- Misjudgements Will Drive Social Trials Underground (Nature) — 34 ethicists write to explain why they see Facebook’s mood-influence trials as not an egregious breach of either ethics or law. Notable: No one knows whether exposure to a stream of baby announcements, job promotions and humble brags makes Facebook’s one billion users sadder or happier. The exposure is a social experiment in which users become guinea pigs, but the effects will not be known unless they are studied.[…] But the extreme response to this study, some of which seems to have been made without full understanding of what it entailed or what legal and ethical standards require, could result in such research being done in secret or not at all. Compare wisdom of the ethicists to wisdom of the crowd. (via Kate Crawford)
- Problem-Free Activity in the Mathematics Classroom (PDF) — interesting not just for the bland crap work we make kids do, but for the summary of five types of need that stimulate learning: for certainty (“which of the two is right?”), for causality (“did X cause Y?”, “what will happen next?”), for computation (“how much will it cost?”, “how long will it take?”), for communication and persuasion (“it’s more fun when we work on this together”, “let me show you why I’m right!”), and for connection and structuring (“that can’t be right, it goes against all I know!”, “ah, that makes sense because …”). (via Kathy Sierra)
- Survey of Academic Field Experiences (PLoSone) — Our survey revealed that conducting research in the field exposes scientists to a number of negative experiences as targets and as bystanders. The experiences described by our respondents ranged from inadvertent alienating behavior, to unwanted verbal and physical sexual advances, to, most troublingly, sexual assault including rape. is immediately followed by These proportions of respondents experiencing harassment are generally consistent with other studies of workplace harassment in other professional settings. This will change when men’s behaviour and expectations change. Male readers, do your part: don’t harass and don’t tolerate it. This message brought to you from future generations who will wonder how the hell we turned a blind eye to it.
- sentry (github) — a realtime, platform-agnostic error logging and aggregation platform. It specializes in monitoring errors and extracting all the information needed to do a proper post-mortem without any of the hassle of the standard user feedback loop.
"ethics" entries
Four short links: 17 July 2014
Software Ethics, Learning Challenges, Workplace Harassment, and Logging for Postmortems
Four short links: 4 July 2014
Deleted Transparency, Retro Theme, MPA Suckage, and Ultrasonic Comms
- The Flipside of the Right To Be Forgotten (Business Insider) — deletion requests were granted for a former politician who wanted to remove links to a news article about his behavior when previously in office – so that he can have a clean slate when running for a new position – and a man who was convicted of possessing child sexual abuse imagery.
- BOOTSTRA.386 — gorgeously retro theme for Bootstrap.
- Multi-Process Architectures Suck — detailed and painful look at the computational complexity and costs of multiprocess architectures.
- Chromecast Ultrasonic Comms — In the new system, Chromecast owners first allow support for nearby devices. A nearby device then requests access to the Chromecast, and the Chromecast plays an ultrasonic sound through the connected TV’s speakers. The sound is then picked up by the microphone in the device, which allows it to pair with the TV. (via Greg Linden)
Four short links: 2 July 2014
Facebook Research, Mountain Game, Dollar Vans, and Eigenmorality
- Experimental Evidence of Massive-scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks — I suspect many more people have expressed an opinion on the research than have read the research.
- Mountain — a new game in which you are (wait for it) a mountain. From the creator of the fake game in Her. (via Chris McDowall)
- NYC’s Dollar Vans (New Yorker) — New York’s unofficial shuttles, called “dollar vans” in some neighborhoods, make up a thriving transportation system that operates where the subway and buses don’t. A somewhat invisible economy. (via Seb Chan)
- Eigenmorality — caution: linear algebra and morality, two subjects that many programmers struggle with. (via Pete Warden)
Expect no, but fight for yes
At the end of the day, there are no rules, only guidelines.
Editor’s note: this is the transcript of DJ Patil’s commencement address to the 2014 graduating class at UC Santa Cruz’s Jack Baskin School of Engineering; it is published here with permission.
DJ Patil with his father. Photo: courtesy of DJ Patil.
Thank you, Dean Ramirez and the distinguished faculty here today. And thank you to all the friends and family who have come out to celebrate this day. Thank you all for being here.
But most importantly: you. The Class of 2014. I gotta tell you guys: you look awesome. Downright amazing.
Now, I recognize that I’m the person standing between you and a selfie with your diploma, so I’m going to do my best to keep it short. And to start, I’m going to start with a confession: ever since Professor Getoor reached out and asked me if I’d be willing to do this, I’ve been dreading it. I mean really, really dreading it. I mean like as in final-exam-in-compilers dreading it. Read more…
Four short links: 17 June 2014
Decentralised Consensus, Disruption Critiqued, Digital Reputation, and Stuff That Matters
- Eris — a platform which allows developers and users to deploy consensus driven applications which rely on decentralized architecture and a consensus driven blockchain database backend. Open source (modified MIT).
- The Disruption Machine (New Yorker) — long detailed critique of the “disruption” hypothesis of Clayton Christensen, particularly questioning the case studies cited in The Innovator’s Dilemma.
- Web Reputation Systems and the Real World (Randy Farmer) — Don’t cross the streams. Good digital reputations should always be context-limited: the nature of the inputs should constrain the use of the reputation scores that are output.
- Bill and Melinda Gates Commencement Speech (Quartz) — excellent urging to work on stuff that matters. The pessimists are wrong in my view, but they’re not crazy. If innovation is purely market- driven and we don’t focus it on the big inequities, then we could have amazing advances and inventions that leave the world even more divided.
Four short links: 6 June 2014
Ethical UX, Personal Robots, Sharter URLs, and Magical Devices
- Ethics and UX Design (Slideshare) —We are the thieves of time. This excellent talk challenges you (via Aristotle) to understand what a good life is, and whether you’re designing to bring it about. (via Keith Bolland)
- Pepper Personal Robot — Japan’s lead in consumer-facing robotics is impressive. If this had been developed by an American company, it’d either have a Lua scripting interface or twin machine guns for autonomous death.
- shrturl — spoof, edit, rewrite, and general evil up webpages, hidden behind an URL shortening service.
- Lessons for Building Magical Devices (First Round Review) — The most interesting devices I’ve seen take elements of the physical world and expose them to software.[…] If you buy a Tesla Model S today, the behavior of the car six months from now could be radically different because software can reshape the capability of the hardware continuously, exceeding the speed of customer demand.
Four short links: 29 May 2014
Modern Software Development, Internet Trends, Software Ethics, and Open Government Data
- Beyond the Stack (Mike Loukides) — tools and processes to support software developers who are as massively distributed as the code they build.
- Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends 2014 (PDF) — the changes on slide 34 are interesting: usage moving away from G+/Facebook-style omniblather creepware and towards phonebook-based chat apps.
- Introduction to Software Engineering Ethics (PDF) — amazing set of provocative questions and scenarios for software engineers about the decisions they made and consequences of their actions. From a course in ethics from SCU.
- Open Government Data Online: Impenetrable (Guardian) — Too much knowledge gets trapped in multi-page pdf files that are slow to download (especially in low-bandwidth areas), costly to print, and unavailable for computer analysis until someone manually or automatically extracts the raw data.
Four short links: 7 April 2014
Auto Ethics, Baio on Medium, Internet of Insecure Things, New Unlicensed Spectrum
- Can We Design Systems to Automate Ethics — code in self-driving cars will implement a solution to the trolley problem. But which solution?
- My First Post on Medium (Andy Baio) — one or two glitches but otherwise fine demonstration of what’s possible with Medium.
- SCADA Vulnerability: 7600 Plants at Risk (BBC) — the vulnerabilities are in unpatched Centum CS 3000 software. The real business for IoT is secure remote updates and monitoring. (via Slashdot)
- New Unlicensed Spectrum — The unanimous vote frees up 100 MHz of airwaves in the lower part of 5 GHz spectrum band. Previously, the FCC reserved those airwaves for exclusive use by a satellite phone company. The FCC vote opens those unlicensed airwaves so they can be used by consumer electronics equipment, including Wi-Fi routers. With the new airwaves, Wi-Fi equipment can handle more traffic at higher speeds.
Four short links: 17 March 2014
Wireframe Quiz, Business Values, Mobile Dev, and the Bad Guy Mindset
- De-Design the Web — quiz, can you recognise common websites from just their wireframes? For the non-designer (like myself) it’s a potent reminder of the power of design. Design’s front of mind as we chew on the Internet of Affordances. (via USvsTHEM)
- Words I Hold Dear (Slideshare) — short but effective presentation on values in business. If you are confident that you can bear responsibility, and will not do anything immoral, illegal, or unethical, then it is not too hard to choose the path that promises the most adventure.
- Android Development for iOS Devs — in case you had forgotten that developing for multiple mobile platforms is like a case of fire-breathing butt warts. (not good)
- The World Through the Eyes of Hackers (PDF) — I’ve long thought that the real problem is that schools trains subordinates to meet expectations and think like a Nice Person, but defence is only possible when you know how to break expectations and think like a Bad Guy.
Four short links: 18 February 2014
Offensive Security, Sage-Quitting, Ethics Risks, and War Stories
- Offensive Computer Security — 2014 class notes, lectures, etc. from FSU. All CC-licensed.
- Twitter I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down (Quinn Norton) — The net doesn’t make social problems. It amplifies them until they can’t be ignored. And many other words of wisdom. When you eruditely stop using a service, that’s called sage-quitting.
- Inside Google’s Mysterious Ethics Board (Forbes) — nails the three risk to Google’s AI ethics board: (a) compliance-focus, (b) internally-staffed, and (c) only for show.
- 10 Things We Forgot to Monitor — devops war stories explaining ten things that bitly now monitors.