Some thought on the subject (at last)
Commentary
– Calling It ‘Metadata’ Doesn’t Make Surveillance Less
Intrusive
By Geoff
Nunberg: “Metadata”
was bound to break out sooner or later, riding the wave of “data”
in all its forms and combinations. “Big
data” and “data mining” are the reigning tech buzzwords
these days, and university faculties are scrambling to meet the surge
in demand for courses in the hot new field of data
science. It’s as if “data” is usurping “information”
as a byword. Up to now, “data” has played a supporting role in
the information age. There’s a popular definition of data as the
raw material that becomes information when it’s processed and made
meaningful. That puts information at the center of the modern tech
world, but it isn’t how anybody actually uses the two words… But
the shift in focus from information to data reflects a genuine
difference between the two. “Information” brings to mind the
knowledge that’s gathered in libraries, encyclopedias, newspapers
and journals — stuff that has an independent existence in the
world. “Data” is always connected to particular things and
events. It comes from experiments, sensors, official records. Or
it’s the scuff marks we leave behind as we click on websites, make
calls, go through the E-ZPass tollbooths, visit an ATM. It’s all
out there, accumulating in ginormabytes,
overflowing the server farms… Whether or not you think the
government should be sweeping this stuff up, calling it metadata
doesn’t make the process any less intrusive. Tell me where you’ve
been and who you’ve been talking to, and I’ll tell you about your
politics, your health, your sexual orientation, your finances. Why
don’t we just let the word “metadata” sink back into the nerdy
cubicles it came from? When it comes to privacy, the “meta-”
doesn’t matter. In the post-information age, it’s just data all
the way down.”
(Related) What happens when your
strategic vision changes from “Make the world safe for democracy”
to “We gotta do something!”
Paper
– NSA Spying Under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act
Follow up to previous posting, Council
on Foreign Relations Backgrounder – U.S. Domestic Surveillance,
a new CDT
Paper: “The FBI and NSA have abused Section 215 of the
PATRIOT Act to compel disclosure of phone records of calls made to,
from, and within the United States. This surveillance is not
permitted by the statute, and was hidden from the public by
deception. The legal basis for the program should be disclosed, and
the program should be replaced by targeted phone call collection that
focuses on suspected terrorists and spies.”
Coming soon: Leaked documents for your
Kindle? Perhaps jobs for my student/vets?
Is
the Amazon $600 million contract to build a “private cloud” for
CIA moving forward?
Follow up to previous posting, FCW
Reports on Bid Protest Over Amazon Cloud Contract for CIA, news
that Amazon
“is staffing up to meet the demand the new contract will require.
Specifically, Amazon is looking for engineers who already have a
“Top
Secret / Sensitive Compartmented Information” clearance, or are
willing to go through the elaborate screening process required to get
it. TS/SCI is the highest security clearance offered by the US
government, and getting it requires having your background thoroughly
vetted.”
Interesting? Funny? Fair use? Even
if there is no serious legal issues, it could make my students think
a bit...
Student
sues after school uses Facebook bikini pic in seminar
… should you be 17 and a school
administrator uses your Facebook bikini image to tell a story of how
photos live online forever, you would surely sue for $2 million.
… Her attorney, Pete Wellborn, said
he's suing for $2 million, so that the claim is taken seriously. He
also declared that he sees breaches of federal and state law -- and
the Constitution.
When asked if publicly available
photographs aren't, well, exactly that, his response was quite
fascinating: "That sounds an awful lot to me like the horrible
old cliche of 'well, that's how she dressed, she got what's coming to
her.'"
… It seems the essence of the
escalation here is that Chaney was offended the school didn't ask for
her permission to use the shot. Subsequent discussions with the
school clearly yielded nothing.
Still, I can't also help wondering
about the school district's director of technology.
How to classify students? Since this
combines Statistics and some :Big Data” concepts, I might find a
use for it. (Or maybe I'll just print it as a poster)
Can you call yourself a “geek” or a
“nerd” just because you feel like it? If you’re wondering if
geeks and nerds are the same, they’re not. Geeks may be loosely
defined as enthusiasts, obsessed with cool and trendy things. Nerds,
on the other hand, are more intellectual and painstakingly focus on
acquiring knowledge in a particular topic or field.
To prove this distinction, Burr Settles
— data scientist, software engineer, and author of Active
Learning — published the results of his
experiment which illustrated words that accompany the terms geek
and nerd.
Words that accompany the term geek
were plotted on the y axis, and nerdy words on the x axis.
In general, orange words are geeky, blue words are nerdy.
The affinity for these words to their terms increases further along
the axes — that is to say that “culture” is more often
associated with geeks than “collections”; “biochemistry”,
“neuroscience” and “salary” are nerdier words compared to
“exams” and “teachers”. Words along the x=y plotted line are
just as geeky as they are nerdy.
Read Burr’s breakdown of his
experiment on his blog, Slackpropagation.
For
my amusement...
The Board of Education for the Los
Angeles Unified School District, the second largest school
district in the US, has approved a $30 million contract with Apple
to buy iPads for students in
47 schools. As part of the Common Core Technology project, iPads
will cost $678 (higher than the normal price because it includes a
case and pre-loaded software, including some from Pearson). Education
professor Larry
Cuban weighs in with some important critical questions about the
plan, noting that no journalists called him for a comment. But hey,
Apple
issued a press release, so there ya go. This is phase 1 of a
$500 million plan to equip every kid in the district
with a device. [$500,000,000 for 662,140 students = $755 per student
Bob]
… Florida’s Miami-Dade
County School District approved
a $63 million plan to lease
computing devices to its students, part of its plan to go
entirely make sure every student in the district has a laptop or
tablet by 2015.
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