Weekly Web Harvest for 2019-06-23
- The Grey Lady Learns Pivot Tables: NY Times J-Course Data, Part 1 | spreadsheetjournalism
This just in: The newspaper of record is rebranding itself into the newspaper of records. The Times – the one from New York, that is – has moved to evangelize the data-journalistic thing among its staff, and towards that admirable end has crafted an extended in-house workshop, syllabus and practice files/exercises made available to all the rest of us in Google Sheets here and here, respectively (ok, ok, call me the Luddite; I’m downloading the files into Excel). - AltSchool’s out: Zuckerberg-backed startup that tried to rethink education calls it quits – SFChronicle.com
Now, the 21st century schoolhouse, created by a former Google executive and backed by titans of tech like Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel, is essentially shutting down. AltSchool is being retooled as Altitude Learning, a startup that will sell software and professional development services nationwide. - Track This | A new kind of Incognito
Let us open 100 tabs of pure madness to fool trackers into thinking you’re someone else. - bellingcat – Lord Of The Flies: An Open-Source Investigation Into Saud Al-Qahtani – bellingcat
The individual identifying themselves as al-Qahtani in emails to Hacking Team in 2012 and 2015 used two email addresses (saudq1978@gmail.com and saud@saudq.com) and a phone number (+966 55 548 9750) that can be definitively linked to al-Qahtani through information leakage from Google’s and Twitter’s password recovery pages. - Poe’s law – Wikipedia
Poe’s law is based on a comment written by Nathan Poe in 2005 on christianforums.com, an Internet forum on Christianity. The post was made during a debate on creationism, where a previous poster had remarked to another user “Good thing you included the winky. Otherwise people might think you are serious”.[4] Poe then replied, “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won’t mistake for the genuine article”.[1] The original statement of Poe’s law referred specifically to creationism, but it has since been generalized to apply to any kind of fundamentalism or extremism.[3] - mahsa alimardani ? on Twitter: “Mosques receive free energy in Iran. Iranians have set up Bitcoin miners in them. There’s around 100 here, producing around $260,000 USD a year. This money goes a long way in Iran’s choked sanctioned economy.… http
unintended consequences - Ethical Principles, OKRs, and KPIs: what YouTube and Facebook could learn from Tukey | Data Science Institute
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure” – Goodhart’s law - Critical Atlas of Internet
Through a series of 15 hypotheses, this Critical Atlas of Internet aims to develop 15 conceptual spatialization exercises. The purpose of the atlas is to use spatial analysis as a key to understanding social, political and economic issues on Internet. The atlas seek to discern the shape of the Internet in order to understand the concrete issues and stakes involved. - Netflix records all of your Bandersnatch choices, GDPR request reveals – The Verge
Netflix keeps a record all of your Bandersnatch choice data from its Black Mirror choose-your-own-adventure film, a technology policy researcher has discovered. - IRpair & Phantom – Privacy Eyewear. by Reflectacles — Kickstarter
- Opinion | ‘If You’ve Built a Chaos Factory, You Can’t Dodge Responsibility for the Chaos’ – The New York Times
“Too many seem to think that good intentions excuse away harmful outcomes,” Mr. Cook told the assembled graduates of a school from which much of the modern internet has sprung. “If you’ve built a chaos factory, you can’t dodge responsibility for the chaos. Taking responsibility means having the courage to think things through.”