Weekly Web Harvest for 2016-06-26


  • A significant gap exists between cybersecurity as taught by textbooks and experts, and
    cybersecurity as practiced by actual end users [1-9]. In previous work, we looked at
    the general problem of how users work around security controls in general [10] and in
    healthcare [11]. Here, we focus on cyber security evasions healthcare and how
    ethnographic methods help reveal them.

  • Note to Educators: Pay Now or Pay Later! — Medium

    Aside from the vulgarity of Donors Choose, the most unattractive example of teacher dependency and low self-esteem is the desire to become corporate certified. What’s next? Should teachers where festive holiday sweaters affixed with corporate sponsor logos like NASCAR drivers or Happy Meals? If not, then why the
    rush to advertise your corporate affiliation on your blog, Twitter profile, or CV?

    Google is not your friend. They are a giant corporation selling users and their data to other corporate customers. That doesn’t bother me 10 percent as much as the spectacle of educators begging for corporate affection.

  • Functional Programming — Eloquent JavaScript

    This is shorter, but if you don’t know how to soak peas you’ll surely screw up and put them in too little water. But how to soak peas can be looked up, and that is the trick. If you assume a certain basic knowledge in the audience, you can talk in a language that deals with bigger concepts, and express things in a much shorter and clearer way. This, more or less, is what abstraction is.

  • Brave New World Revisited (1958) by Aldous Huxley

    The methods employed by orthodox educators were and still are extremely inefficient. Under a scientific dictator education will really work — with the result that most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution. There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown.

  • Concept Experience #2 “Man/Woman-Computer Symbiosis” | A Closer Look at Gerell’s Thought Vectors

    From 2014 but really nice student comment exchange from Bonnie Boaz’s class.

  • Don’t scar on the first cut — Signal v. Noise

    Policies are organizational scar tissue. They are codified overreactions to situations that are unlikely to happen again. They are collective punishment for the misdeeds of an individual.
    This is how bureaucracies are born. No one sets out to create a bureaucracy. They sneak up on companies slowly. They are created one policy?—?one scar?—?at a time.
    So don’t scar on the first cut. Don’t create a policy because one person did something wrong once. Policies are only meant for situations that come up over and over again.

  • The worst thing I read this year, and what it taught me… or Can we design sociotechnical systems that don’t suck? | … My heart’s in Accra

    how do we help smart, well-meaning people address social problems in ways that make the world better, not worse? In other words, is it possible to get beyond both a naïve belief that the latest technology will solve social problems and a reaction that rubbishes any attempt to offer novel technical solutions as inappropriate, insensitive and misguided? Can we find a synthesis in which technologists look at their work critically and work closely with the people they’re trying to help in order to build sociotechnical systems that address hard problems?

    ….

    Many hard problems require you to step back and consider whether you’re solving the right problem. If your solution only mitigates the symptoms of a deeper problem, you may be calcifying that problem and making it harder to change. Cheaper, safer prisons make it easier to incarcerate more Americans and avoid addressing fundamental problems of addiction, joblessness, mental illness and structural racism.