable summary list of alternatives. Note how dreadful and unmemorable most of these names are. Most noticeable in this list is that I don't think that anyone actually built any actual tools that accomplish any of these theoretical things.

      It also makes more noticeable that the Center for Humane Technology seems to be theoretically arguing against something instead of "for" something.

    2. Thus, these companies have launched a new strategy to reinvigorate their all American status: engage in some heavy-handed techno-nationalism by attacking China. And this Sinophobic, and often flagrantly racist, shift serves to distract from the misdeeds of the tech companies by creating the looming menace of a big foreign other. This is a move that has been made by many of the tech companies, it is one that has been happily parroted by many elected officials, and it is a move which Harris makes as well.

      Perhaps the better move is to frame these companies as behemoths on the scale of foreign countries, but ones which have far more power and should be scrutinized more heavily than even China itself. What if the enemy is already within and it's name is Facebook or Google?

    1. O’Connor, D. B., Aggleton, J. P., Chakrabarti, B., Cooper, C. L., Creswell, C., Dunsmuir, S., Fiske, S. T., Gathercole, S., Gough, B., Ireland, J. L., Jones, M. V., Jowett, A., Kagan, C., Karanika‐Murray, M., Kaye, L. K., Kumari, V., Lewandowsky, S., Lightman, S., Malpass, D., … Armitage, C. J. (2020). Research priorities for the COVID‐19 pandemic and beyond: A call to action for psychological science. British Journal of Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12468

    1. Franceschini, C., Musetti, A., Zenesini, C., Palagini, L., Pelosi, A., Quattropani, M. C., Lenzo, V., Freda, M. F., Lemmo, D., Vegni, E., Borghi, L., Saita, E., Cattivelli, R., De Gennaro, L., Plazzi, G., Riemann, D., & Castelnuovo, G. (2020). Poor quality of sleep and its consequences on mental health during COVID-19 lockdown in Italy [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/ah6j3

    1. Adjiwanou, V., Alam, N., Alkema, L., Asiki, G., Bawah, A., Béguy, D., Cetorelli, V., Dube, A., Feehan, D., Fisker, A. B., Gage, A., Garcia, J., Gerland, P., Guillot, M., Gupta, A., Haider, M. M., Helleringer, S., Jasseh, M., Kabudula, C., … You, D. (2020). Measuring excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic in low- and lower-middle income countries: The need for mobile phone surveys [Preprint]. SocArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/4bu3q

    1. Aleta, A., Martín-Corral, D., Pastore y Piontti, A., Ajelli, M., Litvinova, M., Chinazzi, M., Dean, N. E., Halloran, M. E., Longini Jr, I. M., Merler, S., Pentland, A., Vespignani, A., Moro, E., & Moreno, Y. (2020). Modelling the impact of testing, contact tracing and household quarantine on second waves of COVID-19. Nature Human Behaviour, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0931-9

    1. Darren Dahly. (2021, February 24). @SciBeh One thought is that we generally don’t ‘press’ strangers or even colleagues in face to face conversations, and when we do, it’s usually perceived as pretty aggressive. Not sure why anyone would expect it to work better on twitter. Https://t.co/r94i22mP9Q [Tweet]. @statsepi. https://twitter.com/statsepi/status/1364482411803906048

    1. Ira, still wearing a mask, Hyman. (2020, November 26). @SciBeh @Quayle @STWorg @jayvanbavel @UlliEcker @philipplenz6 @AnaSKozyreva @johnfocook Some might argue the moral dilemma is between choosing what is seen as good for society (limiting spread of disinformation that harms people) and allowing people freedom of choice to say and see what they want. I’m on the side of making good for society decisions. [Tweet]. @ira_hyman. https://twitter.com/ira_hyman/status/1331992594130235393

  2. Apr 2021
    1. ReconfigBehSci. (2021, April 19). @ToddHorowitz3 so, given that no one can know the ‘unmitigated number’ what they seem to be calculating is in difference deaths given lockdown and model prediction without lockdown and calling that the ‘overestimate’—Which seems truly bizarre [Tweet]. @SciBeh. https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1384147188180082692

    1. Indians were not to be appeased—and certainly not brought into British public life.
      • Indians were kept from entering politics or public life
      • After the British gov take over in 1858, the British gov seeked to not only have direct control instead of a company's control, but also direct control instead of letting Indians have control
    1. I realized it was foolish of me to think the internet would ever pause just because I had. The internet is clever, but it’s not always smart. It’s personalized, but not personal. It lures you in with a timeline, then fucks with your concept of time. It doesn’t know or care whether you actually had a miscarriage, got married, moved out, or bought the sneakers. It takes those sneakers and runs with whatever signals you’ve given it, and good luck catching up.
    2. So on a blindingly sunny day in October 2019, I met with Omar Seyal, who runs Pinterest’s core product. I said, in a polite way, that Pinterest had become the bane of my online existence.“We call this the miscarriage problem,” Seyal said, almost as soon as I sat down and cracked open my laptop. I may have flinched. Seyal’s role at Pinterest doesn’t encompass ads, but he attempted to explain why the internet kept showing me wedding content. “I view this as a version of the bias-of-the-majority problem. Most people who start wedding planning are buying expensive things, so there are a lot of expensive ad bids coming in for them. And most people who start wedding planning finish it,” he said. Similarly, most Pinterest users who use the app to search for nursery decor end up using the nursery. When you have a negative experience, you’re part of the minority, Seyal said.

      What a gruesome name for an all-too-frequent internet problem: miscarriage problem

    3. To hear technologists describe it, digital memories are all about surfacing those archival smiles. But they’re also designed to increase engagement, the holy grail for ad-based business models.

      It would be far better to have apps focus on better reasons for on this day features. I'd love to have something focused on spaced repetition for building up my memory for other things. Reminders at a week, a month, three months, and six months would be a useful thing for some posts.

    4. Our smartphones pulse with memories now. In normal times, we may strain to remember things for practical reasons—where we parked the car—or we may stumble into surprise associations between the present and the past, like when a whiff of something reminds me of Sunday family dinners. Now that our memories are digital, though, they are incessant, haphazard, intrusive.
    5. I still have a photograph of the breakfast I made the morning I ended an eight-year relationship and canceled a wedding. It was an unremarkable breakfast—a fried egg—but it is now digitally fossilized in a floral dish we moved with us when we left New York and headed west. I don’t know why I took the photo, except, well, I do: I had fallen into the reflexive habit of taking photos of everything. Not long ago, the egg popped up as a “memory” in a photo app. The time stamp jolted my actual memory.

      Example of unwanted spaced repetition via social media.

    1. This year’s Slow Art Day — April 10 — comes at a time when museums find themselves in vastly different circumstances.

      Idea: Implement a slow web week for the IndieWeb, perhaps to coincide with the summit at the end of the week.

      People eschew reading material from social media and only consume from websites and personal blogs for a week. The tough part is how to implement actually doing this. Many people would have a tough time finding interesting reading material in a short time. What are good discovery endpoints for that? WordPress.com's reader? Perhaps support from feed reader community?

  3. Mar 2021
    1. There's a reasonably good overview of some ideas about fixing the harms social media is doing to democracy here and it's well framed by history.

      Much of it appears to be a synopsis from the perspective of one who's only managed to attend Pariser and Stround's recent Civic Signals/New_Public Festival.

      There could have been some touches of other research in the social space including those in the Activity Streams and IndieWeb spaces to provide some alternate viewpoints.

    2. Tang has sponsored the use of software called Polis, invented in Seattle. This is a platform that lets people make tweet-like, 140-character statements, and lets others vote on them. There is no “reply” function, and thus no trolling or personal attacks. As statements are made, the system identifies those that generate the most agreement among different groups. Instead of favoring outrageous or shocking views, the Polis algorithm highlights consensus. Polis is often used to produce recommendations for government action.

      An example of social media for proactive government action.

    3. Matias has his own lab, the Citizens and Technology Lab at Cornell, dedicated to making digital technologies that serve the public and not just private companies.

      [[J. Nathan Matias]] Citizens and Technology Lab

      I recall having looked at some of this research and not thinking it was as strong as is indicated here. I also seem to recall he had a connection with Tristan Harris?

    4. What Fukuyama and a team of thinkers at Stanford have proposed instead is a means of introducing competition into the system through “middleware,” software that allows people to choose an algorithm that, say, prioritizes content from news sites with high editorial standards.

      This is the second reference I've seen recently (Jack Dorsey mentioning a version was the first) of there being a marketplace for algorithms.

      Does this help introduce enough noise into the system to confound the drive to the extremes for the average person? What should we suppose from the perspective of probability theory?

    1. In the Camerer, Loewenstein and Weber's article, it is mentioned that the setting closest in structure to the market experiments done would be underwriting, a task in which well-informed experts price goods that are sold to a less-informed public. Investment bankers value securities, experts taste cheese, store buyers observe jewelry being modeled, and theater owners see movies before they are released. They then sell those goods to a less-informed public. If they suffer from the curse of knowledge, high-quality goods will be overpriced and low-quality goods underpriced relative to optimal, profit-maximizing prices; prices will reflect characteristics (e.g., quality) that are unobservable to uninformed buyers ("you get what you pay for").[5] The curse of knowledge has a paradoxical effect in these settings. By making better-informed agents think that their knowledge is shared by others, the curse helps alleviate the inefficiencies that result from information asymmetries (a better informed party having an advantage in a bargaining situation), bringing outcomes closer to complete information. In such settings, the curse on individuals may actually improve social welfare.

      How might one exploit this effect to more proactively improve and promote social welfare?

    1. The Kindle indicated with a subtle dotted underline and small inline text that those final sentences had been highlighted by “56 highlighters.” Other humans! Reading this same text, feeling the same impulse. Some need to mark those lines.

      Social annotation is definitely part of the future of text. Distributing it across modalities may be the difficult part.

    1. What I’d like more of is a social web that sits between these two extremes, something with a small town feel. So you can see people are around, and you can give directions and a friendly nod, but there’s no need to stop and chat, and it’s not in your face. It’s what I’ve talked about before as social peripheral vision (that post is about why it should be build into the OS).

      I love the idea of social peripheral vision online.

    2. A status emoji will appear in the top right corner of your browser. If it’s smiling, there are other people on the site right now too.

      This is pretty cool looking. I'll have to add it as an example to my list: Social Reading User Interface for Discovery.

      We definitely need more things like this on the web.

      It makes me wish the Reading.am indicator were there without needing to click on it.

      I wonder how this sort of activity might be built into social readers as well?

    3. How often have you been on the phone with a friend, trying to describe how to get somewhere online? Okay go to Amazon. Okay type in “whatever”. Okay, it’s the third one down for me… This is ridiculous! What if, instead, you both went to the website and then you could just say: follow me.

      There are definitely some great use cases for this.

    1. la DEPP31 révèlent que l’orientation vers les classes et filières conçues pour les élèves handicapés (ULIS, SEGPA, ITEP, IME) est fortement liée à l’origine sociale. Ainsi, parmi les enfants affectés dans ces classes pour des troubles intellectuels et cognitifs, 6% viennent d’un milieu social favorisé, contre 60% d’un milieu très défavorisé.
    1. Cintia, P., Fadda, D., Giannotti, F., Pappalardo, L., Rossetti, G., Pedreschi, D., Rinzivillo, S., Bonato, P., Fabbri, F., Penone, F., Savarese, M., Checchi, D., Chiaromonte, F., Vineis, P., Guzzetta, G., Riccardo, F., Marziano, V., Poletti, P., Trentini, F., … Merler, S. (2020). The relationship between human mobility and viral transmissibility during the COVID-19 epidemics in Italy. ArXiv:2006.03141 [Physics, Stat]. http://arxiv.org/abs/2006.03141

    1. Schoch-Spana, M., Brunson, E. K., Long, R., Ruth, A., Ravi, S. J., Trotochaud, M., Borio, L., Brewer, J., Buccina, J., Connell, N., Hall, L. L., Kass, N., Kirkland, A., Koonin, L., Larson, H., Lu, B. F., Omer, S. B., Orenstein, W. A., Poland, G. A., … White, A. (2020). The public’s role in COVID-19 vaccination: Human-centered recommendations to enhance pandemic vaccine awareness, access, and acceptance in the United States. Vaccine. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.vaccine.2020.10.059