Tuesday, December 19, 2017

Data: Cyber of Twitters


Policy analysts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta were told of the list of forbidden words at a meeting Thursday with senior CDC officials who oversee the budget, according to an analyst who took part in the 90-minute briefing. The forbidden words are “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based.”
That’s the WaPo piece everyone is abuzz about


Health record details exposed as 'de-identification' of data fails


Administration of Medicare Electronic Claiming Arrangements


The Human Cost of the Ghost Economy Melissa Chadburn | Longreads | December 2017 |


Death by data: how Kafka's The Trial prefigured the nightmare




How a Dorm Room Minecraft Scam Brought Down the Internet









Data shouldn’t drive all of your decisions, Taddy Hall, Senior Partner, Lippincott. December 12, 2017. Quartz at Work: “…The power of big data to enable breakthroughs in many aspects of managerial and scientific endeavor is so staggering that it has generated a religious-like faith in its powers—if we can just get enough data, the truth will be revealed. But this faith is flawed. Revealing innovation insights requires small, not big, data. All data is man-made—it’s a sanitized representation of the messiness of our lives. Successful innovators don’t walk away from the messiness. They immerse themselves in it to find rich meaning…”

Lawyer Spends $4 Million On Son’s Birthday Party Above the Law


A bombshell letter charges that Uber hacked into competitors’ networks and wiretapped people at a hotel Business Insider  Too late for SoftBank to change the terms of its tender.




DO TREES FALL IN CYBERSPACE? War on the Rocks




You kinda have to admire the ingenuity of these guys, and the irony of one of the wire-transfer-fraud victims being a Wall Street firm, given that collectively the Wall Street iBanks are far and away the largest fraud ring in the world, under cover of their TBTF legal immunity. Oh, you fraudulently securitized a trillion dollars’ worth of junk mortgages and sold them to unwitting investors around the world, helping to blow up the global financial system when the magnitude of the scam and the leveraged greed became too large to sustain? Here’s a bunch of bailout money for you, for a job well done






Who Says You Can't Go Home Again? You Can in These 5 Books

Why is it so wonderfully delightful to witness the dread and misery of characters who return to where they are from? Is it the sheer thrill of voyeurism when we get to peek behind closed doors into lives that may be a little worse off than our own? Is it the comfort of knowing we aren’t the only people out there that may find our loved ones a bit challenging from time to time? The world may never know. But why don’t we leave those questions to the gods and simply look at tales of homecoming. These 5 books are particularly perfect for those of you traveling back home for Thanksgiving.




“Terrorism is the consequence of some groups’ activities originated from the violent radicalization of different mindsets. It is a complex phenomenon and in the 90s the “Declaration on Joint Action to Counter Terrorism” of the ONU General Assembly recognised it as a global threat to peace and international safety. There are three core sources that could be identified as triggers of a plurality of ideologies: religious,political and ethnic. In order to analyse the primary version of terrorism, the one provided by data, we merged together two different datasets from START consortium: the GTD and BAAD2. We selected 120 terroristic groups and analysed their activities throughout 18 years – from 1998 to 2015 – in order to display a clear picture of the terrorist attacks evolution over time and by the sources…”


About the article author – Giulia Zerbini is a Communication Designer, based in Milan and Boston, as well as a Master Candidate at Politecnico di Milano and Visiting Researcher at Harvard University. Passionate about using visualizations for discovering patterns in data and communicating information in intuitive terms to a broad audience. Background in Ux/Ui and Graphic Design. Illustrator in spare time. Website hereAbout the project authors This is a team project created by Francesco Cosmai, Giacomo Flaim, Francesco GiudiceBarbara Nardella and Giulia Zerbini as part of a capstone Master project at Politecnico di Milano, supervised by Density Design Lab. Professors: Paolo Ciuccarelli, Marco Fattore, Stefano Mandato, Michele Mauri, Salvatore Zingale. Teaching Assistants: Angeles Briones, Tommaso Elli, Michele Invernizzi, Azzurra Pini.”



Twitter Blog: “…we’re thrilled to share that we’re making it simpler to thread Tweets together, and to find threads, so it’s easier to express yourself on Twitter and stay informed. We’ve made it easy to create a thread by adding a plus button in the composer, so you can connect your thoughts and publish your threaded Tweets all at the same time. You can continue adding more Tweets to your published thread at any time with the new “Add another Tweet” button. Additionally, it’s now simpler to spot a thread – we’ve added an obvious “Show this thread” label. A few weeks ago, we expanded our character count to make it easier for people to fit what they’re thinking into a Tweet. But we know people also may want to serialize a longer story or thought, or provide ongoingcommentary on an event or topic. That’s where this update to threads comes in! You’ve been using threads in creative ways like these for years – the ways and reasons to thread your Tweets are limited only by your imagination…”


Kafkaesque? Big Brother? Finding the Right Literary Metaphor for Net ...