Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein told President Donald Trump last week that he isn’t a target of any part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation or the probe into his longtime lawyer, Michael Cohen, according to several people familiar with the matter.
Reads
Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
👓 French researchers pledge to go without Springer journals | Times Higher Education
‘No more direct access to Springer’s latest papers? No problem,’ says petition, signed by nearly 4,000
👓 Pearson Embedded a ‘Social-Psychological’ Experiment in Students’ Educational Software | Gizmodo
Education and publishing giant Pearson is drawing criticism after using its software to experiment on over 9,000 math and computer science students across the country. In a paper presented Wednesday at the American Association of Educational Research, Pearson researchers revealed that they tested the effects of encouraging messages on students that used the MyLab Programming educational software during 2017's spring semester.
👓 Harper’s Editor Insists He Was Fired Over Katie Roiphe Essay | New York Times
The essay stirred controversy on Twitter. It was also the subject of debate at the venerable monthly. Now the editor, James Marcus, is out.
👓 Why I Love Link Blogging | BirchTree
More often than not, I write articles for this site after reading something someone else wrote. I browse the web for articles and tweets that I find interesting, and the ones that make me think are very often the ones that inspire me to write something myself. This leads to a funny situation as a w...
How many levels deep could the link blogging on these posts go? Is it linkblogging all the way down?
For me, I’ll add it specifically to my linkblog of things I’ve read which is a subsection of my collected linkblog which also collects favorites, likes, bookmarks, and sites I’m following.
Incidentally, this seems to be another post about people who use their websites for thinking and writing, which I seem to be coming across many of lately. I ought to collect them all into a group and write a piece about them and the general phenomenon.
👓 WebAuthn: A Developer’s Guide to What’s on the Horizon | Okta Developer
WebAuthn (the Web Authentication API) allows browsers to make use of hardware authenticators such as the Yubikey or a mobile phone's biometrics like a thumbprint reader or facial recognition.
I’ve been interested to see Aaron’s opinion of this when I saw it come across my radar the other day. Glad to have a simple overview of it’s functionality now, particularly from someone who’s literally written the book on authentication.
👓 Wrapping My Head Around Micro.blog and IndieWeb | Jason Sadler
After the Facebook / Cambridge Analytica catastrophe and recent Twitter news (and retraction) about support for 3rd party clients, I found myself wondering about Micro.blog again, after hearing about it on Kickstarter a little over a year ago. On the surface, it’s an indie Twitter-like app, in th...
👓 Cathy Fisher on fixing Fb: Go back to your 2001 fan site | Kimberly Hirsh
Kimberly Hirsh (Kimberly Hirsh)Cathy Fisher, a Business Professional on Twitter (Twitter) “My idea for fixing Facebook: shut down Facebook and everyone goes back to the weird niche fan site forum they were on in 2001, where they then form a really deep friendship with a teen who lives in Poland” This is basically what I’m ...
👓 Sean Hannity Is Named as Client of Michael Cohen, Trump’s Lawyer | New York Times
Lawyers for Mr. Cohen, the president’s personal lawyer, had sought to keep Mr. Hannity’s identity a secret in a court challenge of an F.B.I. search of Mr. Cohen’s office.
👓 What Makes a Vowel a Vowel and a Consonant a Consonant | Today I Found Out
ou already know that vowels in the English alphabet are a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y, while the rest of the letters are called consonants. But did you ever ask yourself why the letters were divided into two separate groups?
👓 Why We Use “X” as the Unknown in Math | Gizmodo
For hundreds of years, x has been the go-to symbol for the unknown quantity in mathematical equations. So who started this practice?
👓 Privacy sentences to ponder | Marginal Revolution
The increasing difficulty in managing one’s online personal data leads to individuals feeling a loss of control. Additionally, repeated consumer data breaches have given people a sense of futility, ultimately making them weary of having to think about online privacy. This phenomenon is called “privacy fatigue.” Although privacy fatigue is prevalent and has been discussed by scholars, there is little empirical research on the phenomenon. A new study published in the journal Computers and Human Behavior aimed not only to conceptualize privacy fatigue but also to examine its role in online privacy behavior. Based on literature on burnout, we developed measurement items for privacy fatigue, which has two key dimensions —emotional exhaustion and cynicism. Data analyzed from a survey of 324 Internet users showed that privacy fatigue has a stronger impact on privacy behavior than privacy concerns do, although the latter is widely regarded as the dominant factor in explaining online privacy behavior.Emphasis added by me. That is by Hanbyl Choi, Jonghwa Park, and Yoonhyuk Jung, via Michelle Dawson.
Better control of online privacy is certainly something that the IndieWeb can help to remedy.
The past weeks have indicated that we really do need some regulations. It’s not just Facebook, but major, unpunished leaks from data brokers like Experian (which seemingly actually profited from it’s data leak) or even those of companies like Target. Many have been analogizing data as the “new oil”, but people shouldn’t be treated like dying sea birds trapped in oil slicks.
I’m bookmarking this journal article to read: The role of privacy fatigue in online privacy behavior. 1
References
1.
Choi H, Park J, Jung Y. The role of privacy fatigue in online privacy behavior. Comput Human Behav. 2018;81:42-51. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2017.12.001
👓 Fox’s Hannity, named as a client of Michael Cohen, spent days attacking FBI raid | Politico
The host cited the seizure of Michael Cohen’s documents to blast Mueller’s Russia investigation.
👓 Building a Text Editor for a Digital-First Newsroom | Times Open (Medium)
An inside look at the inner workings of a technology you may take for granted
A topic which is tremendously overlooked in the CMS world, but which can provide a lot of power.
h/t Jorge Spinoza
👓 Climate Change Is Messing With Your Dinner | Bloomberg
The future of food looks like lots of lobsters, Polish chardonnay and California coffee.
This is a difficult story to tell, though the timelapse imagery here is relatively useful. If one had some extra money lying around, it certainly indicates which crops one could be shorting in the markets over the next few decades.
I can imagine Jeremy Cherfas doing something interesting and more personalizing with this type of story via his fantastic interviews on Eat This Podcast.
h/t Jorge Spinoza