In light of all of the debate over the SOPA/PIPA controversy, I was delighted to see this lighthearted talk that takes a look at the math behind the claims that the music/movie industry makes about their losses due to copyright infringement.
TED Talk Tuesday part 3 coming around 6:00 today.
Take the time to watch this video. It is 30 minutes long, and I’d suggest actually turning off your cell phone, clearing some mental space and really focusing on the content. There are two important things going on here. The first, and most important, is a call to action to tell our government that sometimes we need to do the right thing even if there is “nothing” in it for us. Finding this man will not make our lives in America more comfortable, and won’t solve all of the world’s terrors, but it will make a world of difference to the people of the nations in central Africa that he is tormenting. The other thing that is going on here is a referendum on whether the connected social network worldwide can turn the tide and bring to the forefront issues that the people deem to be important rather than allowing the media and the government to tell us as a people what we should think is important. I am hopeful that the creators of this video are correct, and that by mobilizing attention to this among the general public the effect will filter “up” to those in power and cause real change. I pray that our government, and others around the world, will help to equip the people of those countries affected (starting in Uganda, and spreading to the neighboring countries) to find this fugitive. I also pray that God would work in his darkened heart by the Holy Spirit to convict him of his sin and draw him to the One who died for sinners, even sinners as seemingly “gone” as Joseph Kony. What could be more pro-life than hoping for the apprehension and life change of someone who is spreading death? What could be more Christ-like than praying for the worst of sinners to receive forgiveness and salvation? I hope he has his heart changed by the Spirit, gives himself up and accepts the earthly penalty for his actions. I also pray for the healing and restoration of the thousands he has victimized. May they receive mercy and grace, and a PEACE that passes all understanding. Even so, Lord.
Interesting post from PCWorld about an alternative to the tabled (though not defeated) SOPA and PIPA legislation.
SOPA and PIPA may have been put on hold — thanks to possibly the most contentious uproar seen on Capitol Hill and in the tech world ever — but other legislation was introduced this week to combat online piracy.
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-California) introduced H.R. 3782, the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act in the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday, the same day as an Internet protest when a number of high-profile websites such as Wikipedia went dark. Issa says the new billdelivers stronger intellectual property rights for American artists and innovators while protecting the openness of the Internet. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) has introduced the OPEN Act in the U.S. Senate.
OPEN would give oversight to the International Trade Commission (ITC) instead of the Justice Department, focuses on foreign-based websites, includes an appeals process, and would apply only to websites that “willfully” promote copyright violation. SOPA and PIPA, in contrast, would enable content owners to take down an entire website, even if just one page on it carried infringing content, and imposed sanctions after accusations — not requiring a conviction.
Darrell Issa (R-California)
According to Issa’s site KeepTheWebOpen, which elucidates the bill in its entirety and asks for people to comment on it, “If the ITC investigation finds that a foreign registered website is ‘primarily’ and ‘willfully’ infringing on the IP rights of a U.S. rights holder, the commission would issue a cease and desist order that would compel payment processors (like Visa and Paypal) and online advertising providers to cease doing business with the foreign site in question. This would cut off financial incentives for this illegal activity and deter these unfair imports from reaching the U.S. market.”
OPEN has received support from technology giants such as Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and others, but the Motion Picture Association of America complains in a statement (PDF) that the bill goes easy on Internet piracy.
It seems promising that there is finally talk of more reasonable approaches to stopping piracy. As might be expected (see this post), the media conglomerates do not feel that this does enough and want SOPA, PIPA, or something even worse passed to help prop up their industry. OPEN at least puts the presumption of innocence back into the system, and allows for appeals. This sounds like a much more American approach.
You can read the whole PCWorld piece here.
A more detailed look at how we got to this point with SOPA and PIPA and what the content industry wants.
A Facebook friend pointed me (not specifically, it was a general link posting) toward this wikiHow article on how to fight Facebook addiction. Hmmm. Ironic? Yes. But interesting as well. Here is the intro and their steps to recovery:
Maybe your affinity for Facebook began with a simple desire to keep in touch with your friends, or make new ones online. Or perhaps you were just bored. But now Facebook is the thorn in your side, and possibly a bona fide addiction. If you’re finding it difficult to spend an hour of your waking life without checking or thinking about Facebook, you may be looking for a way out. This is it.
And their steps to recovery:
Read the rest here to see how they suggest you work through your recovery. (Note: they suggest if you can appropriately handle step 3, steps 5, 6, and 8 are not needed.) Enjoy! Also, it is a wiki, so you can probably add your own suggestions along the way.
Picture by cometstarmoon
From LifeHacker.au:
Here’s an odd statistic: according to the Norton Cybercrime Report, if you’ve experienced an online crime in the last year, you’re more likely to have also been the victim of a real world crime. While 9 per cent of people who haven’t managed to suffer identify theft or a virus had been a victim of burglary, robbing or violence, that figure jumps to 17 per cent for people who has been victims of electronic crimes.
Correlation doesn’t imply causation, but I couldn’t resist asking Norton’s internet safety advocate Marian Merritt why she thought there was such a difference. Her answer: “Clearly these people aren’t taking enough care in their real-world interactions and it carries over in their online world.”The report covered 20,000 people, including 800 in Australia. While the top three online crimes worldwide were viruses, scams and phishing, in Australia the top three were viruses, online credit card fraud and hacking of a social networking profile. While that suggests we’re ahead of the curve when it comes to using and abusing social networking and online banking, the fact that viruses top the charts suggests that people are not following even basic security precautions. Still.
Since this is an observational study, we cannot conclude causation, but I find the link odd. I’m not sure how you could really plan a randomized experiment to test possible causes of the link, but I think that the idea that lack of care is the underlying cause for each might not be far off.
Various Social Media Icons
This post relates less directly to teaching, but I know that many of us are interested in what effect social networking may be having on our students. As kids spend more time developing friendships in the age of MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter, what will they be like when we see them in class with all of these things turned off (for the most part)? A recent study by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University looked at 12 to 17 year olds. They made the claim that those who spend time one social networking sites are more likely to smoke, drink, and use drugs. At The Daily, Trevor Butterworth offers a response which questions those conclusions on what are essentially statistical grounds.
The problem with CASA’s argument is that the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future Survey (funded by the National Institutes of Health) shows that kids are doing all of these things much less than they did before there was social networking, or the Internet, or even personal computers for the masses. The trends for alcohol use and binge drinking (along with attitudes about whether both are good or bad, and perceptions of how easy it is to procure alcohol) all show that kids are in a much better place today than in the ’70s and early ’80s. It’s not a perfect place – but if the correlation between the rise of social networking over the past decade and substance abuse was causal surely the trends would be getting worse rather than better?
As for marijuana use, there has been an uptick, but one not nearly high enough to bring us back to the stoned age of the 1970s. Marijuana also no longer carries the cultural stigma it once did, but it’s important to remember that this coincides with significant social and political agitation for both legalized medical and private use, which has possibly changed the overall climate of social acceptability. Perhaps we can “blame” our changes in social attitudes, rather than our technology, for this small surge of pot smoking.
There’s also the availability factor. Marijuana is seen as especially easy to get for most kids. As for cocaine, use among 12th graders has plummeted since the late ’80s, as has the perception that it is relatively easy to procure. Cigarette smoking is also in long-term decline, with sharp increases in perceptions of risk and disapproval.
CASA’s founder Joseph Califano tries to explain this unhelpful correlation away in an interview with the Chicago Tribune: “We’re not saying [social media] causes it,” he said. “But we are saying that this is a characteristic that should signal to [parents] that, well, you ought to be watching.”
Yeah, but given the percentage of kids engaged in social networking, you might as well tell parents to watch out for eating meat as a “signal” for pot smoking. Social networking is such a widespread practice that it can easily mask other, more critical factors, such as the possibility that kids who are interested in drinking or drugs are more likely to engage in social networking, or that kids who suffer parental neglect may turn to substance abuse and spend more time online.
This sounds like a class discussion I would have about the problems with observational studies: they cannot prove causation. Also, we must be especially careful about confounding/lurking variables. At any rate, it may be that social media and social networking may not be the end of civilized students. At least not if we help them learn to manage it appropriately. This seems like a good place for teachers and parents to work together, doesn’t it?
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See previous posts in the series here and here.
A couple of interesting posts today about search engines. (HT: Messiah College librarian Beth Transue) The first from the back end/business side, trying to optimize their placement in search results. The second discusses how Google’s search engine essentially filters the results we see, and so reinforces our current beliefs, rather than exposing us to a wide variety of unfiltered results.
Let’s start with the business side. Ken Mueller offers the following introduction:
The other day I was sitting in a client’s office for a meeting when they got a phone call. The person who answered listened, then looked at her boss (my client) and said:
“Do we want to be on the front page of Google and Bing?”
Without missing a beat, my client replied:
“No.”
Now, it’s not that my client doesn’t want to be on the “front page of Google”. It’s that she understands that this is basically, at worst, a scam, and at best, empty promises.
You may have even gotten one of these calls. They often ask you if you want to be on the “first page” or “front page” of Google, and in some cases I’ve heard them say,
“There’s an opening on the first page of Google, are you interested?”
as if slots open up and it’s there job to help fit you in.
If you get these calls, I hope you’ll run the other way. Remember, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Mueller then offers seven suggestions and then some final words. See the whole thing here, especially if you are working in a position where trying to optimize search engine results is of great importance to you or your employer.
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Results for Articles Returned from a Common Google News Search by Different Users
In the other article, by Mary Ellen Bates at Librarian of Fortune, offers a quick take on the reports of the effects that Google searches have upon the news and sites that are returned when you search. Bates assumed that the effect was real on general searches, but was skeptical that the effect was as pronounced with searches using Google News. She did her own (admittedly) informal study, and was surprised by the results. Here is a taste:
What I found surprised me; there was more variation among search results than I had expected. Knowing that a graphic is worth 1000 bytes (or something like that), here are a few ways of telling the story.
Caveat: I was a philosophy major in college and never had to take a stats course, so this analysis was done without the benefit of any relevant skills. I’m happy to go through the details of my analysis with you if you’re interested, or if you would like to share your thoughts on other ways to display this information.
And then she concludes:
Bottom line: Holy moley, Google does filter the news. You really need to go beyond the first few search results if you want to get a relatively well-rounded view of the news.
I’ve offered one of her graphs above, but there are several in her post. She explains each of her graphs, and what she thinks they mean. Bates talks more about her methodology after the body of her post, and it leaves much to be desired statistically. I would like to see a more appropriately designed study, including information on demographics of those included in the study in order to see how that might have affected the search results seen. Still, the results, basic as they are, are likely indicative of a real “filtering” of results, and is troubling if your goal is unfiltered news, or think our country would benefit from hearing and understanding those we don’t agree with.
Frank Bruni
Interesting article by Frank Bruni in yesterday’s New York Times about an interesting side effect of our being so incredibly connected these days: we can’t get in touch with people, despite (or because of) various options. Here is a taste:
The other night I did something silly. In a hurry to reach my friend K., I made the mistake of calling him on his mobile phone.
“You should have texted,” he chided me the next morning, when he finally heard the voice mail I’d left. “You know that’s the fastest way.”It’s hard to keep track. Because my friend A., who frequently sends text messages, somehow fails to recognize that she might receive them as well and almost never checks. With her, I’m supposed to call.
But not with my friend D. Between his two mobile phones, two office phones and one home phone, you can never know which number to try, and he seems never to pick up, anyway. E-mail is his preference. He has three e-mail addresses, at least that I know about, but I’ve figured out the best one. I think.
You hear so much about how instantly reachable we all are, how hyperconnected, with our smartphones, laptops, tablets and such. But the maddening truth is that we’ve become so accessible we’re often inaccessible, the process of getting to any of us more tortured and tortuous than ever.
Check out the rest here. It would funny, except it can be so true! One of my colleagues here at Messiah College has the problem solved. He has all mail sent to his College address, only uses his College phone (no home phone or cell phone), has only his College email address, and avoids Facebook and all social media as if they were the plague. That is one way to do it, I suppose! (Any Messiah alumni want to guess who I’m talking about?)
Thanks to Messiah College Information and Mathematical Sciences Department colleague Gene Rorhbaugh for pointing me to this somewhat scary post at Discovery.com. Apparently some Facebook users don’t watch their profile security very carefully (shocking, I know). A researcher at Carnegie Melon in Pittsburgh gives a glimpse of what could be to come.
According to a group of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), led by associate professor of Information Technology and Public Policy, Alessandro Acquisti, it is now even easier to identify and access your personal information from photos posted on the Internet.
Using cloud computing, facial recognition and public information found on social media profiles like Facebook and online dating sites, Acquisti and his team conducted experiments that yielded some revealing results.
What results? Check out the full story, and be prepared to be highly motivated to check your Facebook settings.
No Longer Normal