Archive of ‘information technology’ category
Online Course | A Thousand Words and a Picture: Storytelling with Data
https://events.educause.edu/courses/2019/a-thousand-words-and-a-picture-storytelling-with-data
Part 1: March 13, 2019 | 1:00–2:30 p.m. ET
Part 2: March 20, 2019 | 1:00–2:30 p.m. ET
Part 3: March 27, 2019 | 1:00–2:30 p.m. ET
Overview
A picture is worth a thousand words, but developing a data picture worth a thousand words involves careful thought and planning. IT leaders are often in need of sharing their story and vision for the future with campus partners and campus leadership. Delivering this message in a compelling way takes a significant amount of thought and planning. This session will take participants through the process of constructing their story, how to (and how not to) incorporate data and anecdotes effectively, how to design clear data visualizations, and how to present their story with confidence.
Learning Objectives
During this course, participants will:
- Develop a story that elicits a specific outcome
- Identify and effectively use data elements to support a compelling story
- Learn how to tell your story in a clear and effective way
NOTE: Participants will be asked to complete assignments in between the course segments that support the learning objectives stated below and will receive feedback and constructive critique from course facilitators on how to improve and shape their work.
Facilitator
Leah Lang, Director of Analytics Services, EDUCAUSE
Leah Lang leads EDUCAUSE Analytics Services, a suite of data services, products, and tools that can be used to inform decision-making about IT in higher education. The foundational service in this suite is the EDUCAUSE Core Data Services (CDS), higher education’s comprehensive IT benchmarking data service.
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more Educause webinars in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=educause+webinar
The Digital Destruction of Democracy
ANYA SCHIFFRIN JANUARY 21, 2019
https://prospect.org/article/digital-destruction-democracy
Social media is the best friend disinformation ever had, and the cure is far from obvious.
Anya Schiffrin is an adjunct faculty member at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. She worked in Hanoi from 1997 to 1999 as the bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires.
Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics
By Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, & Hal Roberts
Oxford University Press
A Harvard law professor who is a well-known theorist of the digital age, Benkler and colleagues have produced an authoritative tome that includes multiple taxonomies and literature reviews as well as visualizations of the flow of disinformation.
clickbait fabricators
white supremacist and alt-right trolls
a history of the scholarship on propaganda, reminding the reader that much of the discussion began in the 1930s.
Benkler’s optimistic 2007 book, The Wealth of Networks, predicted that the Internet would bring people together and transform the way information is created and spread. Today, Benkler is far less sanguine and has become one of the foremost researchers of disinformation networks.
Fox News, Breitbart, The Daily Caller, InfoWars, and Zero Hedge
As a result, mainstream journalists repeat and amplify the falsehoods even as they debunk them.
There is no clear line, they argue, between Russian propaganda, Breitbart lies, and the Trump victory. They add that Fox News is probably more influential than Facebook.
after George Soros gave a speech in January 2018 calling for regulation of the social media platforms, Facebook hired a Republican opposition research firm to shovel dirt at George Soros.
The European Union has not yet tried to regulate disinformation (although they do have codes of practice for the platforms), instead focusing on taxation, competition regulation, and protection of privacy. But Germany has strengthened its regulations regarding online hate speech, including the liability of the social media platforms.
disclosure of the sources of online political advertising.It’s a bit toothless because, just as with offshore bank accounts, it may be possible to register which U.S. entity is paying for online political advertising, but it’s impossible to know whether that entity is getting its funds from overseas. Even the Honest Ads bill was too much for Facebook to take.
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more on the issues of digital world and democracy in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2019/02/19/facebook-digital-gangsters/
Facebook labelled ‘digital gangsters’ by report on fake news
Company broke privacy and competition law and should be regulated urgently, say MPs
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/18/facebook-fake-news-investigation-report-regulation-privacy-law-dcms
https://abcn.ws/2NjmNoZ
See also: https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2019/02/20/digital-destruction-of-democracy/
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more on Facebook in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=facebook
4 Ways AI Education and Ethics Will Disrupt Society in 2019
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-01-28-4-ways-ai-education-and-ethics-will-disrupt-society-in-2019
In 2018 we witnessed a clash of titans as government and tech companies collided on privacy issues around collecting, culling and using personal data. From GDPR to Facebook scandals, many tech CEOs were defending big data, its use, and how they’re safeguarding the public.
Meanwhile, the public was amazed at technological advances like Boston Dynamic’s Atlas robot doing parkour, while simultaneously being outraged at the thought of our data no longer being ours and Alexa listening in on all our conversations.
1. Companies will face increased pressure about the data AI-embedded services use.
2. Public concern will lead to AI regulations. But we must understand this tech too.
In 2018, the National Science Foundation invested $100 million in AI research, with special support in 2019 for developing principles for safe, robust and trustworthy AI; addressing issues of bias, fairness and transparency of algorithmic intelligence; developing deeper understanding of human-AI interaction and user education; and developing insights about the influences of AI on people and society.
This investment was dwarfed by DARPA—an agency of the Department of Defence—and its multi-year investment of more than $2 billion in new and existing programs under the “AI Next” campaign. A key area of the campaign includes pioneering the next generation of AI algorithms and applications, such as “explainability” and common sense reasoning.
Federally funded initiatives, as well as corporate efforts (such as Google’s “What If” tool) will lead to the rise of explainable AI and interpretable AI, whereby the AI actually explains the logic behind its decision making to humans. But the next step from there would be for the AI regulators and policymakers themselves to learn about how these technologies actually work. This is an overlooked step right now that Richard Danzig, former Secretary of the U.S. Navy advises us to consider, as we create “humans-in-the-loop” systems, which require people to sign off on important AI decisions.
3. More companies will make AI a strategic initiative in corporate social responsibility.
Google invested $25 million in AI for Good and Microsoft added an AI for Humanitarian Action to its prior commitment. While these are positive steps, the tech industry continues to have a diversity problem
4. Funding for AI literacy and public education will skyrocket.
Ryan Calo from the University of Washington explains that it matters how we talk about technologies that we don’t fully understand.
Russia ‘successfully tests’ its unplugged internet
24 December 2019
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50902496
“Increasingly, authoritarian countries which want to control what citizens see are looking at what Iran and China have already done.
“It means people will not have access to dialogue about what is going on in their own country, they will be kept within their own bubble.”
a “sovereign Runet”?
In Iran, the National Information Network allows access to web services while policing all content on the network and limiting external information. It is run by the state-owned Telecommunication Company of Iran.
One of the benefits of effectively turning all internet access into a government-controlled walled garden, is that virtual private networks (VPNs), often used to circumvent blocks, would not work.
Another example of this is the so-called Great Firewall of China. It blocks access to many foreign internet services, which in turn has helped several domestic tech giants establish themselves.
Russia already tech champions of its own, such as Yandex and Mail.Ru, but other local firms might also benefit.
The country plans to create its own Wikipedia and politicians have passed a bill that bans the sale of smartphones that do not have Russian software pre-installed.
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Russia Is Considering An Experiment To Disconnect From The Internet
February 11, 20194:50 PM ET SASHA INGBER
https://www.npr.org/2019/02/11/693538900/russia-is-considering-an-experiment-to-disconnect-from-the-internet
Russia is considering a plan to temporarily disconnect from the Internet as a way to gauge how the country’s cyberdefenses would fare in the face of foreign aggression, according to Russian media.
It was introduced after the White House published its 2018 National Security Strategy, which attributed cyberattacks on the United States to Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.
Russia’s Communications Ministry also simulated a switching-off exercise of global Internet services in 2014, according to Russian outlet RT.
Russia’s State Duma will meet Tuesday to consider the bill, according to RIA Novosti.
Roskomnadzor has also exerted pressure on Google to remove certain sites on Russian searches.
Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats told Congress last month that Russia, as well as other foreign actors, will increasingly use cyber operations to “threaten both minds and machines in an expanding number of ways—to steal information, to influence our citizens, or to disrupt critical infrastructure.”
My note: In the past, the US actions prompted other countries to consider the same:
Germanty – https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2014/07/01/privacy-and-surveillance-obama-advisor-john-podesta-every-country-has-a-history-of-going-over-the-line/
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more on cybersecurity in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=cybersecurity
more on surveillance in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=surveillance
K-12 And Higher Education Are Considered Separate Systems. What If They Converged?
By Jeffrey R. Young Sep 8, 2017
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-09-08-k-12-and-higher-education-are-considered-separate-systems-what-if-they-converged
In “The Convergence of K-12 and Higher Education: Policies and Programs in a Changing Era,” two education professors point out potential benefits of taking a more holistic view to American education
interview with Christopher Loss, one of the editors.
What role does technology play in some of the convergences that occur or are happening?
There’s a great essay in the collection by June Ahn, which deals with the idea of technology as a key mediating source and mechanism for the creation of various kinds of convergences between and among different sectors (my note: K12 and higher ed).
Cyberlearning Community Report: The State of Cyberlearning and the Future of Learning With Technology http://circlcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/CyberlearningCommunityReport2017.pdf (Oct, 2017)
Americans like to see themselves as among the best in the world in education. But lately, the education leaders have been looking abroad for ideas, I think. What can we learn from countries that do have closer links between K-12 and higher ed?
How Genrefication Makes School Libraries More Like Bookstores
Gail Cornwall Jul 22, 2018 https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/51336/how-genrefication-makes-school-libraries-more-like-bookstores
Under the Dewey Decimal System that revolutionized and standardized book shelving starting in 1876, nonfiction essentially already gets the genrefication treatment with, for example, Music located in the 780s and Paleontology in the 560s. Yet most fiction is shelved in one big clump alphabetized by author’s last name.
Many librarians say the “search hurdle” imposed by Dewey classification (a system originally designed for adults) significantly reduces the odds of a child finding something new they’re likely to enjoy. In a genrefied library, on the other hand, a young reader standing near a favorite book need only stick out a hand to find more like it. (It’s a bit like the analog version of Amazon’s recommendation feature: “Customers who bought this item also bought”)
The Dewey-loyal also oppose genrefication in principle for, interestingly enough, the same reason others support it: self-sufficiency. Sure, they argue, kids might be better able to find a book independently in their school library, but what happens when they go to the public one? When they get to high school?
The debate has led to compromise positions. Some leave books for older students in the Dewey arrangement while genrefying for younger ones. Other librarians rearrange middle readers and young adult books but leave picture books shelved by author since it can be unclear how to categorize a story about a duck driving a tractor.
Learn Blockchains by Building One
The fastest way to learn how Blockchains work is to build one
https://hackernoon.com/learn-blockchains-by-building-one-117428612f46
Remember that a blockchain is an immutable, sequential chain of records called Blocks. They can contain transactions, files or any data you like, really. But the important thing is that they’re chained together using hashes.
If you aren’t sure what a hash is, here’s an explanation.
reading and writing some basic Python, as well as have some understanding of how HTTP requests work, since we’ll be talking to our Blockchain over HTTP.
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more on blockchain in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=blockchain
Law is Code: Making Policy for Artificial Intelligence
Jules Polonetsky and Omer Tene January 16, 2019
https://www.ourworld.co/law-is-code-making-policy-for-artificial-intelligence/
Twenty years have passed since renowned Harvard Professor Larry Lessig coined the phrase “Code is Law”, suggesting that in the digital age, computer code regulates behavior much like legislative code traditionally did. These days, the computer code that powers artificial intelligence (AI) is a salient example of Lessig’s statement.
- Good AI requires sound data. One of the principles, some would say the organizing principle, of privacy and data protection frameworks is data minimization. Data protection laws require organizations to limit data collection to the extent strictly necessary and retain data only so long as it is needed for its stated goal.
- Preventing discrimination – intentional or not.
When is a distinction between groups permissible or even merited and when is it untoward? How should organizations address historically entrenched inequalities that are embedded in data? New mathematical theories such as “fairness through awareness” enable sophisticated modeling to guarantee statistical parity between groups.
- Assuring explainability – technological due process. In privacy and freedom of information frameworks alike, transparency has traditionally been a bulwark against unfairness and discrimination. As Justice Brandeis once wrote, “Sunlight is the best of disinfectants.”
- Deep learning means that iterative computer programs derive conclusions for reasons that may not be evident even after forensic inquiry.
Yet even with code as law and a rising need for law in code, policymakers do not need to become mathematicians, engineers and coders. Instead, institutions must develop and enhance their technical toolbox by hiring experts and consulting with top academics, industry researchers and civil society voices. Responsible AI requires access to not only lawyers, ethicists and philosophers but also to technical leaders and subject matter experts to ensure an appropriate balance between economic and scientific benefits to society on the one hand and individual rights and freedoms on the other hand.
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more on AI in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=artificial+intelligence
Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway.
2019 may finally be the year for ‘The Search Engine That Doesn’t Track You’
Drew Millard, Jan 15, 2019
https://medium.com/s/story/nothing-can-stop-google-duckduckgo-is-trying-anyway-718eb7391423