~Italian Proverb
It is telling that two of the greatest ethical scandals to have hit Facebook in recent years both involved academics…
That is from a very good William Davies piece in LRB, via an anonymous correspondent.
The Pinkertons Still Never Sleep New Republic
Ecuador blocks Julian Assange internet access, bars visitors
Related? Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower: Facebook Able to Listen to You at Home and Work
US State Department proposes asking visa applicants for social media identities from last five years
A US federal government proposal to collect social media identities of nearly everyone who seeks entry into the country has been described as a "chilling" encroachment on freedom of speech and association.
Eroding Protection Under the Law ProPublica
A key adviser to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull helped to formalise a job transfer for the partner of Barnaby Joyce, according to new details about the controversial decision to secure the new position in a ministerial office. The letter from Mr Turnbull's senior governance adviser was signed on May 9 last year and gave ...
SHHHH...
DON’T SAY ANYTHING JUST NOD IF YOU UNDERSTAND:
Why Do Dictators Keep Fancying Themselves Literary Authors?
“How can you be a dictator without your sacred text, without a document to show your word is law?” From Lenin’s dense treatises and Hitler’s notorious memoir, through Mao’s “little red book” of aphorisms and Kim Jong-Il’s critical treatises on cinema and opera, to Türkmenbashi’s faux-folklore and Saddam Hussein’s romance novels, they just can’t stop themselves from churning out books. Colin Dickey examines the what and why.
What Exactly Do We Do? Everything! (A Librarian Tells You What The Job Is Really Like)
“Librarianship asks you to do 12 things at once and then when you’re in the middle of those projects wonders if you’ve got any tax forms left or an eclipse viewer. It’s endless questions. It’s ‘my two dollar fine pays your salary.’ It’s a grubby little hand at storytime grabbing your leg and smearing glitter glue down the side of pants you’ve already worn twice that week. It’s finding the right answer to a question and reveling in that small joy for a bare moment before another patron comes up to ask you something even weirder.”
From Anil Dash, 12 Things Everyone Should Understand About Tech.
— IT’S OFFICIAL: SEX AND THE CITY’S CYNTHIA NIXON IS RUNNING FOR GOVERNOR OF NEW YORK — THE ACTRESS ANNOUNCED HER CANDIDACY TODAY1. Tech is not neutral. One of the most important things everybody should know about the apps and services they use is that the values of technology creators are deeply ingrained in every button, every link, and every glowing icon that we see. Choices that software developers make about design, technical architecture or business model can have profound impacts on our privacy, security and even civil rights as users. When software encourages us to take photos that are square instead of rectangular, or to put an always-on microphone in our living rooms, or to be reachable by our bosses at any moment, it changes our behaviors, and it changes our lives.All of the changes in our lives that happen when we use new technologies do so according to the priorities and preferences of those who create those technologies.
Dan recently wrote a blog post titled “Back to the Blog,” which muses on a microtrend I’ve seen as well. Friends and writers, not thousands or probably even hundreds, but solid dozens, returning to old-fashioned weblogging as a way to get their thoughts in order, take ownership of their intellectual property, get away from the Twitter hubbub, stick it to Facebook, or any one of a dozen other reasons to write a blog.If your research invents a genie, how do you ensure someone else won’t open the bottle?
↩︎ Political Violence @ a Glance
New Sunshine Week report shares best practices to maximize the power of FOIA – “In response to a growing culture of government secrecy, people are seeking new ways to defend their right to information and combat intensifying threats to transparency and accountability. Openness advocates, journalists, litigators and grassroots organizations working on a range of policy issues are increasingly looking to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to shine light on government actions carried out in our name, but without our knowledge. Today, Open the Government released a Best Practices Guide to FOIA Collaboration, highlighting cases where FOIA collaboration is successfully being used to fuel advocacy campaigns and advance openness policies. “The OTG coalition is using FOIA more every day in clever ways to roll-back the tide of government secrecy, strengthening overall collective demands for transparency in the process,” said Lisa Rosenberg, Executive Director of Open the Government. “We are immensely grateful for everyone who shared their FOIA success stories with us, and are thrilled to build on a body of knowledge to help fuel efforts to maximize the full power of the law.” Government secrecy is nothing new. But, with the advent of the Trump Administration, new threats to the public’s right to know have emerged. A report released last week by OTG, Closing Democracy’s Window,documents how during the first year of the current administration there has been a rapid erosion of openness, a crumbling of norms, frequent and ongoing disparagement of the media, efforts to stonewall information requests, manipulation of data, and outright suppression of facts…”
Via LLRX – Statistics Resources and Big Data 2018 – Marcus Zillman’s new guide is a comprehensive resource for all researchers who require access to reliable and accurate publicly available statistics and big data sets that address diverse and timely subject matter. The resources included in this guide are developed and maintained by a range of organizations, including: academic and scholarly sources, the federal government, the corporate and business sectors, open source contributions, advocacy groups, NGOs and IGOs.