👓 OER: The Future of Education Is Open | Educause Review

Read OER: The Future of Education Is Open by Lisa Young, Una Daly and Jason Stone (er.educause.edu)
The OER movement continues to have a significant impact on students, faculty, and the way teaching is occurring. OER can overcome barriers to students

🎧 Episode 41: Danger (Seeing White, Part 11) | Scene on Radio

Listened to Episode 41: Danger (Seeing White, Part 11) by John Biewen and Chenjerai Kumanyika from Scene on Radio

For hundreds of years, the white-dominated American culture has raised the specter of the dangerous, violent black man. Host John Biewen tells the story of a confrontation with an African American teenager. Then he and recurring guest Chenjerai Kumanyika discuss that longstanding image – and its neglected flipside: white-on-black violence.

🎧 Episode 40: Citizen Thind (Seeing White, Part 10) | Scene on Radio

Listened to Episode 40: Citizen Thind (Seeing White, Part 10) by John Biewen and Chenjerai Kumanyika from Scene on Radio

The story of Bhagat Singh Thind, and also of Takao Ozawa – Asian immigrants who, in the 1920s, sought to convince the U.S. Supreme Court that they were white in order to gain American citizenship. Thind’s “bargain with white supremacy,” and the deeply revealing results.

I’m embarrassed to say that I’d never heard these stories or known about any of these laws and their history. Or worse, I’m embarrassed to say that the education system has failed me and millions of others. This sort of history should be broadly known in America.

🎧 Episode 39: A Racial Cleansing in America (Seeing White Part 9) | Scene on Radio

Listened to Episode 39: A Racial Cleansing in America (Seeing White Part 9) by John Biewen and Chenjerai Kumanyika from Scene on Radio

In 1919, a white mob forced the entire black population of Corbin, Kentucky, to leave, at gunpoint. It was one of many racial expulsions in the United States. What happened, and how such racial cleansings became “America’s family secret.”

Download a transcript of the episode.

The history of Corbin as presented by the Corbin city government, with no mention of the 1919 racial expulsion.

Elliot Jaspin’s book, Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansings in America

Another in a long line of stories and history I wished I had learned in US History. I knew things were bad having grown up in the American South. I had no idea that they were this painfully bad. Holy shit.

🎧 Episode 37: Chenjerai’s Challenge (Seeing White, Part 7) | Scene on Radio

Listened to Episode 37: Chenjerai’s Challenge (Seeing White, Part 7) by John Biewen with special guest Chenjerai Kumanyika from Scene on Radio

“How attached are you to the idea of being white?” Chenjerai Kumanyika puts that question to host John Biewen, as they revisit an unfinished conversation from a previous episode. Part 7 of our series, Seeing White.

Photo: Composite image: Chenjerai Kumanyika, left; photo by Danusia Trevino. And John Biewen, photo by Ewa Pohl.

Relistened to this episode as a prelude to getting back into it after a long summer. Glad that there are so many more episodes to catch up on.

👓 Facebook Figured Out My Family Secrets, And It Won’t Tell Me How | Gizmodo

Read Facebook Figured Out My Family Secrets, And It Won't Tell Me How by Kashmir Hill (Gizmodo)
Rebecca Porter and I were strangers, as far as I knew. Facebook, however, thought we might be connected. Her name popped up this summer on my list of “People You May Know,” the social network’s roster of potential new online friends for me.

👓 How the NSA identified Satoshi Nakamoto | Alexander Muse

Read How the NSA identified Satoshi Nakamoto by Alexander Muse (Alexander Muse | Medium)
The ‘creator’ of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, is the world’s most elusive billionaire. Very few people outside of the Department of Homeland Security know Satoshi’s real name. In fact, DHS will not publicly confirm that even THEY know the billionaire’s identity. Satoshi has taken great care to keep his identity secret employing the latest encryption and obfuscation methods in his communications. Despite these efforts (according to my source at the DHS) Satoshi Nakamoto gave investigators the only tool they needed to find him — his own words. Using stylometry one is able to compare texts to determine authorship of a particular work. Throughout the years Satoshi wrote thousands of posts and emails and most of which are publicly available. According to my source, the NSA was able to the use the ‘writer invariant’ method of stylometry to compare Satoshi’s ‘known’ writings with trillions of writing samples from people across the globe. By taking Satoshi’s texts and finding the 50 most common words, the NSA was able to break down his text into 5,000 word chunks and analyse each to find the frequency of those 50 words. This would result in a unique 50-number identifier for each chunk. The NSA then placed each of these numbers into a 50-dimensional space and flatten them into a plane using principal components analysis. The result is a ‘fingerprint’ for anything written by Satoshi that could easily be compared to any other writing.
The article itself is dubious and unsourced and borders a bit on conspiracy theory, but the underlying concept about stylometry and its implications to privacy will be interesting to many. Naturally, it’s not much new.

👓 Trump Punishes Longtime Aide After Angry Phoenix Speech, Sources Say | Bloomberg

Read Trump Punishes Longtime Aide After Angry Phoenix Speech, Sources Say (Bloomberg)
George Gigicos removed as president’s rally organizer Sparse crowd put Trump in foul mood before delivering remarks