When did the garage door open? Was the TV on? Who came to the front door? The answers to these and thousands of other questions are stored in your IoT devices.

Smart Home Surveillance: Governments Tell Google’s Nest To Hand Over Data 300 Times

Thomas Brewster reports:

Anyone pumped for this week’s launch of Google’s Home Hub might want to temper their excitement. A smart home is a surveilled home. That’s been the concern of privacy activists since citizens started lighting up their abodes with so-called “smart” tech in recent years.

Take Google’s current smart home division, Nest Labs. It’s been told to hand over data on 300 separate occasions since 2015. That’s according to a little-documented transparency report from Nest, launched a year after the $3.2 billion Google acquisition. The report shows around 60 requests for data were received by Google’s unit in the first half of this year alone.

Read more on Forbes.

For our CJ students.

https://www.bespacific.com/criminal-justice-research-network-cjrn/

Criminal Justice Research Network (CJRN)

SSRN – “We are pleased to announce the creation of the Criminal Justice Research Network (CJRN), which focuses on 10 major areas of scholarship. SSRN’s newest network provides a worldwide online community for criminal justice scholars and for the sharing of ideas across a broad spectrum of early-stage research.SSRN had added a new collection of e-journals on criminal law. Subscriptions are currently free. [time period not specified]. You can browse or search the entire CJRN collection of eJournals.”

Question: Will the same be true of homes filled with eBooks?

https://www.bespacific.com/a-large-new-study-finds-people-who-grew-up-in-book-filled-homes-have-higher-reading-math-and-technological-skills/

A large new study finds people who grew up in book-filled homes have higher reading, math, and technological skills

Home Libraries Confer Long-Term Benefits – “We’ve known for a while that home libraries are strongly linked to children’s academic achievement. What’s less certain is whether the benefits they bestow have a long-term impact. A new large-scale study, featuring data from 31 countries, reports they do indeed. It finds the advantages of growing up in a book-filled home can be measured well into adulthood. “Adolescent exposure to books is an integral part of social practices that foster long-term cognitive competencies,” writes a research team led by Joanna Sikora of Australian National University. These reading-driven abilities not only “facilitate educational and occupational attainment,” the researchers write in the journal Social Science Research. “[They] also lay a foundation for lifelong routine activities that enhance literacy and numeracy.” The researchers analyzed data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Competencies. Its surveys, taken between 2011 and 2015, featured adults (ages 25 to 65) in 31 nations, including the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, Singapore, and Turkey.

All participants were asked how many books there were in their home when they were 16 years old. (One meter of shelving, they were told, holds about 40 books.) They chose from a series of options ranging from “10 or less” to “more than 500.” Literacy was defined as “the ability to read effectively to participate in society and achieve personal goals.” Participants took tests that “captured a range of basic through advanced comprehension skills, from reading brief texts for a single piece of information to synthesizing information from complex texts.” Numeracy tests measured the “ability to use mathematical concepts in everyday life,” while IT-related tests “assessed the ability to use digital technology to communicate with others, as well as to gather, analyze, and synthesize information.” The results suggest those volumes made a long-term difference. “Growing up with home libraries boosts adult skills in these areas beyond the benefits accrued from parental education, or [one’s] own educational or occupational attainment,” the researchers report. Not surprisingly, the biggest impact was on reading ability. “The total effects of home library size on literacy are large everywhere,” the researchers report…”

Perspective. The world is becoming Lake Woebegon!

https://www.bespacific.com/a-global-tipping-point-half-the-world-is-now-middle-class-or-wealthier/

A global tipping point: Half the world is now middle class or wealthier

Brookings report – Half the world is now middle class or wealthier: “…Our “middle class” classification was first developed in 2010 and has been used by many researchers. While acknowledging that the middle class does not have a precise definition that can be globally applied, the threshold we use in this work has the following characteristics: those in the middle class have some discretionary income that can be used to buy consumer durables like motorcycles, refrigerators, or washing machines. They can afford to go to movies or indulge in other forms of entertainment. They may take vacations. And they are reasonably confident that they and their family can weather an economic shock—like illness or a spell of unemployment—without falling back into extreme poverty. By classifying all households in the world into one of these four groups, using income and expenditure surveys from 188 countries, we are able to derive measures of the global distribution of income. Our social enterprise World Data Lab—the maker of World Poverty Clock—has refined these estimates and created a new interactive data model to estimate all income brackets for almost every country for every point in time until 2030 by combining demographic and economic data. A lot has been written about the world’s progress in reducing the number of people living in extreme poverty, as highlighted in the recent Goalkeepers report put out by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. We believe that another story relates to the rapid emergence of the global middle class. This middle class story is probably bigger in terms of the number of people affected. In the world today, about one person escapes extreme poverty every second; but five people a second are entering the middle class. The rich are growing too, but at a far smaller rate (1 person every 2 seconds)…”

Resources. (If true)

https://www.bespacific.com/initiatives-whose-goal-is-to-fight-fake-news-restore-trust-in-news/

Initiatives whose goal is to fight fake news – restore trust in news

“Dozens of new initiatives have launched to confront fake news and the erosion of faith in the media, Axios’ Sara Fischer reports:

• The Trust Project, which is made up of dozens of global news companies, announced this morning that the number of journalism organizations using the global network’s “Trust Indicators” now totals 120, making it one of the larger global initiatives to combat fake news. Some of these groups (like NewsGuard) work with Trust Project and are a part of it.
• News Integrity Initiative (Facebook, Craig Newmark Philanthropic Fund, Ford Foundation, Democracy Fund, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Tow Foundation, AppNexus, Mozilla and Betaworks)
• NewsGuard (Longtime journalists and media entrepreneurs Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz)
• The Journalism Trust Initiative (Reporters Without Borders, and Agence France Presse, the European Broadcasting Union and the Global Editors Network )
• Internews (Longtime international non-profit)
• Accountability Journalism Program (American Press Institute)
• Trusting News (Reynolds Journalism Institute)
• Media Manipulation Initiative (Data & Society)
• Deepnews.ai (Frédéric Filloux)
• Trust & News Initiative (Knight Foundation, Facebook and Craig Newmark in. affiliation with Duke University)
• Our.News (Independently run)
• WikiTribune (Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales)”