Posts Tagged ‘Facebook’
The technology transformations in the past 10-15 years has been remarkable. It is mostly driven by the internet, but there also have been several other advances in technologies that have helped accelerate research and development across the board. It has also leveled the playing field for many. For example, many authors and artists have been successful in directly reaching out to an audience through the internet that simply wasn’t possible before. The channels for success before the internet was limited, complicated and dismal.
But this also has resulted in a massive growth in the availability of information that are uncurated, biased, incorrect, so on and so forth. This has become such a huge problem that even for seasoned folks it is becoming impossible to identify whether some of what we see and read are true and accurate. One of the many horrifying examples is a recent horrifying story from India about a fake post that spread like wildfire through WhatsApp. Major technology companies like Google and Facebook continue to put in safeguards, but those intent on misusing the system bypass these immediately.
Everyone is busy producing new gadgets and monetizing the user base that no one seems to be investing enough in finding solutions for the long haul. They are busy finding bandaids and the blood appears to stop for a short period before gushing out!
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Cambridge Analytica has become a household name in recent days as we learn how they had access to valuable data about 50 million Facebook users which may have played a role in influencing the US elections in 2016. There are a lot of loose ends to this story that are emerging as every day goes by. This brings to the fore an issue that has existed for a long time – based on enthusiasm and euphoria, new technologies are adopted by millions and millions of people all around the world without carefully thinking through important issues such as data security and privacy. Rules and regulations that can potentially help, take a long time to develop and they lag. The rapid pace of technology in the past three decades, fueled by the adoption of internet, has increased this gap tremendously. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight.
Talking about rules and regulations, we are in the midst of implementing necessary protocols and controls as required by the European Union called General Data Protection Regulation. As the site reminds us, we all have 63 days to comply!
A disclaimer – this is a pretty complicated regulation, the details of which are still being vetted carefully and what you will read below is my interpretation based on internal discussions and consultations with other attorneys.
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I am enrolled in a course being offered by Worldview in Stanford called “Behind and Beyond Big Data“. As a part of this I am learning a lot about how the big data is being used in various interesting ways. In addition, a couple of other things that I saw on TV or heard in the social media also has captured my interest.
Tweets predicting rates of heart attacks. https://goo.gl/2iInWM%5B/caption%5D
Predictive Modeling based on Facebook Likes
Michal Kosinskia, David Stillwella, and Thore Graepelb from the University of Cambridge and Microsoft designed an experiment to see if the Facebook Likes of a person is a predictor of “private traits and attributes” of a person such as age, intelligence and sexual orientation. They describe their research here. A very large sample of facebook users contributed voluntarily to the research by participating in myPersonality initiative. They also manually inspected the volunteers’ facebook profiles in some cases to infer additional information such as the ethnic origin. It is a fascinating experiment. If you are interested in checking how well the system predicts your traits and attributes, try it out at Apply Magic Sauce.
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We spent five days in Cancun, Mexico and just got back. It was a lot of fun and relaxation. The beaches were fantastic! During the travels this summer I used a lot of technologies myself and noticed the use of various technologies around me. The first and foremost thing I notice is that no matter where one is, most people are carrying a mobile device. Whether it is the trains in Malaysia or relaxing on the beaches in Cancun, many have a cell phone they are checking or talking on or are looking at things on their tablets. Of course, it goes without saying that it included me and it made me not feel guilty 🙂
Secondly, wireless was everywhere. However, depending on where you are, the access can be an issue. In Kuala Lumpur, I was able to get WiFi access perfectly in the hotel, guest WiFi at University of Malaya was a bit of an issue, wireless at Starbucks was perfect. In Cancun, one of the hotels we stayed in had no WiFi in the room (we vacated the place the next day and moved to another hotel!), but the other was perfect and the WiFi was available even in the beaches adjoining the hotel (several feet away). However, Starbucks required you to purchase something and you had to use the password printed on the receipt (waste of paper) and you had only 15 minutes of access.
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Though we had an excellent start of the semester, there were two nagging issues we needed to solve. One had to do with the print management software called Papercut and the other had to with Macs in classrooms. The first issue was related to one of the unusually busy printing season – first two weeks of the semester. In addition, we are now using multi function devices for printing and in order to support them, we needed to move the print server to Windows server, the only supported platform. The Mac issue had to do with the way we have been reusing the computer names and how this “confuses” the active directory, resulting in the users not be able to login to the domain. Notice that both of these problems are related to Microsoft backend technologies. Just sayin’…
Thanks to the teamwork by LTS staff and their hard work, both of these problems seem to be under control. Another case that illustrates that no matter how hard you work to avoid these problems, the real field testing happens only when our faculty and students are here. This is why the best strategies are one that allows us to be prepared and solve the problems quickly. We can never rest saying “we have tested everything and they work”. No, they don’t, sorry!
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I wrote my last post on a day that is special to me and the next one is today which is also a special day for me 🙂
I got back from travel to Turkey and Greece last thursday. My wife had a meeting in Turkey, so we began there and had a wonderful time and then went to Greece, which, while a beautiful country, was not as enjoyable as Turkey for us. I will spare the details. Our Greece opinion was definitely not clouded by a not so happy incidence – my Google Nexus phone was snatched away from my hand while we were just wrapping up our last dinner in Athens before heading back to the States. It was what I would call perfect execution!
I always look to see how the other countries are doing technology as a way to benchmark ours. So, this post is some random thoughts about it. Talking about random, I am not sure how many of you heard the story that the State Department goofing up the “random” selection of applicant to an immigration lottery.
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Social Media is in the limelight again in the wake of the happenings on in Egypt. I myself have been so busy recently that I have not been able to do my usual level of tweeting and facebooking. We had to open up discussion on the Email/Calendaring to the Wellesley Community and I had to share with the Library and Technology Policy Committee several policy documents. As you know, policy documents take up a lot of time. Policy documents are important, but in my opinion, they need to be relevant, short, readable, to the point and practical. On the EDUCAUSE CIO list I was surprised to find that a few institutions have policies on policy documents. Hmmm… I wonder who wrote that one.
Social Media as we know is a web based technology platform for easy social interaction. Ease of use and access are critical for this to work correctly. As we know, some of the technologies such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have fared very well in this space, but a lot of them such as Google Buzz, and Ning have failed to catch on. The most recent rumor is about Yahoo! planning to shut down del.icio.us, the social bookmarking site. The struggle for us, the technologists, is what advice to give to those we support regarding the use of these.
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