This may well be the most comprehensive article I’ve read this year so far on the topic of the ethical responsibility of designers. Its author, Cabe, discusses “weaponised design”: “electronic systems whose designs either do not account for abusive application or whose user experiences directly empower attackers”.
Category: Social Stream
🎧 Introducing ‘Caliphate,’ a New York Times Audio Series | New York Times
The New York Times has introduced a documentary audio series that follows Rukmini Callimachi, a foreign correspondent for The Times and a frequent voice on “The Daily,” as she reports on the Islamic State and the fall of the Iraqi city of Mosul. With the producer Andy Mills, Rukmini journeys to the heart of the conflict to grapple with the most pressing questions about ISIS and to comprehend the power and global pull of the militant group.
Today, instead of our usual show, we offer the Prologue and Chapter 1 of “Caliphate.” This episode includes disturbing language and scenes of graphic violence.
You can listen to “Caliphate” above, or by searching for “Caliphate” wherever you get your podcasts. (If you’re on an Apple device, that’s probably Apple Podcasts. Users of Apple or Android devices can find us on RadioPublic, Stitcher, Spotify or the podcast platform of your choice.)
Each episode will be available to New York Times subscribers a week early, as a way to thank them for their support of this kind of reporting. If you’re a Times subscriber, you can get an early listen to the next episode here. If you’re not, consider becoming one. Either way, sign up to receive weekly dispatches from Rukmini and learn when new episodes are live.
Background reading:
• On five trips to Iraq, Times journalists scoured old Islamic State offices, gathering thousands of files abandoned by the militants.
• The documents that were unearthed reveal extreme brutality and detailed record-keeping.
🔖 Neural Networks and Statistical Learning by Ke-Lin Du, M. N. S. Swamy | Springer
Providing a broad but in-depth introduction to neural network and machine learning in a statistical framework, this book provides a single, comprehensive resource for study and further research. All the major popular neural network models and statistical learning approaches are covered with examples and exercises in every chapter to develop a practical working understanding of the content.
Each of the twenty-five chapters includes state-of-the-art descriptions and important research results on the respective topics. The broad coverage includes the multilayer perceptron, the Hopfield network, associative memory models, clustering models and algorithms, the radial basis function network, recurrent neural networks, principal component analysis, nonnegative matrix factorization, independent component analysis, discriminant analysis, support vector machines, kernel methods, reinforcement learning, probabilistic and Bayesian networks, data fusion and ensemble learning, fuzzy sets and logic, neurofuzzy models, hardware implementations, and some machine learning topics. Applications to biometric/bioinformatics and data mining are also included.
Focusing on the prominent accomplishments and their practical aspects, academic and technical staff, graduate students and researchers will find that this provides a solid foundation and encompassing reference for the fields of neural networks, pattern recognition, signal processing, machine learning, computational intelligence, and data mining.
h/t
Book: Neural Networks and Statistical Learning https://t.co/tO36Z5KRja
— Data Science Central (@DataScienceCtrl) April 30, 2018
📺 Michelle Wolf complete remarks at 2018 White House Correspondents’ Dinner | C-SPAN (YouTube)
From C-SPAN coverage, Michelle Wolf remarks at the 2018 White House Correspondents' Dinner. Watch the complete video here: https://cs.pn/2JxzkC2
After having finally seen this, I don’t see anything wrong or problematic about Michelle Wolf’s act. In fact, she gave a generally solid roast that dished it around to almost everyone. If we want to take someone to task, why not Trump for being a “poor” coward? Was he worried he wouldn’t be the richest person in the room? Was Jeff Bezos RSVP’d?
Some have said that Wolf took Sarah Huckabee Sander’s appearance to task; the sad fact is that they’re just apparently not up enough on popular culture to have gotten some of the jokes. If anything Wolf was complimenting Sanders’ makeup technique.
Why are you guys making this about Sarah’s looks? I said she burns facts and uses the ash to create a *perfect* smoky eye. I complimented her eye makeup and her ingenuity of materials. https://t.co/slII9TYdYx
— Michelle Wolf (@michelleisawolf) April 29, 2018
On the other hand, if we want to beat someone up over taking people’s appearances to task, perhaps we should go back and do some better reporting on the President who says these things on a regular basis and not as part of an obvious comedy and satire routine? A real ad hominem appearance attack would sound something more like “With crazy hair, orange complexion, and bizarre makeup, I often wonder if Trump isn’t attempting to prove that he got just enough talent and votes to hold the office of “First Clown.” Apparently he wasn’t rich enough to buy the popular vote, but just like the sham of Trump University, he was able to afford the Electoral College. Can the voters get a settlement too?
At the end of the day it’s really Wolf who should be the most upset. The worst part of the whole performance was a painfully bad and poorly placed microphone that continually gave me nightmare flashbacks of Howard Dean’s Yahhh!! moment. Her material would have definitely done better with a more solid audio set up.
Now if the WHCA really wants to get righteously upset, maybe they should invite Jeffrey Ross to come? Perhaps he could toss off something tame along the lines of “I wouldn’t f@*k Trump with Sarah Huckabee Sander’s dick!” Maybe it would at least buy his redemption in Bea Arthur’s eyes?
📺 “Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown” West Virginia | CNN
Bourdain digs deep into the proud, often misunderstood culture of West Virginia, as he traverses a 5,000 foot mine, observes the demolition derby-like sport of rock-bouncing and dines on signature Appalachian dishes.
There’s some interesting simple honesty to this show. Reminds me a bit of a more serious and food centric version of what W. Kamau Bell is doing with his show on CNN.
📺 “The Big Bang Theory” The Monetary Insufficiency | CBS
Directed by Nicole Lorre. With Johnny Galecki, Jim Parsons, Kaley Cuoco, Simon Helberg. Sheldon goes to Vegas to win money for science. Also, Penny and Bernadette take Amy wedding dress shopping, but her terrible choice entangles them in a web of lies.
Had trouble paying attention to this episode for some reason…
📺 “The Big Bang Theory” The Comet Polarization | CBS
Directed by Mark Cendrowski. With Johnny Galecki, Jim Parsons, Kaley Cuoco, Simon Helberg. Sheldon's comic book store experience changes when writer Neil Gaiman puts Stuart's store on the map; friendships are threatened when Koothrappali takes credit for Penny's astronomical discovery.
🔖 Moving chairs in Starbucks: Observational studies find rice-wheat cultural differences in daily life in China | Science Advances
Traditional paddy rice farmers had to share labor and coordinate irrigation in a way that most wheat farmers did not. We observed people in everyday life to test whether these agricultural legacies gave rice-farming southern China a more interdependent culture and wheat-farming northern China a more independent culture. In Study 1, we counted 8964 people sitting in cafes in six cities and found that people in northern China were more likely to be sitting alone. In Study 2, we moved chairs together in Starbucks across the country so that they were partially blocking the aisle ( n = 678). People in northern China were more likely to move the chair out of the way, which is consistent with findings that people in individualistic cultures are more likely to try to control the environment. People in southern China were more likely to adjust the self to the environment by squeezing through the chairs. Even in China’s most modern cities, rice-wheat differences live on in everyday life.
👓 Your behavior in Starbucks may reveal more about you than you think | Science | AAAS
Cultural differences are revealed in coffee shop etiquette, study in China finds
📺 Martha Stewart’s Cooking School: Stews of the Arabian Gulf | PBS
Follow the flavor as Martha puts her spin on the stews of the Arabian Gulf. Each dish is layered with stick-to-your-bones satisfaction. Arabian Gulf potpie, braised lamb shanks with okra, curried swordfish stew and red lentil vegetable stew… these slow cooked treasures offer nourishing comfort with ease.
I find Martha Stewart a bit on the droll side. Here she essentially makes a chicken pot pie and calls it Arabian Gulf cuisine?! Anthony Bourdain she is not. Even worse, she takes a taste of the stew for seasoning and then drips the remnants into the dish before using the same spoon to continue stirring. Yes, you read that right. She double dipped her spoon! Alas…
👓 How School Shootings Spread | New Yorker
Malcolm Gladwell (The New Yorker)An increasingly ritualized form of violence is attracting unexpected perpetrators.
An intriguing article whose theory seems both applicable and timely. It also seems extensible to additional areas, some of which I’ve noted in my annotations.
Highlights, Quotes, & Marginalia
Most previous explanations had focussed on explaining how someone’s beliefs might be altered in the moment.
Knowing a little of what is coming in advance here, I can’t help but thinking: How can this riot theory potentially be used to influence politics and/or political campaigns? It could be particularly effective to get people “riled up” just before a particular election to create a political riot of sorts and thereby influence the outcome. Facebook has done several social experiments with elections in showing that their friends and family voted and thereby affecting other potential voters. When done in a way that targets people of particular political beliefs to increase turn out, one is given a means of drastically influencing elections. In some sense, this is an example of this “Riot Theory”.
“But group interaction was such that none could admit this without loss of status; in our terms, their threshold for stealing cars is low because daring masculine acts bring status, and reluctance to join, once others have, carries the high cost of being labeled a sissy.” You can’t just look at an individual’s norms and motives. You need to look at the group.
This might also be the same case with fraternity shenanigans and even more deplorable actions like gang rapes. Usually there’s one or more sociopaths that start the movement, and then others reluctantly join in.
If a riot evolves as it spreads, starting with the hotheaded rock thrower and ending with the upstanding citizen, then rioters are a profoundly heterogeneous group.
Granovetter’s model suggests that riots are sometimes more than spontaneous outbursts. If they evolve, it means they have depth and length and a history. Granovetter thought that the threshold hypothesis could be used to describe everything from elections to strikes, and even matters as prosaic as how people decide it’s time to leave a party.
The first seven major shooting cases—Loukaitis, Ramsey, Woodham, Carneal, Johnson and Golden, Wurst, and Kinkel—were disconnected and idiosyncratic.
Seven though? In such a short time period? These must have known about prior ones or else perhaps the theory doesn’t hold as much water. Similarly suicide could be added as a contagion that fits into this riot model as well.
That’s what Paton and Larkin mean: the effect of Harris and Klebold’s example was to make it possible for people with far higher thresholds—boys who would ordinarily never think of firing a weapon at their classmates—to join in the riot.
He disapproved of Adam Lanza, because he shot kindergartners at Sandy Hook instead of people his own age: “That’s just pathetic. Have some dignity, damn it.”
This model of a dialectic suggests that the narrative can be shaped, both by the individual reader and each actor. Can it also be shaped by the media? If these mass-murderers are portrayed as pathetic or deranged would that dissuade others from joining their ranks?
—gandalf511 on Oct 13, 2015
gandalf511, I like the idea you’ve elaborated here, and it may work to at least some extent. One other hand, some of these kids are already iconoclasts who are marginalized and may not put much value or faith in a mainstream media representation. The tougher needle to thread is how to strike a middle ground that speaks to potential assailants?
Following Open Pedagogy Notebook
Sharing Practices, Building Community
There are many ways to begin a discussion of “Open Pedagogy.” Although providing a framing definition might be the obvious place to start, we want to resist that for just a moment to ask a set of related questions: What are your hopes for education, particularly for higher education? What vision do you work toward when you design your daily professional practices in and out of the classroom? How do you see the roles of the learner and the teacher? What challenges do your students face in their learning environments, and how does your pedagogy address them?
“Open Pedagogy,” as we engage with it, is a site of praxis, a place where theories about learning, teaching, technology, and social justice enter into a conversation with each other and inform the development of educational practices and structures. This site is dynamic, contested, constantly under revision, and resists static definitional claims. But it is not a site vacant of meaning or political conviction. In this brief introduction, we offer a pathway for engaging with the current conversations around Open Pedagogy, some ideas about its philosophical foundation, investments, and its utility, and some concrete ways that students and teachers—all of us learners—can “open” education. We hope that this chapter will inspire those of us in education to focus our critical and aspirational lenses on larger questions about the ideology embedded within our educational systems and the ways in which pedagogy impacts these systems. At the same time we hope to provide some tools and techniques to those who want to build a more empowering, collaborative, and just architecture for learning.
👓 How Riots May Help Us Understand School Shooters | NPR
In his new article, The New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell uses a well-known theory to contrast early school shooters back in the 1990s with shooters today.
👓 Deprecating and Replacing Bridgy Publish for WordPress | David Shanske
David Shanske (David Shanske)I’ve decided to take a different direction for the Bridgy plugin for WordPress. I’ve never quite been able to explain to people it doesn’t actually do anything. It’s a user interface for the Bridgy service. I’ve decided that the best thing to do is to is to change the approach radically.
🎞 Inside Man (2006) – ★★★★
Directed by Spike Lee. With Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, Christopher Plummer.
A police detective, a bank robber, and a high-power broker enter high-stakes negotiations after the criminal's brilliant heist spirals into a hostage situation.
Third or fourth viewing… Always good and I’m still noticing little things that I missed previously.
Watched on big screen television via Netflix through Chromecast
Rating: