Monday, December 09, 2013

Short, but useful.
The Semantics of Cyber Warfare
by Sabrina I. Pacifici on December 8, 2013
The Semantics of Cyber Warfare, Jason Fritz, Bond University. East Asia Security Symposium and Conference. Beijing. Nov. 2013
“The study of cyber warfare in China suffers from the same excess of overlapping terminology as in English documents. This paper will analyze key cyber warfare terms from authoritative sources and show that all of them can be broken down into three fundamental branches that are common to both the People’s Republic of China and the United States of America. The three branches are: Information Operations, Computer Network Operations, and Net Centric Warfare. Streamlined categorizing can aid the efficiency of research and improve inter-agency structure. Additional benefits include more accurate threat assessment, limiting media and public misunderstanding, and increasing transparency to forward cooperation, understanding, and trust.”


Non-profits have no legal protection? Or, corporations have no ethics?
Paper – Corporate Espionage Against Nonprofit Organizations
by Sabrina I. Pacifici on December 8, 2013
“Many different types of nonprofits have been targeted with espionage, including environmental, anti-war, public interest, consumer, food safety, pesticide reform, nursing home reform, gun control, social justice, animal rights and arms control groups. Corporations have been linked to a wide variety of espionage tactics. The most prevalent tactic appears to be infiltration by posing a volunteer or journalist, to obtain information from a nonprofit. But corporations have been linked to many other human, physical and electronic espionage tactics against nonprofits. Many of these tactics are either highly unethical or illegal. Corporations engage in espionage against nonprofits with near impunity. Typically, they suffer nothing more than minor adverse media coverage if their espionage is exposed. The lack of accountability may encourage other corporations to conduct espionage. Corporate espionage against nonprofit organizations presents a threat to democracy and to individual privacy. Democracy cannot function without an effective civil society. But civil society and its nonprofit organizations depend crucially on their ability to keep some ideas, information, and conversations private. Individual citizens and groups do not lose their right to privacy merely because they disagree with the activities or ideas of a corporation. The right to privacy dovetails with our First Amendment rights to speech, public debate, and full participation in the “marketplace of ideas.” It is especially unjust that corporations sabotage Americans’ fundamental rights through actions that are unethical or illegal. Many things can be done to protect nonprofits from corporate espionage. Congress should investigate and hold hearings on corporate espionage against nonprofits. Congress and state legislatures should enact legislation to criminalize the theft of confidential, noneconomic information held by their critics. Law enforcement – especially the U.S. Department of Justice – should prioritize investigating and prosecuting corporate espionage against nonprofits.”


How do you say “Google” in Norwegian?
Commentary – Norway Decided to Digitize All the Norwegian Books
by Sabrina I. Pacifici on December 8, 2013
Alexis Madrigal – The Atlantic: ”The National Library of Norway is planning to digitize all the books by the mid 2020s. Yes. All. The. Books. In Norwegian, at least. Hundreds of thousands of them. Every book in the library’s holdings. By law, “all published content, in all media, [must] be deposited with the National Library of Norway,” so when the library is finished scanning, the entire record of a people’s language and literature will be machine-readable and sitting in whatever we call the cloud in 15 years. If you happen to be in Norway, as measured by your IP address, you will be able to access all 20th-century works, even those still under copyright. Non-copyrighted works from all time periods will be available for download. Here in the States, we are struggling to make even a small percentage of English-language works accessible to the citizens of our fine country, despite the efforts of groups like the Digital Public Library of AmericaHathi Trust, and (I dare say) Google. Which means that we are not ready for the apocalypse. But the Norwegians, that’s a people preparing for the deep future. Now they are home to the Svalbard Seed Vault and they will have all the books stored away.”


For my Criminal Justice statistics students. (told ya!)
New on LLRX – Calculating Justice: Mathematics and Criminal Law
by Sabrina I. Pacifici on December 8, 2013
Via LLRX.com - Calculating Justice: Mathematics and Criminal Law - Ken Strutin’s new guide on criminal justice illuminates the growing importance of math in the administration of justice, with an emphasis on the areas of proof and judgment. Ken raises the examples of how statistics (evidence) and probability (analytics) have been used and challenged in many criminal cases to match people to events through such means as: DNA, soil samples, eyewitness descriptions, firearm purchase records, typewritten documents, clothes fibers, footprints, hair follicles, blood types, sperm, teeth marks, and conviction rates. Indeed, everything from traffic tickets to predictive policing draws on math in some way. Ken’s analysis and through documentation of case law adds a critical perspective on the manner in which “numbers are used, and abused” in court.


For my fellow teachers, and not just the technologically challenged.
The Analog Teacher’s Guide To Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy
Are you an analog teacher trying to function in a digital world? Is the professional chatter of your colleagues littered with terms like Smore, Voki, Today’s Meet, Prezi, Popplet, Thinglink, and others? If so, then you are a casualty of a digital divide that exists among the ever-growing number of educators as they attempt to keep up with the flow of resources and information. The demand is on for educators to provide more digital content that allows for the integration of technology, but where does the professional start? A great place to start would be a website aligned to Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy.
Created by a Media Coordinator and an Instructional Technology Coordinator this website offers resources from the beginner to the advanced user of digital resources.


Sometimes Saturday, sometimes Sunday, sometimes very late on Sunday. But amusement every week.
… The school board in Huntsville, Alabama will offer students cash incentives to do well on their ACT tests – up to $300. [Teaching students to be politicians? Bob]
… The College Board, edX, and Davidson College are teaming up to offer special Advanced Placement courses in calculus, physics and macroeconomics. More details in The New York Times.
… “Argosy University’s Denver campus has agreed to pay $3.3-million in a settlement with the Colorado attorney general’s office, which found that the for-profit institution, a division of the Education Management Corporation, had intentionally misled students about one of its degree programs.” So says The Chronicle of Higher Education.
… Boundless, the “textbook alternative” startup, has launched its Boundless Teaching Platform, an effort to get more teachers using and remixing Boundless content.
According to a survey conducted by the Los Angeles Board of Education, just 36% of teachers strongly favor continuation of the district’s troubled iPad initiative. 90% of administrators said the same.


Music to study by?
Enjoy Curated Music Mixes And Discover Great Artists On 8tracks
Unlimited streaming music, for free, legally available all over the world, and with no audio ads. Have I got your attention yet? That’s just what 8tracks offers. One of the oldest and best music websites in existence, we mentioned 8tracks way back in 2008, and far more recently as one of several great tools for creating digital mixtapes. Most recently, I’ve shown you how to enjoy 8track on the go with the amazing third-party client InifiTracks.

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