Education and Administration – Page 5

Big Tech’s Half-Hearted Response To Fake News And Election Hacking

Despite big hand waves, Facebook, Google, and Twitter aren’t doing enough to stop misinformation.

From slashdot I found a story about : Big Tech’s Half-Hearted Response To Fake News And Election Hacking. This Fast Company story talks about ways that social media companies are trying to prevent the misuse of their platforms as we head into the US midterms.

For Facebook, Google, and Twitter the fight against fake news seems to be two-pronged: De-incentivize the targeted content and provide avenues to correct factual inaccuracies. These are both surface fixes, however, akin to putting caulk on the Grand Canyon.

And, despite grand hand waves, both approaches are reactive. They don’t aim at understanding how this problem became prevalent, or creating a method that attacks the systemic issue. Instead these advertising giants implement new mechanisms by which people can report one-off issues—and by which the platforms will be left playing cat-and-mouse games against fake news—all the while giving no real clear glimpse into their opaque ad platforms.

The problem is that these companies make too much money from ads and elections are a chance to get lots of ads, manipulative or not. For that matter, what political ad doesn’t try to manipulate viewers?

The slashdot story was actually about Mozilla’s Responsible Computer Science Challenge which will support initiatives to embedd ethics in computer science courses. Alas, the efficacy of ethics courses is questionable. Aristotle would say that if you don’t have the disposition to be ethical no amount of training would do any good. It just helps the unethical pretend to be ethical.

Re-Imagining Education In An Automating World conference at George Brown

On May 25th I had a chance to attend a gem of a conference organized the Philosophy of Education (POE) committee at George Brown. They organized a conference with different modalities from conversations to formal talks to group work. The topic was Re-Imagining Education in An Automating World (see my conference notes here) and this conference is a seed for a larger one next year.

I gave a talk on Digital Citizenship at the end of the day where I tried to convince people that:

Data analytics are now a matter of citizenship (we all need to understand how we are being manipulated).
We therefore need to teach data literacy in the arts and humanities, so that
Students are prepared to contribute to and critique the ways analytics are used deployed.
This can be done by integrating data and analytical components in any course using field-appropriate data.

Research Team Security

One of the researchers in the GamerGate Reactions team has created a fabulous set of recommendations for team members doing dangerous research. See Security_Recommendations_2018_v2.0. This document brings together in one place a lot of information and links on how to secure your identity and research. The researcher put this together in support of a panel that I am chairing this afternoon on Risky Research that is part of a day of panels/workshops following the Edward Snowden talk yesterday evening. (You can see my blog entry on Snowden’s talk here.) The key topics covered include:

Basic Security Measures
Use End-to-End Encryption for Communications  Encrypt Your Computer
Destroy All Information
Secure Browsing
Encrypt all Web Traffic
Avoiding Attacks
On Preventing Doxing
Dealing with Harassment

Opinion | America’s Real Digital Divide

The problem isn’t that poor children don’t have access to computers. It’s that they spend too much time in front of them.

The New York Times has an important Opinion about America’s Real Digital Divide by Naomi S. Riley from Feb. 11, 2018. She argues that TV and video game screen time is bad for children and there is no evidence that computer screen time is helpful. The digital divide is not one of access to screens but one of attitude and education on screen time.

But no one is telling poorer parents about the dangers of screen time. For instance, according to a 2012 Pew survey, just 39 percent of parents with incomes of less than $30,000 a year say they are “very concerned” about this issue, compared with about six in 10 parents in higher-earning households.

Naylor Report in Voyant

Correspondence Analysis (ScatterPlot) View

The Naylor Report (PDF) about research funding in Canada is out and we put it in Voyant. Here are some different

Here is the default Corpus View
Here it is in the Topics (Topic Modelling) View
Here is the Scatter Plot (Correspondence Analysis) View (see image above)

Continue reading Naylor Report in Voyant

Transcrire: Crowdsourced Transcription

I just came across a great French project called Transcrire. The Huma-Num Very Large Facility has built a system for the crowdsourcing of transcription of archival materials. It looks like they have built infrastructure for crowdsourcing (or citizen science) in the humanities. Playing around, it looks very professional.

CAA and SAH Release Guidelines for the Evaluation of Digital Scholarship in Art and Architectural History

The CAA and SAH Release Guidelines for the Evaluation of Digital Scholarship in Art and Architectural History. The College Art Association and Society of Architectural Historians have released guidelines that include attention to process:

A work of digital scholarship often requires developing or refining a methodology. That work should be evaluated as a contribution to scholarship, just as methodological innovations in traditional scholarship are given weight in assessments of achievement. By extension, digital scholarship may need to be evaluated by the process of analysis in addition to the results of the analysis. (p. 5)

The guidelines go on how to identify the importance of the process through things like project narratives. They also talk about how the “inadequacy of existing peer review for digital scholarship is directly related to the changing nature of publications. In many cases, peer review for a digital publication is little different from that of a print publication,…” It sounds like the arts are going through the same discussions as we are.

List of animals with fraudulent diplomas

Thanks to Twitter I came across this List of animals with fraudulent diplomas on the Wikipedia. As others have pointed out, this is the best Wikipedia page (so far). Here is an example to wet your appetite:

Ben Goldacre, a UK-based physician and science journalist, wrote in 2004 that his cat, Henrietta, had obtained a diploma in nutrition from the American Association of Nutritional Consultants; Goldacre had been investigating allegations about the qualifications claimed by Gillian McKeith.