Monday, November 06, 2017

With apologies to Santayana: Those who do not study technology are doomed to screw it up.
McConnell: Tech companies could help US 'retaliate against the Russians'
… “What we ought to do with regard to the Russians is retaliate, seriously retaliate against the Russians,” McConnell told MSNBC’s Hugh Hewitt on Saturday. “These tech firms could be helpful in giving us a way to do that.”
McConnell did not elaborate on what that retaliation might look like.




Interesting argument. It’s not a violation of the law because it track a vehicle, not a person.
The Rutherford Institute has asked the Virginia Supreme Court to prohibit police from using license plate readers as mass surveillance tools to track citizens whether or not they are suspected of a crime. In filing an amicus brief in Neal v. Fairfax County Police Department, Rutherford Institute attorneys argue that Fairfax County’s practice of collecting and storing license plate reader data violates a Virginia law prohibiting the government from amassing personal information about individuals, including their driving habits and location.




Do first, think about the downside later?
This may be one of those “the-road-to-Hell” stories. Joe Cadillic sent it along and we are both of the opinion that regardless of any good intentions, this is not a good idea.
Meaghan Ybos reported:
Nearly 70 victims of domestic violence and rape in Memphis are wearing GPS devices thanks to the city’s Sexual Assault Kit Taskforce, according to its monthly progress report published in October.
[…]
The GPS devices, which are tracked in real time, “provide an extra measure of safety by alerting victims when alleged perpetrators out on bond come within a certain range of victims who voluntarily wear the device,” taskforce leader Dewanna Smith told me in an October 23 e-mail.
Read more on In Justice Today.
Yeah…. no….. if a victim really wants to wear the device, then I guess that’s their right and decision, assuming that they have been fully informed of how data are collected and stored and what THEIR data may be used for and by whom. But otherwise, this strikes me as a pretty bad idea.
And does the perpetrator get a signal that they have gotten too close to their victim? Does a loud alarm on their monitor start shrieking at them? And if so, could that actually help a perpetrator find their victim if they were looking for them?
There’s too much wrong with this. Joe: jump in with your thoughts, please. I tend to agree with this statement in the story:
“If somebody accused of rape is enough of a risk that a victim would need to wear a safety monitoring device,” said Carrie Goldberg, a New York civil rights attorney and pioneer in the field of sexual privacy, “then perhaps it would make more sense to rethink that [perpetrator’s] being on the streets in the first place.




Is this education?
Beatrice Dupuy reports:
Teachers in one Oregon school district who fail to report the sexual activity of their students could be at risk of being fined or losing their jobs.
The Salem-Keizer district officials told teachers that if they hear about their students having sex they must report it to law enforcement or Department of Human Services officials. District officials say they are just following state law that has put them in a bind with their students.
Read more on Newsweek.
And here we have yet another horrible idea/law. Schools should be creating an environment where it is safe for students to share information with school personnel. These types of snitch laws work against that.




A model for entrepreneurs?
How Facebook’s Oracular Algorithm Determines the Fates of Start-Ups
… One night in the summer of 2015, over Sichuan at Han Dynasty on 85th Street, Cogan asked Horwitz for advice about his latest notion: selling contact lenses online. The contacts business was dominated by a handful of companies like Johnson & Johnson and Bausch & Lomb, which seemed to charge whatever they wanted — at least in Cogan’s view, based on the price increases for his own lenses. Surely a low-cost competitor could tempt away customers




Perspective. Consistent with my classroom.
The Disappearing American Grad Student
There are two very different pictures of the students roaming the hallways and labs at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering.
At the undergraduate level, 80 percent are United States residents. At the graduate level, the number is reversed: About 80 percent hail from India, China, Korea, Turkey and other foreign countries.
… The dearth of Americans is even more pronounced in hot STEM fields like computer science, which serve as talent pipelines for the likes of Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft: About 64 percent of doctoral candidates and almost 68 percent in master’s programs last year were international students, according to an annual survey of American and Canadian universities by the Computing Research Association.




Yet another PowerPoint competitor? There is a free limited EDU option.
Create Interactive Content Using Joomag
Joomag is a platform which allows users to design and publish professional looking publications. It contains hundreds of templates which can be use to create the perfect foundation for your publication. Incorporate videos and music directly from popular platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, and Soundcloud or upload these types of files directly from your computer. Create customized slideshows using your own images or from Getty Images. This platform also incorporates an image editor. Joomag publications can be embedded on websites and shared easily on social media channels.
… Click here and here to see examples of how two school districts use Joomag.


No comments: