But that essay continues on to a less quoted yet equally important insight, about democracy’s vulnerability to triviality. Madison notes that people are so prone to factionalism that “where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.”

This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics: Users were guided not just by their true preferences but by their past experiences of reward and punishment, and their prediction of how others would react to each new action. One of the engineers at Twitter who had worked on the “Retweet” button later revealed that he regretted his contribution because it had made Twitter a nastier place. As he watched Twitter mobs forming through the use of the new tool, he thought to himself, “We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon.”

Before 2009, Facebook had given users a simple timeline––a never-ending stream of content generated by their friends and connections, with the newest posts at the top and the oldest ones at the bottom. This was often overwhelming in its volume, but it was an accurate reflection of what others were posting. That began to change in 2009, when Facebook offered users a way to publicly “like” posts with the click of a button. That same year, Twitter introduced something even more powerful: the “Retweet” button, which allowed users to publicly endorse a post while also sharing it with all of their followers. Facebook soon copied that innovation with its own “Share” button, which became available to smartphone users in 2012. “Like” and “Share” buttons quickly became standard features of most other platforms.Shortly after its “Like” button began to produce data about what best “engaged” its users, Facebook developed algorithms to bring each user the content most likely to generate a “like” or some other interaction, eventually including the “share” as well. Later research showed that posts that trigger emotions––especially anger at out-groups––are the most likely to be shared.

Once social-media platforms had trained users to spend more time performing and less time connecting, the stage was set for the major transformation, which began in 2009: the intensification of viral dynamics.

Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. Social media has weakened all three.

Babel is a metaphor for what some forms of social media have done to nearly all of the groups and institutions most important to the country’s future—and to us as a people.

It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.

The fire hose was like in early Facebook days, when you saw the posts of everyone who was in your network in the order in which they were posted and that was the end of the story. I remember first starting to become clued in to the fact that that wasn’t the way it was working anymore, circa 2011, when I was seeing a lot more stupid stuff, and a lot more stuff that was clearly nudging me in one direction or another, rather than giving me an autonomous view of the landscape of information out there.

And therefore, to accept the dictates of algorithms in deciding what, for example, the next song we should listen to on Spotify is, accepting that it will be an algorithm that dictates this because we no longer recognize our non-algorithmic nature and we take ourselves to be the same sort of beings that don’t make spontaneous irreducible decisions about what song to listen to next, but simply outsource the duty for this sort of thing, once governed by inspiration now to a machine that is not capable of inspiration.

Algorithms in themselves are neither good nor bad. And they can be implemented even where you don’t have any technology to implement them. That is to say, you can run an algorithm on paper, and people have been doing this for many centuries. It can be an effective way of solving problems. So the “crisis moment” comes when the intrinsically neither-good-nor-bad algorithm comes to be applied for the resolution of problems, for logistical solutions, and so on in many new domains of human social life, and jumps the fence that contained it as focusing on relatively narrow questions to now structuring our social life together as a whole. That’s when the crisis starts.

a child had gone missing in our town and the FBI came to town to investigate immediately and had gone to the library. They had a tip and wanted to seize and search the library’s public computers. And the librarians told the FBI that they needed to get a warrant. The town was grief stricken and was enraged that the library would, at a time like that, demand that the FBI get a warrant. Like everyone in town was like, are you kidding me? A child is missing and you’re– and what? This town meeting afterwards, the library budget, of course, is up for discussion as it is every year, and the people were still really angry with the library, but a patron and I think trustee of the library – again, a volunteer, someone living in town – an elderly woman stood up and gave the most passionate defense of the Fourth Amendment and civil liberties to the people on the floor that I have ever witnessed.

The Internet owes its strength and success to a foundation of critical properties that, when combined, represent the Internet Way of Networking (IWN). This includes: an accessible Infrastructure with a common protocol, a layered architecture of interoperable building blocks, decentralized management and distributed routing, a common global identifier system, and a technology neutral, general-purpose network.

it’s important to note that this study specifically looked at political speech (the area that people are most concerned about, even though the reality is that this is a tiny fraction of what most content moderation efforts deal with), and it did find that a noticeably larger number of Republicans had their accounts banned than Democrats in their study (with a decently large sample size). However, that did not mean that it showed bias. Indeed, the study is quite clever, in that it corrected for generally agreed upon false information sharers — and the conclusion is that Twitter’s content moderation is biased against agreed-upon misinformation rather than political bias. It’s just that Republicans were shown to be much, much, much more willing to share such misinformation.

The situationwould be better for IPv6 under two conditions. First, if IPv6 couldoffer some popular new services that IPv4 cannot offer—that wouldprovide the former with additional products (and value) that thelatter does not have. Second, IPv6 should avoid competition withIPv4, at least until it has been widely deployed. That would be thecase if IPv6 was presented, not as a replacement to IPv4, but as“the second network layer protocol” that is required to support theprevious new services.

EvoArch suggests an additional reason that IPv4 has been so sta-ble over the last three decades. Recall that a large birth rate atthe layer above the waist can cause a lethal drop in the normalizedvalue of the kernel, if the latter is not chosen as substrate by thenew nodes. In the current Internet architecture, the waist is the net-work layer but the next higher layer (transport) is also very narrowand stable. So, the transport layer acts as an evolutionary shield forIPv4 because any new protocols at the transport layer are unlikelyto survive the competition with TCP and UDP. On the other hand,a large number of births at the layer above TCP or UDP (applica-tion protocols or specific applications) is unlikely to significantlyaffect the value of those two transport protocols because they al-ready have many products. In summary, the stability of the twotransport protocols adds to the stability of IPv4, by eliminating anypotential new transport protocols that could select a new networklayer protocol instead of IPv4.

To ensure more diversity in the middle layers, EvoArch suggests designing protocols that are largely non-overlapping in terms of services and functionality so that they do not compete with each other. The model suggests that protocols overlapping more than 70 percent of their functions start competing with each other.

The EvoArch model predicts the emergence of few powerful and old protocols in the middle layers, referred to as evolutionary kernels. The evolutionary kernels of the Internet architecture include IPv4 in the network layer, and TCP and the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) in the transport layer. These protocols provide a stable framework through which an always-expanding set of physical and data-link layer protocols, as well as new applications and services at the higher layers, can interoperate and grow. At the same time, however, those three kernel protocols have been difficult to replace, or even modify significantly.

All the evidence indicates that at the edge of the Internet lies an endless frontier of new potential applications and that new transmission technologies are eagerly absorbed as we have seen with the arrival of smartphones, 4G and 5G. The Internet continues to evolve as new ideas for its use and implementation bubble to the surface in the minds of inventors everywhere.

A higher layer protocol is encapsulated as payload in lower layers which provides a well-defined boundary between layers.  This boundary isolates a higher layer from lower layer implementation.

Save around $11.30 for every 100 miles driven in an EV instead of a gasoline fueled vehicle.

In the information age, filtering systems, driven by algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI), have become increasingly prominent, to such an extent that most of the information you encounter on the internet is now rearranged, ranked and filtered in some way. The trend towards a more customised information landscape is a result of multiple factors. But advances in technology and the fact that the body of information available online grows exponentially are important contributors.

As a woman in America in 2022, I will also observe the sexist hostility implicit in this viewpoint is unsurprising as it is insidious. Library work is one of a  small number of professions that have not been (completely) dominated by white men. Libraries are easy targets for this style of prescriptive opinion piece, and I challenge the desire by powerful men to tell others how to do their jobs because it reeks of a desire to dominate which is wholly inappropriate to the collective challenges we face.

Algospeak refers to code words or turns of phrase users have adopted in an effort to create a brand-safe lexicon that will avoid getting their posts removed or down-ranked by content moderation systems. For instance, in many online videos, it’s common to say “unalive” rather than “dead,” “SA” instead of “sexual assault,” or “spicy eggplant” instead of “vibrator.”

Much of the time, the blurred automation/enforcement distinction doesn’t matter. If you and I trust one another, and you send me a disappearing message in the mistaken belief that the thing preventing me from leaking it is the disappearing message bit and not my trustworthiness, that’s okay. The data still doesn’t leak, so we’re good.But eventually, the distinction turns into a fracture line.

But beyond this danger is a subtler — and more profound — one. We should not normalize the idea that our computers are there to control us, rather than to empower us.

Disappearing message apps take something humans are bad at (remembering to do a specific task at a specific time) and hand that job to a computer, which is really good at that.

I thought that the point of disappearing messages was to eat your cake and have it too, by allowing you to send a message to your adversary and then somehow deprive them of its contents. This is obviously a stupid idea.But the threat that Snapchat — and its disappearing message successors —was really addressing wasn’t communication between untrusted parties, it was automating data-retention agreements between trusted parties.

On the flip side, getting more than 700 sign-ups for two weeks in a row made operators eligible for an additional Orb. “Just tell people it’s free money,” one operator said a Worldcoin representative advised them.

Biometrics play an important role in colonial history: British administrators began experimenting with them in the 1850s as a way to control and intimidate their subjects in colonial India. Worldcoin’s activities in India, as well as other former British colonies such as Zimbabwe, where banks are banned from processing crypto transactions, and Kenya, where a new law forbids the transfer of biometrics data beyond the country’s borders, evoke Silicon Valley’s history of ignoring sensitive cultural issues and skirting regulations.

In Hypothes.is who are you annotating with?

Do you annotate differently in public view, self censoring or self editing?

Weinberg’s tweet announcing the change generated thousands of comments, many of them from conservative-leaning users who were furious that the company they turned to in order to get away from perceived Big Tech censorship was now the one doing the censoring. It didn’t help that the content DuckDuckGo was demoting and calling disinformation was Russian state media, whose side some in the right-wing contingent of DuckDuckGo’s users were firmly on.

even if it is necessary to adjust the policy over time as new risks and considerationsemerge.

Organizationsmust consider these threats before introducing new technologies, rather than the other way around

Students’ perspectives on their data may shift, however,when they are given opportunities to learn about the risks (Bowler et al., 2017), and there is astrong argument that such activities are a requirement for ethical practice in the use of data(Braunack-Mayer et al., 2020)

graduate attribute statements

This in turn means that data ownership, privacy, ethics andtransparency are becoming issues that are dealt with by corporate players, based inthe global North, rather than negotiated through local policies and theirapplication.

educators and administrators need to be wary about potential discriminations and asymmetriesresulting from continually categorising and normalising people as they work and study.

Surveillance technologies, especially those backed by significant amounts of venture capital, areoften underpinned by the same precarious labour and outsourcing practices that are critiqued fromwithin the academy

s teachers’ roles become less coherent and satisfying, they alsobecome more stratified, with staff who perform the lower-valued (typically more caring, student-oriented and “feminised”) aspects of the role being increasingly casualised, monitored, andsubjected to “efficiency” measures.

Practices of monitoring and tracking students’ online behaviour also entrench the belief thatmeaningful learning activity is that which can be measured minutely and monitored closely,ignoring activities such as thinking, reading, imagining, creating, challenging, and unstructureddiscussion

However,perversely, the more these tools are employed, the more adversarial teaching relationships withstudents become, fueling both the risk of cheating and the arguments against a trust model ofhigher education

trust that research processes generate valid, useful knowledge and evidence that caninform practice and decision-making both within the HE context and in society morebroadly.

the normalization of vendor-universityrelationships (which tend to privilege vendor profit-making)

Theunilateral claiming of private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioraldata constitutes, for Zuboff, a new economic order

Thus,information about people and their behaviour is made visible to other people, systems andcompanies.

panopticon

algorithmic embedding and enhancement of biases that reinforceracism, sexism, and structural inequality

carceral

Data-driven decision making in education settings is becoming an established practice to optimizeinstitutional functioning and structures (e.g., knowledge management, and strategic planning), tosupport institutional decision-making (e.g., decision support systems and academic analytics), tomeet institutional or programmatic accreditation and quality assurance, to facilitate participatorymodels of decision-making, and to make curricular and/or instructional improvements

DIGITAL CULTURE & EDUCATION, 14(1) 2022, ISSN 1836-8301Surveillance Practices, Risks and Responsesin the Post Pandemic University

Over vast distances, the sonic exhaust of our digital lives reverberates: the minute vibrations of hard disks, the rumbling of air chillers, the cranking of diesel generators, the mechanical spinning of fans. Data centers emit acoustic waste, what environmentalists call “noise pollution.”

In some cases, only 6 to 12 percent of energy consumed is devoted to active computational processes.

The flotsam and jetsam of our digital queries and transactions, the flurry of electrons flitting about, warm the medium of air. Heat is the waste product of computation, and if left unchecked, it becomes a foil to the workings of digital civilization. Heat must therefore be relentlessly abated to keep the engine of the digital thrumming in a constant state, 24 hours a day, every day.

computers might therefore easily outperform humans at facial recognition and do so in a much less biased way than humans. And at this point, government agencies will be morally obliged to use facial recognition software since it will make fewer mistakes than humans do.

In June 2020, in the first known case of its type, a man in Detroit was arrested in front of his family for burglary because he was mistakenly identified by facial recognition software. It may come as no surprise the man was Black

Researchers including MIT's Joy Buolamwini have demonstrated the technology often works better on men than women, better on white people than Black people, and worst of all on Black women.

Our own commercial tools, as well as open-source software tools and many datasets that populate public databases, are available with no oversight.

Discussion of societal impacts of AI has principally focused on aspects such as safety, privacy, discrimination and potential criminal misuse10, but not on national and international security.

Importantly, we had a human in the loop with a firm moral and ethical ‘don’t-go-there’ voice to intervene.

the better we can predict toxicity, the better we can steer our generative model to design new molecules in a region of chemical space populated by predominantly lethal molecules.

In less than 6 hours after starting on our in-house server, our model generated 40,000 molecules that scored within our desired threshold. In the process, the AI designed not only VX, but also many other known chemical warfare agents that we identified through visual confirmation with structures in public chemistry databases. Many new molecules were also designed that looked equally plausible.

This generative model normally penalizes predicted toxicity and rewards predicted target activity. We simply proposed to invert this logic by using the same approach to design molecules de novo, but now guiding the model to reward both toxicity and bioactivity instead.

de novo

Dual use of artificial-intelligence-powered drug discovery

The growing prevalence of AI systems, as well as their growing impact on every aspect of our daily life create a great need to that AI systems are "responsible" and incorporate important social values such as fairness, accountability and privacy.

inherent precision-recall trade-off

Newton arranged an experiment in which one person — a “tapper” — was asked to tap out the melody of a popular song, while another person — the “listener” — was asked to identify it. The tappers assumed that their listeners would correctly identify about 50% of their melodies; they were amazed to learn that the listeners only got about one out of 40 songs correct. To the tappers, their melodies sounded perfectly clear and obvious, but the listeners heard no music, no instrumentation in their heads — only the muffled noise of a finger tapping on a table.

Trust is paramount to the way networks self-organize and interoperate with other networks.

But now the government of Ukraine has called on ICANN to disconnect Russia from the internet by revoking its Top Level domain names

Each application will therefore provide users with one or more trust lists, which are lists of certification authorities that issue credentials for that application.

This is accomplished through the use of a certification authority (CA). CAs perform real-world due diligence to ensure credentials are only issued to actors who are whom they claim to be.

Provenance generally refers to the facts about the history of a piece of digital content assets (image, video, audio recording, document).

“Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” has rapidly transformed China into one of the most economically unequal societies on earth. It now boasts a Gini Coefficient of, officially, around 0.47, worse than the U.S.’s 0.41. The wealthiest 1% of the population now holds around 31% of the country’s wealth (not far behind the 35% in the U.S.). But most people in China remain relatively poor: some 600 million still subsist on a monthly income of less than 1,000 yuan ($155) a month.

From the smug point of view of millions who now inhabit the Chinese internet, Wang’s dark vision of American dissolution was nothing less than prophetic

he marvels at homeless encampments in the streets of Washington DC, out-of-control drug crime in poor black neighborhoods in New York and San Francisco, and corporations that seemed to have fused themselves to and taken over responsibilities of government. Eventually, he concludes that America faces an “unstoppable undercurrent of crisis” produced by its societal contradictions, including between rich and poor, white and black, democratic and oligarchic power, egalitarianism and class privilege, individual rights and collective responsibilities, cultural traditions and the solvent of liquid modernity.

he believed that the modernization of “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” was effectively leaving China without any real cultural direction at all. “There are no core values in China’s most recent structure,” he warned. This could serve only to dissolve societal and political cohesion.

Wang perceived a country “in a state of transformation” from “an economy of production to an economy of consumption,” while evolving “from a spiritually oriented culture to a materially oriented culture,” and “from a collectivist culture to an individualistic culture.”

Since the start of the pandemic, Gloo’s Mr. Beck said, the company has been focusing on how to help churches get more attention on Google search. The company has a program for churches to pool their funds and buy search keywords—something a single church couldn’t afford on its own, he said.

Clients can integrate their internal databases with Gloo, adding to its data trove. The company offers technology that churches can put on their websites to collect data, and has questionnaires churches can give their congregants.

Gloo said third-party data has always been anonymized to users—it said it doesn’t reveal people’s names or exact locations to them. In response to questions from the Journal, the company said it also began de-identifying data within its own databases last year.

Second, knowledge may be contested, where it has been constructed within particular power relations and dominant perspectives.

the presentation on which it is based

Metadata is about both value and values

data which relieves a potential user (whether human or machine) of having to have full advance knowledge of the existence or characteristics of a resource of potential interest in the environment.

I have spoken about four sources of metadata in the past.

the network environment

Controlled Digital Lending: Unlocking the Library’s Full Potential

libraries generally lend digitized versions ofprint materials from their collections, strictly limiting them to a single digital copy per physicalcopy owned—a one-to-one “owned-to-loaned” ratio. If a library owns two physical copies of TheGiving Tree, it only loans out two copies at any time, whether physically or digitally.

Develop a process to ensure privacy is aconsideration in student analytics andinstitutional research. Unfortunately, concernsabout student data privacy have been minimal sincethe earliest days of the student success movement

Comprehensive and sustained privacyawareness campaigns

Efforts to clarify and disseminatethe differences between “privacy as advocacy” (e.g.,privacy is a fundamental right; privacy is an ethicalnorm) and “privacy as compliance” (e.g., ensuringprivacy policies and laws are followed; privacyprograms train, monitor, and measure adherence torules) help frame conversations and set expectations.

These enhanced capabilities at theinstitution will no doubt necessitate investments in privacystaffing and infrastructure, resulting in fully staffed andresourced privacy units within the institution.

As informed and engagedstakeholders, students understand how and why theirinstitutions use academic and personal data.

By extracting the center frame of every shot, the user couldview all of the frames simultaneously on the contact sheet to review all visual content in thevideo.

Leveraging the metadata from AMP, for example, users are already able to conduct searches(with varying levels of results) such as:● Take me to every point in a video interview with Herman B Wells where Herman B Wellsmentions Eleanor Roosevelt on the subjects of Presidents’ spouses and 20th-centuryleaders.● Show me every video interview with Herman B Wells in the 1970s where the intervieweris Thomas D. Clark, and it was produced at WTIU Bloomington.● Take me to every point in a video interview with Herman B Wells where Herman B Wellsis on camera and talking about Midwest universities where there is no music present.

Based on work and results so far, the project team has concluded that the approach taken inAMP is effective and scalable for generation of metadata for certain types of AV collections,particularly those that involve significant amounts of spoken word content. This includeslectures, events, and documentaries, along with oral history interviews and other ethnographiccontent.

as of February 2021, Europeana comprises 59%images and 38% text objects, but only 1% sound objects and 2% video objects.3 DPLA iscomposed of 25% images and 54% text, with only 0.3% sound objects, and 0.6% videoobjects.4Another reason, beyond cost, that audiovisual recordings are not widely accessible is the lack ofsufficiently granular metadata to support identification, discovery, and use, or to supportinformed rights determination and access control and permissions decisions on the part ofcollections staff and users.

The goal of data brokers is to allow consumers to decide which information may be shared with advertisers, then share in some of the revenue generated by its use. These services ask users to sign up on the Web or via an application, connect their social media and Web accounts, then ask them to answer specific questions about their interests. Based on the data provided and collected initially and over time, the brokers will place users into segments, and advertisers can purchase access to data from one or more segments for use in personalized advertising. Each time their data is shared, or advertisers purchase access to a segment in which the user's data has been placed, the user can earn points, rewards, or cash. All the data brokers note that they store their user data on the cloud using a variety of encryption and security protocols, and that the end users with whom they work can opt out of having specific data shared if they so choose.

Data broker Invisibly (www.invisibly.com) provides a listing of various types of data available for sale on the dark web, ranging from a Social Security number (valued at just $0.53) to a complete healthcare record ($250).

data on demographics that are in limited supply (such as data on Middle Eastern male consumers) is more valuable than demographic data on white millennial women. Similarly, the browsing data of individuals seeking to purchase a Tesla or Ferrari automobile within the next month would be valued more highly by data brokers and advertisers than the data of someone browsing for the best deals on a used Chrysler minivan.

Catala, a programming language developed by Protzenko's graduate student Denis Merigoux, who is working at the National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (INRIA) in Paris, France. It is not often lawyers and programmers find themselves working together, but Catala was designed to capture and execute legal algorithms and to be understood by lawyers and programmers alike in a language "that lets you follow the very specific legal train of thought," Protzenko says.

Raspberry Pi Trading

The ultimate solution probably requires incentives that provide enough deterrence to eliminate such misconduct proactively rather than treating it reactively.

Certainly, the pandemic has brought home not only enormous challenges in public communication about science but also the serious consequences of our failures in this respect.

journal editors and publishers — are becoming responsible not only for facilitating peer to peer communications but also for public access. As such, they are grappling with the upstream exploitations and downstream public communications and misinformation which were previously squarely outside their remit.

tack towards discovery, towards truth

When I worked at Google, it will still VERY normal until 2009/2010-ish to ask IT for a machine, put it under your desk, and run a CI like Jenkins on it.

The only issue that did not appear on the Top 10 list of any type of institution was Creating a Culture of Care. Its average importance for the institutional groupings ranged from 6.37 to 7.02 on a scale from 1 to 10. These relatively low ratings may not indicate that mental health is not an important issue that technology can help address. They may instead suggest that the contributions of technology to improving mental health are nascent. The Early Adopter institutions rated Creating a Culture of Care most highly, whereas the lowest average rating for this issue came from Late Adopter institutions.

#12. Where Have All the Applicants Gone?: Using technology to streamline administrative processes and leveraging artificial intelligence to assist the enrollment pipeline

Collaboration spaces equipped with big screens and state-of-the-art simulcast and videoconferencing capability can support both face-to-face and virtual collaborations. Maker spaces can enable students to work on creative projects, both academic and personal. Radical creativity might inspire institutional staff to design and develop a maker space 2.0 that builds on the first generation of maker spaces.

Leaders need to continue that communication and develop those relationships in remote and hybrid working environments, whether those environments become an ongoing fixture of the institution or are only part of a business continuity plan.

They are overwhelmed by continuing to live with the pandemic, and many of them long for equilibrium instead of having to constantly adapt as the public health situation morphs.

In all cases, institutions need to have a security and privacy strategy. Endpoint protection platforms, two-factor authentication, and cloud monitoring tools are some of the technologies that IT staff use to protect institutional data and individuals' identities.

Achieving this requires a strong partnership among those in the procurement, cybersecurity, and legal departments, business process owners, and other key stakeholders to ensure that there are clear and equitable terms and conditions in the cloud contract.

Department staff may purchase cloud-based software to address business needs, only later learning that it may not meet institutional security requirements or be easily integrated with institutional applications and infrastructure.

The biggest transformation that institutional stakeholders are seeing now is a much broader collaboration between teaching faculty and the staff who support the curriculum, including academic technologists, instructional designers, and librarians. The most equitable level of access for all happens when faculty and staff are working together to improve the learning experience for students. As a result of this collaboration, faculty understand what other staff at the institution bring to the table, and staff become more involved in the classroom experience, physical or remote, and better understand what that experience is like for students and for faculty.

some college and university leaders in Germany are considering adopting an on-premises cloud architecture to preserve digital sovereignty, avoid an over-reliance on proprietary systems, mitigate financial risks, and adhere to the emphasis by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on controlling one's digital destiny.

As has long been the practice of solution providers, pricing is a black box that varies from contract to contract.

The need to maintain business continuity prevailed over the need to plan and to mitigate risk through appropriate cloud contract terms. The consequences may need to be addressed in 2022.

Beyond that, employers have been clamoring for clearer information about what graduates know and can do with their education (e.g., competency-based certifications). An associate's, bachelor's, or master's degree is not specific enough to enable employers to evaluate talent for the needs of their companies.

For those who simply want to return to the way things were, the talk of permanent changes is frightening and exhausting. Faculty and staff may interpret plans for dual modes of working and teaching as plans to double their workloads.

Both faculty and staff will need to become more flexible and adaptive in order to respond rapidly to changing circumstances and students' needs. Faculty will need to become adept at remote teaching, learning, collaboration, and advising so that they can confidently revise and improvise in the moment.

They must be well supported by IT staff who understand not just the technology but also the concepts behind its application to teaching and learning

heutagogical

Institutions will need IT staff who are able to engage with students to provide them with the technology training and skills that they'll need to be successful.

Similarly, many faculty and academic leaders are entrenched around the idea that certain modalities of teaching and learning are intrinsically better or more effective than others. That must change to serve the "everywhere" learner (and the "anywhere" faculty).

The biggest challenge may be finding ways of successfully working and learning in a hybrid mode. Meetings, teaching, and other synchronous group activities work best when everyone is online or when everyone is in the same room. Technologists are investing in various technologies that support "dual mode" instruction or meetings; these technologies include additional cameras, screens, audio, and collaboration technologies. Not every effort will work, so technologists often frame the technologies as experiments or pilots and encourage faculty and staff to test various options. Yet the solution is not only a technical one; equally important is re-engineering academic and work processes to enable people to conduct their work in a seamless way regardless of the modality.

Many institutional leaders are considering whether to make big bets on technology to change the game at their campuses. Those big bets will have major impacts on institutional culture and the very nature of how constituents get work done.

As a result of the pandemic, students want and expect more opportunities outside of the normal, traditional hours that institutions typically offer. They want weekend, evening, and holiday hours for everything from classes to student services to the library.

Options for reimagining the campus include (1) redesigning campus physical spaces to support hybrid learning and work, (2) addressing space crunches by encouraging administrative groups to work remotely and then converting administrative spaces to academic spaces that support learning, research, and scholarship that is better conducted on campus, and/or (3) lowering costs by reducing the physical campus space.

The two models will coexist at many institutions, forcing leaders to consider what can be done only on campus and what can be done virtually.

Instructional support and IT staff must provide more training for faculty and staff, to keep them up-to-date and to ensure that they have the skills needed to teach and work securely and effectively beyond the traditional campus.

Yet faculty, staff, and students are tired, stressed, and overwhelmed.

Learning analytics can help faculty adapt their teaching to identify and support students quickly and efficiently. Assessment technologies, although often controversial, are maturing, and with the help of learning and assessment advocates, these technologies can become more valid and better safeguard privacy.

Using collaborative technologies like Slack or Microsoft Teams can foster dialogue and community around how faculty are using technology in their teaching, how they are teaching, and how they are changing the curriculum.

Change decisions can't be made behind closed doors. They will require dialogue across staff groups and student groups to help all stakeholders understand and agree on goals and feel that they have a hand in choices and timing.

They will provide a holistic view of students, alumni, employees, resources, and more in ways that can result in beneficial outcomes. New architectures increase access to data and resources, which can offer better insights about institutional products and services and enable faster, more accurate decisions.

digital transformation (Dx)

The coming demographic cliff—a steep drop-off in potential first-time full-time freshmen projected to arrive in 2025 due to the decline in birth rate in the 2008 recession—may further erode enrollment income at US institutions.

Institutions that collaborate to manage cybersecurity can share costs and expertise, both reducing the burden on individual institutions and increasing the level and effectiveness of cybersecurity at institutions of all sizes.

Some cybersecurity tasks can be outsourced, however, to extend staff and/or acquire specialized skills.

What were once clear distinctions among hardware, software, cloud, and services and between primary and secondary suppliers continue to blur and overlap to the point where they're no longer distinguishable as separate categories. That raises questions and challenges about identifying the perimeter—or, where institutionally owned and managed technology infrastructure ends. Additionally, the integration between technology run in-house and that run by an external supplier continues to blur boundaries between consumers' responsibilities and suppliers' responsibilities. That, in turn, creates the challenge of clarifying which technology and data components can and should be secured by institutions versus by suppliers versus by end users and, thus, where security risk factors and responsibilities reside. Sometimes suppliers' security and privacy controls may not be as tight as institutions require or realize.

Nyquist rate

Either you get solar power or you get trees. In California, they put their thumb on the scale of solar panels and basically said the trees have to come down.

.In 1622, the same year that Galileo was reiterating his defense of the heliocentric model of the solar system, Pope Gregory XV created the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith—known in Latin as the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, or the Propaganda Fide for short—a body tasked with coordinating and expanding the missionary activity of the Catholic Church

Proper long-term, digital preservation involves curation: careful attention to ensure the content and associated metadata are safe and secure and are managed so that they remain usable despite changes in file formats and technologies in order to remain accessible.

And yet, you don’t have to prove anything to get that email in the first place. I’ve had that Gmail address longer than I’ve had any one physical address in my adult life, or any phone number or any driver’s license number. The only identifier I’ve had for longer is my Social Security number. I got that from the federal government after my parents submitted proof of my identity and citizenship status. I just had to fill out a few prompts on a website to get my email address.

Ray Tomlinson is widely credited as the inventor of email, but the technology evolved in a piecemeal fashion, over time, with additions and improvements from a lot of people. Dave Crocker worked on an early effort to create email standards in 1977 and spent the rest of his career creating or contributing to internet mail standards, which he is still doing today. Crocker told me that email was the result of a “massive amount of increments,” most of which were reactive; each iteration was a solution to an existing problem, or someone just coming up with “a cool idea.”

In traditional paper-based schemes, voters verify by visually inspecting that their ballot represents their intention.

This report will focus primarily on the hardware and software associated with cameras, location trackers, and sensors. These technologies are common components in broader “smart city” technologies and projects, and they have the high-risk ability to collect data that can directly, or in combination with other data, identify individuals.

technology that is capable of collecting data that can identify individuals because that data can be used to target individuals, which in turn can erode the sense of safety and inclusivity requisite for public spaces to serve as commons for democratic functions.

This story, with its mission creep and mishaps, is representative of a broader set of “smart city” cautionary trends that took place in the last year. These cautionary trends call us to question if our public spaces become places where one fears punishment, how will that affect collective action and political movements?

“Donor-advised funds have grown even more rapidly in number and assets and DAFs have NO LEGAL MANDATE to pay out anything each year. So donors take tax breaks immediately when they transfer their wealth to DAFs. But those DAFs are not actually legally required to actually distribute those funds to nonprofits.” So there's a lot of very wealthy people who use DAFs and private foundations for tax advantages.

And if you look at for instance, Freexian, which is an effort where Debian developers club together and get sponsorship money, so they can each spend a certain number of hours each month consulting on really important parts of Debian software and infrastructure.

As shown in the previous section, accelerometers in mobile devices can allow serious invasions of user privacy. Even when other sensors, such as cameras, microphones and GPS are turned off, accelerometer data can be sufficient to obtain information about a device holder’s location, health condition, body features, age, gender, emotions and personality traits. Acceleration signals may even be used to uniquely identify a person based on biometric movement patterns and to reconstruct sequences of text entered into a device.

Body movement patterns recorded by accelerometers in mobile devices have been demonstrated to be discriminative enough to differentiate between, or even uniquely identify, users.

It has been shown that accelerometers in mobile devices can be exploited for user localization and reconstruction of travel trajectories, even when other localization systems, such as GPS, are disabled. In [38], Han et al. were able to geographically track a person who is driving a car based solely on accelerometer readings from the subject’s smartphone. In their approach, they first calculate the vehicle’s approximate motion trajectory using three-axis acceleration measurements from an iPhone located inside the vehicle, and then map the derived trajectory to the shape of existing routes on a map. An example application of the algorithm is displayed in Fig. 2. Han et al. describe their results as “comparable to the typical accuracy for handheld global positioning systems.”

The concept is based on fundamentally wrong assumptions.

this article provides an overview and classification of the manifold obstacles that render privacy self-management largely useless in practice.

People's privacy choices are typically irrational, involuntary and/or circumventable due to human limitations, corporate tricks, legal loopholes and the complexities of modern data processing. Moreover, the self-management approach ignores the consequences that individual privacy choices have on other people and society at large.

But Apple isn’t going to do any of this if they don’t think they have to, and they won’t think they have to if people aren’t calling for their heads.

But companies like Apple and Google can raise both the cost and risk of exploitation — not just everywhere, but at least on specific channels like iMessage. This could make NSO’s scaling model much harder to maintain. A world where only a handful of very rich governments can launch exploits (under very careful vetting and controlled circumstances) isn’t a great world, but it’s better than a world where any tin-pot authoritarian can cut a check to NSO and surveil their political opposition or some random journalist.

An entirely separate area is surveillance and detection: Apple already performs some remote telemetry to detect processes doing weird things. This kind of telemetry could be expanded as much as possible while not destroying user privacy. While this wouldn’t necessarily stop NSO, it would make the cost of throwing these exploits quite a bit higher — and make them think twice before pushing them out to every random authoritarian government.

A case against security nihilism

correlated a unique mobile device to Burrill when it was used consistently from 2018 until at least 2020 from the USCCB staff residence and headquarters, from meetings at which Burrill was in attendance, and was also used on numerous occasions at Burrill’s family lake house, near the residences of Burrill’s family members, and at a Wisconsin apartment in Burrill’s hometown, at which Burrill himself has been listed as a resident.

Commercially available app signal data does not identify the names of app users, but instead correlates a unique numerical identifier to each mobile device using particular apps. Signal data, collected by apps after users consent to data collection, is aggregated and sold by data vendors. It can be analyzed to provide timestamped location data and usage information for each numbered device.

the mobile device correlated to Burrill emitted hookup app signals at the USCCB staff residence, and from a street in a residential Washington neighborhood. He traveled to Las Vegas shortly thereafter, data records show.On June 22, the mobile device correlated to Burrill emitted signals from Entourage, which bills itself as Las Vegas’ “gay bathhouse.”

But an analysis of app data signals correlated to Burrill’s mobile device shows the priest also visited gay bars and private residences while using a location-based hookup app in numerous cities from 2018 to 2020, even while traveling on assignment for the U.S. bishops’ conference

Pillar Investigates: USCCB gen sec Burrill resigns after sexual misconduct allegations

Science really needs global governance.

a systems problem—the system provides incentives to publish fraudulent research and does not have adequate regulatory processes. Researchers progress by publishing research, and because the publication system is built on trust and peer review is not designed to detect fraud it is easy to publish fraudulent research. The business model of journals and publishers depends on publishing, preferably lots of studies as cheaply as possible. They have little incentive to check for fraud and a positive disincentive to experience reputational damage—and possibly legal risk—from retracting studies.

High Social Media

FEAR OF “GREAT REPLACEMENT” MOST CONSISTENT FACTOR ACROSS STUDIES

We need a fine-grained understanding of who stormed the Capitol on January 6 and who currently believe the 2020 election was stolen and would participate in a violent protest in order to know who we are dealing with and create viable solutions for the future

it's actually been kind of healing in a way, because you see that every generation of us has to confront this idea of what it's supposed to be and sort of say, but in a spirit, in a generous spirit, in a spirit of sharing.

And I remember listening to or trying to watch one of the Sunday morning political affairs shows. And I had no idea what they were talking about. And I didn't like how that made me feel because I didn't - and then I realized, oh, it's not for me. It's for the insiders.

But what about the people who haven't had a chance to think about that yet? Could we think about them? And I hope that there will always be some room for those folks because, you know, why should everybody have already decided everything or know everything? I feel that there has to be some place where you can find things out without being made to feel stupid. And I'm hoping that we will continue to be that place.

I'm not telling you what to think. I'm telling you what to think about.

we were really interested in putting on people on the air who were what you would call, quote-unquote, like, "regular people" because we felt their lived experience told a truth that needed to be told.

who are the rising stars in music in Ghana? Like, it wasn't war. It wasn't, you know, war crimes. It wasn't people being - you know, recovering from war. But it was daily life there. It was something that was hugely important to the people living there. And that's partly what we were trying to achieve and, I think, did achieve.

And this is why a real rendering of history is important, because people think - just like social movements, they think they just sort of happen. You just arose fully formed. No. After months of discussion, we sort of arrived in the same place and, you know, launched Tell Me More.

These recommendation systems are getting so good that if we aren't vigilant, we're just going to end up drifting toward whatever the machine tells us we like. CHILDS: This isn't just a problem of human psychology. It's also a computer science problem. Jingjing says it becomes a feedback loop. Those little drifts add up.

to figure out if recommendation systems are changing us, Jingjing and her team created a series of experiments using college students, basically fiddling with recommendations and seeing how those recommendations affected the students' behavior.

Jingjing Zhang

The original collaborative filtering required users to tell the algorithm, hey, I like what this guy likes, thumbs up, or thumbs down. Bob and his team took this idea further. They realized that machines could figure out people's tastes on their own by grouping movies together and teasing out what they had in common based on factors that you couldn't just see or guess.

Runaway Recommendation Engine

a 2020 report by the Chinese consulting firm Trivium argues that the social credit system seems more experimental and banal than Western critics describe.

On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder

Rongcheng is a coastal town in China of 670,000 people where one thousand social credit points are given to each person as a default. Behavior the authorities want to deter, such as jaywalking, will cost you points, and praiseworthy behavior is rewarded with points. Fighting with neighbors detracts five points; failure to clean up after a dog detracts ten. Donating blood earns five. Punishment comes when one falls below a threshold: bank loans or high-speed train tickets become unattainable. Rewards come in such forms such as discounted utility bills, faster internet service, or improved health care services.

study

PEN America

2016 study

research study

Heidi Boghosian on Self-Censorship and Expression

Since race is a social construct it is difficult to measure. Yet data is critical to the development of standards; thus data collection must be assessed for unintended biases.

Gender-neutral language does not imply that the standards are developed without considering gender-specific needs and priorities.

Inclusive, or bias-free, language uses expressions and terms that are likely to be perceived as neutral or welcoming by everyone, regardless of their gender, race, religion, age, etc. Using inclusive language can help people from diverse backgrounds feel more welcome and encourages precise, high quality work. As noted in a recent McKinsey survey, employees who feel more included are nearly three times more likely to feel excited by, and committed to, their organizations.

Inside Facebook’s Data Wars