So this is good news
and bad news. You can keep some things private, but only criminals
would do it.
How
One Woman Hid Her Pregnancy From Big Data
For the past nine
months, Janet Vertesi, assistant professor of sociology at Princeton
University, tried to hide from the Internet the fact that she's
pregnant — and it wasn't easy.
Pregnant women are
incredibly valuable to marketers. For example, if a woman decides
between Huggies and Pampers diapers, that's a valuable, long-term
decision that establishes a consumption pattern. According to
Vertesi, the average person's marketing data is worth 10 cents; a
pregnant woman's data skyrockets to $1.50. And once targeted
advertising finds a pregnant woman, it won't let up.
Vertesi presented on
big data at the Theorizing
the Web conference in Brooklyn on Friday, where she discussed how
she hid her pregnancy, the challenges she faced and how the
experience sheds light on the overall political and social
implications of data-collecting bots and cookies.
… Genius, right?
But not exactly foolproof. Vertesi said that by dodging advertising
and traditional forms of consumerism, her activity raised a lot of
red flags. When her husband tried to buy $500 worth of Amazon gift
cards with cash in order to get a stroller, a notice at the Rite Aid
counter said the company had a legal obligation to report excessive
transactions to the authorities.
"Those kinds of
activities, when you take them in the aggregate ... are exactly the
kinds of things that tag you as likely engaging in criminal activity,
as opposed to just having a baby," she said.
“Gosh, perhaps you
should read things before clicking “Agree?”
Judge
throws out lawsuit lobbed at Facebook for using kids' pics in
targeted ads
A judge has thrown out
a potential class action lawsuit against Facebook over its use of
photos of minors in targeted ads, ruling that the users gave their
consent when they signed up for the social network.
… District Judge
Richard Seeborg said that the folks trying to sue Facebook had failed
to show that its "statement of rights and responsibilities"
(SRR) was unenforceable. This statement, which governs the use of
the site, was equivalent to written consent to the use of their names
and profile photos for anyone who signed up, the judge said.
Doctors have been
resisting using technology, perhaps this is a good idea, but...
Do
medical scribes threaten patient privacy?
… The usual use of
a medical scribe is to follow a provider around in their clinical
tasks for the purpose of data entry. This may or may not involve
being present for the history and physical exam. Most commonly they
are physically present in the room and witness the entire encounter.
The need they fill is a function of our ever increasing mandates for
electronic medical records (EMR).
This is also how
discrimination has been “discovered” in past lawsuits. Just
saying, it can be used either way. (Read “How to lie with
statistics.”)
Eileen Sullivan of AP
reports:
A
White House review of how the government and private sector use large
sets of data has found that such information could be used to
discriminate against Americans on issues such as housing and
employment even as it makes their lives easier in many ways.
“Big
data” is everywhere.
It
allows mapping apps to ping cellphones anonymously and determine, in
real time, what roads are the most congested. But it also can be
used to target economically vulnerable people.
The
issue came up during a 90-day review ordered by President Barack
Obama, White House counselor John Podesta said in an interview with
The Associate Press. Podesta did not discuss all the findings, but
said the potential for discrimination is an issue that warrants a
closer look.
Read more on Huffington
Post.
Is this the best
approach to “data searches?”
Orin Kerr writes:
This
post updates readers on the current status of the
mosaic theory of the Fourth Amendment. As regular readers know,
that’s the novel approach to the Fourth Amendment introduced by the
DC Circuit in United
States v. Maynard — and then suggested by the concurring
opinions in United
States v. Jones — by which an aggregation of non-searches
and subsequent analysis of the collected data at some point becomes a
Fourth Amendment search.
There
has been a lot of litigation on the mosaic theory recently. I wanted
to flag three recent developments: an oral argument before the
Eleventh Circuit, a decision by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Court, and a novel procedural step by Magistrate Judge Facciola.
Read more on WaPo
The Volokh Conspiracy.
It didn't take long for
someone (the state in this case) to replace InBloom. Note that data
on students (history) will not predict the future job market. What
are they really doing?
Barb Berggoetz reports:
Imagine
a giant database filled with every Hoosier student’s elementary and
high school achievement test scores, SAT scores, college degrees and
eventually job and salary history.
State
officials are preparing to build it. They want it to tell them
exactly what happens to students who don’t finish high school or
who switch majors in college. But the big payoff
would be forecasting the job market and using that
information to adjust the education system to deliver workers to meet
the needs.
Read more on IndyStar.
...and we're developing
robots without Asimov's Three Laws!
Are
the robots about to rise? Google's new director of engineering thinks
so…
… everyone's
allowed their theories. It's just that Kurzweil's theories have a
habit of coming true. And, while he's been a successful technologist
and entrepreneur and invented devices that have changed our world –
the first flatbed scanner, the first computer program that could
recognise a typeface, the first text-to-speech synthesizer and dozens
more – and has been an important and influential advocate of
artificial intelligence and what it will mean, he has also always
been a lone voice in, if not quite a wilderness, then in something
other than the mainstream.
And now? Now, he works
at Google. Ray Kurzweil who believes that we can live for ever and
that computers will gain what looks like a lot like consciousness
in a little over a decade is now Google's director of engineering.
… Google has gone
on an unprecedented shopping spree and is in the throes of assembling
what looks like the greatest artificial intelligence
laboratory on Earth; a laboratory designed to feast upon a
resource of a kind that the world has never seen before: truly
massive data. Our data. From the minutiae of our lives.
Google has bought
almost every machine-learning and robotics company it can find, or at
least, rates. It made headlines two months ago, when it bought
Boston
Dynamics, the firm that produces spectacular, terrifyingly
life-like military robots,
for an "undisclosed" but undoubtedly massive sum. It spent
$3.2bn (£1.9bn) on smart thermostat maker Nest
Labs. And this month, it bought the secretive and cutting-edge
British artificial intelligence startup DeepMind for £242m.
Interesting idea.
Economics is due for a
paradigm shift. That’s the argument of British money manager
George Cooper’s
very interesting if less-than-felicitously titled new book, Money,
Blood and Revolution: How Darwin and the Doctor of King Charles I
Could Turn Economics Into a Science. It is also, to be
fair, something economists have been talking about for decades. Yet
it keeps
not happening. Why is that?
The idea of a paradigm
shift comes from Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 book The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn, a physicist
turned philosopher of science, had spent a year in the late 1950s at
the then-new Center
for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and
been struck by how the assembled psychologists, economists,
historians, sociologists, and the like often disagreed over the very
fundamentals of their disciplines. Physicists, in his experience,
didn’t do that. This wasn’t because they were any smarter than
social scientists, Kuhn concluded. It was because they had found a
paradigm within which to work.
… Just as Kuhn was
writing this, economics was finally settling into what looked like a
scientific paradigm, in which mathematical models built around
rational agents trying to maximize something called utility were
presumed capable of answering all the questions that needed to be
answered.
… Then it comes
time to offer up his ideas for a new economics paradigm:
- Replace utility-maximizing economic man with a Darwinian fellow who simply wants to do better than the next guy.
- Let this selfish creature fight it out in a macroeconomic model based on the circulatory system. “Capitalism would act to push wealth up the social pyramid,” Cooper writes, “while democracy, and its progressive taxation system, would act in the opposite direction to push it back down, causing a vigorous circulatory flow of wealth throughout the economy.”
Something for my lawyer
friends? Everything you ever wanted to know about the law?
– is a major
publication venture toward a comprehensive coverage of law and the
legal profession. It is an international, interdisciplinary, and
collaborative project, spanning all the relevant areas of law and
legal practice, and advised by leading scholars from around the
world.
Perspective " A
hundred billion here, a hundred billion there, and pretty soon you're
talking real money" to misquote Everett Dirksen (if he ever
said that.)
Pfizer
offering $100 billion for Astra Zeneca
… Pfizer, the maker
of Viagra, said that AstraZeneca rejected an initial approach in
January valuing the company at about 59 billion pounds ($100
billion). The cash and shares deal would represent a 30 percent
premium on AstraZeneca's closing share price of 35.26 pounds on Jan.
3, the closing price around the time the offer was made.
AstraZeneca PLC said it
concluded that the proposal "very significantly undervalued
AstraZeneca and its prospects."
(Related) Also
interesting. France has a lot of nuclear reactor projects around the
world, so would this give GE a look at technology used in Iran?
(Drugs are more profitable than nukes?)
GE’s
Alstom Bid Gains Steam as Hollande Said Not Opposed
… Both GE and
Siemens have taken steps to appease policy makers for a deal with
Alstom, which has a market value of about 8.3 billion euros ($11.5
billion).
Took them long enough.
IBM
Drinks The Kool-Aid, Launches An Enteprise App Store
… while the App
Store concept is a logical one, it’s not something that is a
traditional approach to enterprise IT, and hence hasn’t been
embraced by more traditional vendors. Which makes it all the more
interesting to hear confirmation of GigaOm
scoop
that IBM
is this morning announcing the IBM Cloud Marketplace. A self-service
(just swipe your credit card and you’re done) collection of
software and services. The marketplace has a long list of different
products available, including Zend, SendGrid,
MongoDB,
NewRelic, Redis Labs, Sonian,
Flow Search Corp, Twilio and Ustream. It also includes IBM’s own
products such as its Cloud Foundry-based Bluemix PaaS.
For my Math students.
Experiment
With Sounds on Wolfram Tones
Wolfram
Tones is a neat offering from Wolfram that students can use to
can play with sample sounds and rhythms to create new own sounds.
Wolfram Tones
uses algorithms, music theory, and sound samples to generate new
collections of sounds. Wolfram
Tones allows visitors to choose samples from fifteen different
genres of music on which to build their own sounds. Once a genre is
selected visitors can then alter the rhythms, instrumentation, and
pitch mapping of their sounds. When satisfied with their creations,
users can download their sounds or have them sent directly to their
cell phones.
Applications
for Education
Wolfram
Tones might be a nice little resource for a music theory lesson.
Wolfram Tones could be a fun way for students to experiment with
rhythms and instrumentation to make unique sounds.
Do
I really want to know what my students opinions are?
–
run polls and ask questions using an audience’s devices. Create a
presentation in PowerPoint or Keynote, the same way you always did.
Upload it to everyslide.com and press present. You will get a unique
URL the audience can use to join your slideshow using any device they
happen to have.
If it works for
lawyers, it should work for my students.
New
on LLRX – Personal Task Management for Legal Professionals
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on April 27, 2014
Via LLRX.com
- Personal
Task Management for Legal Professionals - Brad Edmondson searched
for the right task management app throughout much of his time
attending law school. He finally found and recommends in this
article one that he chose for individual use: Todoist. The app –
it’s really more of a service – operates on the “freemium”
model, and Brad signed up for the premium version three months ago.
He compares and contrasts this app to others for Mac and Android
platforms in this best practices guide.
For students and my
fellow professors.
– offers webcasts,
workshops, recorded seminars, lectures and much more. Webiners is a
platform that allows you to access the big lessons that experts are
giving for free so you can empower your business education and make
better decisions in your professional career.
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