Clearly, the UK finds
the Ukraine situation more important than we in the US do. We can
only hope our politicians won't declare, “Peace in our times.”
Ukraine
crisis: pro-Russian separatists seize vehicles - live updates
12.54pm BST
A bit more from that
Fogh Rasmussen press conference. It will be interesting to see how
Russia will react to what it will probably see as provocation. Part
of the reason Putin moved against Crimea was his belief that Nato
wanted Ukraine might joint the alliance.
9.04am BST
The Guardian's Luke
Harding, who is in Kramatorsk, reports that pro-Russian armed
separatists have seized
five armoured personal carriers and a tank from the Ukrainian
army, which they then drove in a victory lap through the centre of
town, where government forces are attempting to wrest back control of
the city.
8.54am BST
Reuters is reporting
that five or six armoured personnel carriers have entered the
eastern Ukrainian town of Slaviansk, with the lead vehicle
showing the Russian flag.
A note for my Ethical
Hackers. Something to emulate? At least it may get the attention of
those who think this is amusing.
David Shamah reports:
Israeli
hackers attacked computers belonging to Anonymous and allied hacker
groups, taking pictures with exploited webcams and posting the photos
online, during the organization’s OpIsrael hacking attack last
week.
A
hacker called Buddhax, a member of the Israeli
Elite Force hacking group, posted
the information on the IEF’s Facebook page Wednesday, two days
after anti-Israel hackers attempted to repeat last year’s mass
attacks on Israeli sites.
[...]
While
Anonymous hackers were attacking Israeli sites, Buddhax traced the IP
addresses of some of the attackers and broke into at least 16
computers, taking screenshots, scraping computers for logins and
passwords of online accounts and using their webcams to take photos
of the hackers, Buddhax said. He sent a message to
each hacker reading “Next time don’t take part in OpIsrael. We
know who you are. We know where you are. Long live
Israel!”
Buddhax
posted the Facebook pages and other personal data of most of his
targets. Many of the pages and accounts listed in
Buddhax’s document have been blocked or taken down.
Read more on Times
of Israel. Looks like some #OpIsrael enthusiasts could use some
lessons in securing their own computers – and not re-using simple
passwords across services.
Is this how you
convince drivers not to use their phone while driving...
Police State USA
writes:
A
man was startled to receive a text message from a strange number
chastising him for using his cell phone while driving.
After
admittedly taking a phone call during his daily commute, the driver
received an unsolicited text message from a number he had never seen
before. It read: “Get off the phone when you are driving!”
The
sender then provided an identity of “Illinois State Police Officer
Robinson #54367.”
Police
State USA was alerted to this strange new enforcement technique
directly from the driver, who wished to remain anonymous. After
interviewing the driver and seeing the message directly on his phone,
there is little to doubt about his story.
OK, that’s creepy.
And how, exactly, did the state police officer obtain his
cell phone number….?
[New to
me: http://www.policestateusa.com/
Prove you are innocent?
At least testing is not mandatory – yet. Volunteer or become a
suspect?
Sara Miller Llana
reports:
The
French fiercely protect their right to privacy – so much so that
the country has famously been butting heads with American Internet
giants like Google to protect French users from potential intrusions
into their private lives.
But
when it comes to criminality, the views are much laxer. In a move
that would be sure to provoke anger in the US and raise tough
constitutional questions, police are asking
more than 500 males at a private Roman Catholic high school to submit
to DNA testing to help find a rapist.
Read more on Christian
Science Monitor.
Ah, that's okay then...
David Gilbert reports:
Google
has officially changed its Terms
of Service to make it quite clear that users are consenting to
the search giant scanning the content of their emails in
order to allow the company deliver more targeted ads and better
search results.
While
it may now be saying it more openly, this is not a new practice.
Google
has been scanning users’ messages for many years, and the company
had believed users “explicitly consented” to the practice by
agreeing to various versions of the company’s terms of service
since 2008.
Read more on
International
Business Times.
Should I be able to use
(mine and analyze) any data I can legally read? (Does using a
computer make a difference?)
EU
Report – Text and Data Mining
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on April 15, 2014
Standardisation
in the area of innovation and technological development, notably in
the field of Text and Data Mining - Report from the Expert Group,
2014.
“Text and data mining
(TDM) is an important technique for analysing and extracting new
insights and knowledge from the exponentially increasing store of
digital data (‘Big Data’). It is important to understand the
extent to which the EU’s current legal framework encourages or
obstructs this new form of research and to assess the scale of the
economic issues at stake. TDM is useful to
researchers of all kinds, from historians to medical
experts, and its methods are relevant to organisations throughout the
public and private sectors. Because TDM research technology is not
prohibitively expensive, it is readily available to lone
entrepreneurs, individual post-graduate students, start-ups and small
firms. It is also amenable to playful and highly speculative uses,
enabling research connections between previously unconnected fields.
There is growing recognition that we are at the threshold of the mass
automation of service industries (automation of thinking) comparable
with the robotic automation of manufacturing production lines
(automation of muscle) in an earlier era. TDM will be widely used to
provide insights in the re-design of this digital services economy.
When it comes to the deployment of TDM, there are worrying signs that
European researchers may be falling behind, especially with regard to
researchers in the United States. Researchers in Europe believe that
this results, at least in part, from the nature of Europe’s laws
with regard to copyright, database protection and, perhaps
increasingly, data privacy. In the United States,
the ‘fair use’ defence against copyright infringement appears to
offer greater re-assurance to researchers than the comparable
copyright framework in Europe, which relies upon a closed set of
statutory exceptions. Recent court decisions, for example
in the ten-year old ‘Google Books’ case, appear to confirm this.
The US has no equivalent of Europe’s database protection laws. In
Europe, there are signs of a response among publishers to encourage
wider use of TDM. Scientific publishers have recently proposed
licensing terms designed to make TDM of their own archives easier,
but many researchers dismiss these efforts as insufficient, arguing
that ‘the right to read is the right to mine’ and that
effective research demands freedom to mine all public domain
databases without restriction. These pressures from researchers have
increased as a result of a growing move to ‘Open Access’
scientific publishing in Europe and elsewhere. The UK and Ireland
have already committed themselves to more permissive copyright rules
with regard to TDM.”
(Related) Things you
can learn from Data Mining OR translating Behavioral Advertising
research into “How to behave badly” users guides. (And why law
enforcement might want access to this data)
The
(Unintentional) Amazon Guide to Dealing Drugs
One day, some drug
dealer bought a particular digital scale—the
AWS-100— on the retail site, Amazon.com. And then another drug
dealer bought the same scale. Then another. Then another.
Amazon's data-tracking
software watched what else these people purchased, and now, if
you buy the AWS-100 scale, Amazon serves up a quickstart kit for
selling drugs.
Along with various
scale-related paraphernalia, we find:
- A diamond tester (?!)
- Tweezer and snifter set for "miners and prospectors"
- Potassium Metabisulfite (for decontamination?)
- A drug testing kit ("this kit contains the same reagent chemicals as found in Justice Department test kits")
This is
classic data mining at work. Even if each scale purchaser only made
one other drug-related purchase, when you look at the clusters, the
pattern becomes obvious.
...but our laws are
still those written (before there was an Internet) by dead white
guys...
Pew
– The Next America
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on April 15, 2014
“Demographic
transformations are dramas in slow motion. America
is in the midst of two right now. Our population
is becoming majority non-white at the same time a record share is
going gray. Each of these shifts would by itself be the
defining demographic story of its era. The fact that both are
unfolding simultaneously has generated big generation gaps that will
put stress on our politics, families, pocketbooks, entitlement
programs and social cohesion The Pew Research Center tracks these
transformations with public opinion surveys and demographic and
economic analyses. Our new book, The
Next America, draws on this research to paint a data-rich
portrait of the many ways our nation is changing and the challenges
we face in the decades ahead. But from 1960 to 2060, our pyramid
will turn into a rectangle. We’ll have almost as many Americans
over age 85 as under age 5. This is the result of longer life spans
and lower birthrates. It’s uncharted territory, not just for us,
but for all of humanity. And while it’s certainly good news over
the long haul for the sustainability of the earth’s resources, it
will create political and economic stress in the shorter term, as
smaller cohorts of working age adults will be hard-pressed to finance
the retirements of larger cohorts of older ones.”
Several small
infographics I'll probably use in one class or another... (esp.
“Statistics about statistics”)
Funny
But True Facts of Life
Something I can have my
Statistics students analyze?
Beta
Release of Workforce Statistics Analysis Tool
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on April 15, 2014
“The
U.S. Census Bureau is unveiling a new Web-based analysis tool that
provides access to the full Quarterly Workforce Indicators dataset.
The tool — named QWI Explorer — includes measures on employment,
job creation and destruction, hires and wages from the Longitudinal
Employer-Household Dynamics program. QWI Explorer allows users to
compare, rank and aggregate indicators across time, geography and/or
firm and worker characteristics. Potential analyses include a look
over time at wages by worker sex and age across counties, ranking job
creation rates of young firms across NAICS (North American Industry
Classification System) groups, and comparing hiring levels by worker
race and education levels across a selection of metropolitan areas.
More information about this new tool is available here
and a video tutorial is available here.
Visit QWI
Explorer to use the tool.”
Also for my Statistics
students.
An estimated 90%
of the turns made by UPS delivery trucks are right turns, and that’s
intentional, according to the Washington Post. Left turns
are seen as inefficient, because they leave trucks sitting in traffic
longer. The logistics company says a policy of minimizing left turns
has helped it save more than 10 million gallons of
fuel over the past decade. Left turns (in countries where people
drive on the right) are dangerous, too: New York City officials say
left turns are 3 times more likely than right turns
to cause a deadly crash involving a pedestrian.
For all my students...
– is a site for
compiling a bibliography. Ideal for students writing their
dissertation, you can cite books, journal articles, newspaper
articles, websites, and countless more sources. There is also a Word
plugin and a Chrome plugin to make the process even easier. When it
is done, you can download it or email it.
For my students who
read. (More than you might think.)
FREE
EBOOK: Project Gutenberg – More Than Just Free Books
If you’ve heard of
Project Gutenberg, you probably know it for its vast collection of
free public domain books. But do you know everything it offers and
how to make the best of the site?
… This guide …
will teach you:
- about the concept of public domain works
- how to find and use audiobooks through Librivox
- the quickest way to self-publish your own books
- how distributed proofreading works and how to get involved
- some cool tools and tricks of the Project Gutenberg site
- and will suggest some great starting points for your reading.
For my Math students.
Studygeek
- A Math Glossary and a Collection of Free Math Tutorials
Studygeek
is a free service offering hundreds of online mathematics tutorials.
The site features a combination of written tutorials and video
tutorials sourced from the web. Like similar sites, Studygeek
organizes lessons according to subject and topic. For example, click
on the algebra section to reveal all of the topics for which
Studygeek offers tutorials.
Applications
for Education
Studygeek
was created for high school and undergraduate mathematics students.
Those students in need of a quick refresher or a little help when
they get stuck on their homework could find Studygeek to be a helpful
resource. Students who don't need full tutorials may find that
Studygeek's
mathematics glossary provides enough help to get them on the
right track to solving a problem.
For my students, how
not to interview...
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