Category: social sciences
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Make desire more important than fear: “Change the Way You See Yourself (Through Asset-Based Thinking)”
Kathy Cramer and Hank Wasiak’s new book is out, a gorgeous and well-focused follow-on to their Change the Way You See Everything, one of the Microsoft Ad Astra project’s signature giveaways.* In May 2007, we did an amazing two-day workshop with Kathy, Hank and his colleagues from the Concept Farm, and folks from Extreme Arts…
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Phyllis Schafly to get Honorary Doctorate from Wash U?
The intro of the No honorary doctorate for anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly Facebook group: Wash. U. will honor anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly at commencement. WHAT? This is the woman who lives the hypocrisy of having a career that takes her around the country lecturing “family values” groups on how women should stay home. This is the woman…
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RSA: “It feels like something’s missing”
The last time I was at the RSA conference/expo in 2004, Bill Gates talked about PREfix and PREfast in his keynote — he even went off and started talking about Microsoft’s acquisition of PREfix! Hard to top that … but it’s a great place for shoozing and to get a feel for the market, so…
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pwn2own: the stakes just got higher
Update, March 27: Macbook Air pwned and owned — in two minutes! Update, March 28: Vista laptop pwned via an Adobe Flash vulnerability. Update, April 16: Apple issues Safari patch. Props to the winners — and to Ubuntu Linux, which emerged unpwned!
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Intersectionality 2.0
I’ve been working on a couple a potential proposal a keynote for this year’s Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference related to the topic of intersectionality and social networks. Here’s an overview: Since first being developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw in the 1970s, theories of intersectionality have become a powerful lens for examining questions of race and…
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Indeed! The Economist on “computer science as a social science”
The Economist’s Technology Quarterly has an excellent article on Software bugtraps: software that makes software better. This is something of a followup to an article they did a few years ago; most people quoted think that the situation is improving, although of course as Capers Jones points out it depends on your metrics. And why…
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“Election falsification” and other voting issues in Ohio (updated)
Update, March 27: The Columbus Dispatch reports statewide officials say prosecution for Limbaugh is very unlikely: “lying through your teeth and being stupid isn’t a crime.” Ari Melber’s Limbaugh’s Lying Voters Under Investigation on The Nation’s Campaign Matters blog has a lot more. Kim Zetter’s The Mysterious Case of Ohio’s Voting Machines, on Wired’s THREAT…
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Cognitive diversity and the 2008 US election
Originally posted as a comment about The Day After. There’s an interesting thread started on Feb 8 in the One Million Strong for Barack group on Facebook, How many Political Cards Hillary has played and whats more to come? I went back and looked at it today seeing how accurate it was; here was my…
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Facebook flakiness: reliability problems, or an attack?
Facebook once again is in the middle of major flakiness right now: links to nowhere, spontaneous logouts. The best thing to do when something like this happens is to treat it as a sign that it’s a good time to take a break from Facebook for a little while. So I decided to write this…
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Wikileaks.org back up; Julius Baer’s stock down 3.6 percent
Free speech advocates immediately hailed as a victory the decision on Friday of a federal judge to withdraw a prior order turning off the Web address of the site Wikileaks.org. Indeed! Jonathan D. Glater’s New York Times article is an excellent overview of the complexities of the situation, including jurisdictional issues, the privacy rights of…
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Computers, Freedom, and Privacy 2008: call for proposals is up!
From the CFP2008 web page: This election year will be the first to address US technology policy in the information age as part of our national debate. Candidates have put forth positions about technology policy and have recognized that it has its own set of economic, political, and social concerns. In the areas of privacy,…
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Coverage for ‘How to respond when Facebook censors your political speech’
The two-part series I posted on Tales from the Net and Wired’s How-to Wiki is starting to get some coverage. Shai Sachs has an excellent piece on MyDD: There’s been a lot of buzz lately about Facebook “censorship” of free speech. The Blackadder One case I wrote about a couple weeks ago was just an…
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Grr: “Our terms of service has changed”
This morning when I went to log in to a discussion forum on Yuku (“your interests, your communities” — the next-generation, friend-enabled version of ezboard), I was greeted with: Our terms of service has changed. Please read the new terms of service. By clicking “I agree,” you agree to Yuku’s Terms of Use. Oh, they…
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Facebook: censoring political speech
Update on February 22: How to respond when Facebook censors your political speech is up on Tales from the Net and Wired’s How-to Wiki and links back to comments in this thread. Alas, the Facebook Barack Obama discussion board was deleted on February 20, so many of the links here go off to oblivion. If…
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What democracy looks like in the US, February 2008
Update, March 6: democracy largely (albeit imperfectly) prevailed in the LA County mess; 47,153 “double bubble†votes were counted in Los Angeles County. What about Ohio? We shall see …
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“Yes We Can” do grassroots campaigning for Obama on Facebook
The Yes We Can/Sí Se Puede video’s already got at least a million hits on YouTube — 566,000 for the one I linked to here, a couple more instances with 285,000 and 140,000, and then a long tail curve … How many people will watch it if we get it all over Facebook? I dunno,…
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How’d it get through QA — and why didn’t they fix it?
Over on Tales from the Net, I’ve been discussing Kevin Poulsen’s articles about a MySpace security bug that allowed access to photos in profiles that had been marked as “private”. It had been well known for months, but MySpace didn’t fix it until the day after Kevin’s first article. In the interim, somebody wrote an…
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Privacy and civil liberties: showdown time on the “Protect” America Act
Update on February 12: Final votes were today. Barack Obama voted against telecom immunity — as did Harry Reid and 29 other Democrats. John McCain along with every single Republican Senator, Joe Lieberman, and 19 Democrats voted for. More here. Update on Super Tuesday: Ari Melber’s Nation article gives the current snapshot; read the thread…
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My “interventions” are admired!
From Moderator’s closing statement in The Economist’s debate on social networking technologies in education: I also admired the interventions from JON PINCUS, who pointed out that supporters of the motion underestimated “the risks that the new technologies will in practice reinforce (rather than counter) existing negative biases and trends in the educational system”. He also…
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Strange maps
It’s pretty much what you’d expect from the name: a blog with pictures and discussion of interesting, different, and strange maps. As well as the Transit Maps of the World (the postcard for a new collection that was published in October by Penguin) and its peer the tree of life down the Tube, I really…