Saturday, September 9, 2017

September 9, 2017 -- A Quick Run Around the Web

"Emergency Preparedness for Cats"--Jackson Galaxy (13-1/2 min.). Tips on evacuating with your cat.

This is where the real world part comes in. We aren't fleeing the zombie apocalypse to go camp in the woods or something. Thus a need for a tent and traps and a bunch of bulk food isn't present. I'll be living on a couch or in a cheap motel eating pizza or microwave food from the grocery store. So I do not need to waste time and space on that stuff.
  • A couple articles on Facebook and Deep Data:
        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.  
        The People You May Know feature is notorious for its uncanny ability to recognize who you associate with in real life. It has mystified and disconcerted Facebook users by showing them an old boss, a one-night-stand, or someone they just ran into on the street. 
        These friend suggestions go far beyond mundane linking of schoolmates or colleagues. Over the years, I’d been told many weird stories about them, such as when a psychiatrist told me that her patients were being recommended to one another, indirectly outing their medical issues. 
        What makes the results so unsettling is the range of data sources—location information, activity on other apps, facial recognition on photographs—that Facebook has at its disposal to cross-check its users against one another, in the hopes of keeping them more deeply attached to the site. People generally are aware that Facebook is keeping tabs on who they are and how they use the network, but the depth and persistence of that monitoring is hard to grasp. And People You May Know, or “PYMK” in the company’s internal shorthand, is a black box.
Rebecca Porter turned out to be the author's great aunt, by marriage. But how did it know about the familial connection?
        How Facebook had linked us remained hard to fathom. My father had met her husband in person that one time, after my grandmother’s funeral. They exchanged emails, and my father had his number in his phone. But neither of them uses Facebook. Nor do the other people between me and Rebecca Porter on the family tree.
        Facebook is known to buy information from data brokers, and a person who previously worked for the company and who is familiar with how the tool works suggested the familial connection may have been discerned that way. But when asked about that scenario, a Facebook spokesperson said, “Facebook does not use information from data brokers for People You May Know.”
        What information had Facebook used, then? The company would not tell me what triggered this recommendation, citing privacy reasons. A Facebook spokesperson said that if the company helped me figure out how it made the connection between me and my great aunt, then every other user who got an unexpected friend suggestion would come around asking for an explanation, too.
       It was not a very convincing excuse. 
        The author was never able to get to the bottom of it, but is requesting similar stories from others to assist her in her research.
                Facebook, the platform, has taken up such a large part of our mindshare and has started to serve as our pensieve. Because of this, it’s important to understand what Facebook, the company, is doing with our hopes, dreams, political statements, and baby pictures once it gets them.
                And gets them it does. In 2014, Facebook engineers wrote that they have about 600 terabytes of data coming in on a daily basis.
                 For perspective, the size of War and Peace, the text is 3.1 megabytes. The 1966 Soviet movie version of War and Peace the movie is 7 hours long, or 8 gigabytes in size.
                So people are uploading the equivalent of 193 million copies of War and Peace books, or 75,000 copies of War and Peace movies, every single day.
                  Facebook’s Data Policy outlines what it collects and what it does with that data. However, like most companies, it leaves out the actual points that tell customers what exactly is happening.
                 Frustrated by the constant speculation of where those keystrokes are going for every status update I write, I decided to do some research. All of the information below is taken from tech trade press, academic publications, and what I was able to see on the client side as a Facebook user. I’ve added to this post my own interpretations as a data professional working with user data for 10+ years.
                      This is a long article, but I recommend reading the whole thing. A few points, however. First, the author notes that Facebook not only saves your posts, but also monitors and saves your keystrokes before you post anything--ostensibly to research how people engage in self-censorship. It also logs every device from which you used to access Facebook. And it uses a program called Deep Face to monitor all pictures of you or in which you are tagged so it can recognize you. And it tracks you as you browse the web, even after you have logged out. So, you might want to think twice about using Facebook.
                               “We don’t really know why yet, but what we can see is that the increase comes as we also see a rise in gang-related crimes and a growing number of criminal networks,” Manne Gerell, a criminologist at Malmö University, told The Local, after Swedish public radio first wrote about new research he is involved in.
                                  One study which is yet to be published suggests that Sweden experienced four to five times as many fatal shootings per capita as Norway and Germany in 2008-2014, two otherwise similar countries. Previous figures have shown that deadly violence in general is going down in Sweden, but gun violence has gone up.
                                   Gerell also singled out Malmö, Sweden’s third-largest city, as the one place where shootings are becoming particularly common.
                                      “Malmö stands out,” he said, noting that the southern city is somewhat more exposed to social problems and poverty in comparison to both the capital and Gothenburg.
                                         “Malmö is also what we describe an ‘early adopter’ when it comes to crime. It was the first of the three cities where hand grenade crimes became more commonplace and it was also the place for the establishment of Sweden’s first biker-gangs. We don’t know whether this is to do with its proximity to the European continent or not, but it could explain why the trends seem to start there.”
                                  Another article on the same subject notes that gun violence seems to be "mainly taking place in the age group of 15 to 29 year old males." Where could all these military age males have come from? Malmo is 20% Muslim, and the crime wave there is primarily centered in the Muslim community
                                  “We’ve long asserted that there were longstanding and close relationships between al Qaeda and the religious components of the Saudi government,” said Sean Carter, the lead attorney for the 9/11 plaintiffs. “This is further evidence of that.”
                                  • "DACA is a SCAM"--DiploMad. The author observes that "DACA accepts applications from qualifying illegal aliens who were 31 years old or younger on June 15, 2012. That means 36 year olds will be able to apply in 2017, provided they were 16 or under when they arrived in the United States. Clearly this was not a program aimed at protecting children from deportation."
                                  • "Believing In National Sovereignty Doesn’t Make You A Bad Christian"--The Federalist. The author correctly notes that "[t]here's nothing immoral about wanting border security and its enforcement." She writes:
                                           Most people agree that citizens of a nation have a right to protect their culture and defend their economic and security interests by regulating immigration. Most people also probably recognize the obligation that citizens in free and prosperous countries have toward those seeking asylum for humanitarian or other serious reasons.
                                              Balancing those interests is not immoral. Citizens of a country should be mindful of the cultural and economic changes that immigration can bring and particularly how the downside of those changes tends to be borne by those with lower incomes and less power than the ones who tend to make immigration policy. Unfettered immigration can strain the resources of schools, hospitals, and local communities. Poorly managed immigration policies can also lead to disruptions in the political order and culture.
                                                 As Peter Meilaender has written, “The world, after all, contains countless needy people who require assistance. How are we to know whom to help? So we begin with those to whom we stand in special relationships. The neighbor whom we are commanded universally to love takes particular shape as the aged father in need of regular attention, the cousin whose husband is away fighting in Iraq, the fellow parishioner who has lost his job. Immigration regulations are a way of embodying in policy a preferential love for our own fellow citizens and the way of life that we share. Such a preference can be overridden, but it is not inherently suspect.”
                                          Read the whole thing. 

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