Troubling examples of ‘pseudoscience’ at the Cleveland Clinic; Washington Post, 1/11/17

Daniel Summers, Washington Post; Troubling examples of ‘pseudoscience’ at the Cleveland Clinic

"People will understandably look for their own answers. Unfortunately, when no less than the president-elect is among those promulgating dangerous misinformation about vaccines, medical providers have to deal with a lot of false, misleading stuff their patients may find.

One way I deal with this is to give patients a list of resources that generally provide good, evidence-based advice. Though I can’t vet every single article they may publish, knowing a few sites that typically give clear, sound information is a valuable resource when patients ask.

Sadly, no matter how glowing its reputation or how superlative the care it routinely provides, I can’t include the Cleveland Clinic on that list. Knowing it promotes treatments that have no grounding in science, or that a patient could stumble upon a fearmongering article that makes baseless claims about the unspecified dangers of environmental toxins on its website, I can’t direct patients there in good faith. Considering its prominence as a renowned medical establishment, that’s a terrible shame.

A Cleveland Clinic doctor spread anti-vaccine views. He's not alone among MDs.; Vox, 1/8/17

Julia Belluz, Vox; A Cleveland Clinic doctor spread anti-vaccine views. He's not alone among MDs.

"Let’s not forget Dr. Mehmet Oz, a board-certified surgeon and faculty member at Columbia University, who is now almost as famous for his magical thinking about medicine as he is for his Emmy Award-winning TV show. (He’s given a platform to other doctors with anti-vaccine sentiments, such as Joe Mercola.)

The medical profession has been struggling with how to deal with dangerous doctor talk, since doctors can pretty much say anything and keep their medical licenses (outside of the doctor-patient context). But with a president-elect coming into the White House who has also shared anti-vaccine rhetoric, the medical profession better think about how to deal with its rogue members, and get better at spreading the message about why we desperately need vaccines."

Cleveland Clinic doc pens viral screed against vaccines, peers call it ‘post-truth medicine’; Washington Post, 1/10/17

Ben Guarino, Washington Post; Cleveland Clinic doc pens viral screed against vaccines, peers call it ‘post-truth medicine’

"An immense organization, the hospital operates a multi-specialty campus in Ohio and several medical centers around the globe. The hospital is well-known for robotic innovation, too, as well as its cardiac care. In 2015, the clinic had more than 6.6 million patient visits and revenue of $7.2 billion.

After becoming the director of the Wellness Institute, Neides secured a long-running monthly column at Cleveland.com. He published more than two dozen articles for the website since January 2014. And no one at the website edited or approved a particular article, according to Chris Quinn, a Cleveland.com vice president.

“Possibly, before the thing caught widescale attention, we would have unpublished it and sought revisions,” Quinn wrote on Monday. “That’s hindsight, though, so I can’t say for sure.” (The only editorial note on the blog post itself indicates that the article was briefly removed before being restored.)

Neides, in addition to damning formaldehyde, raised the specter of the widely debunked claim that there is a link between vaccine and autism."

The Higher Ed Learning Revolution: Tracking Each Student's Every Move; NPR, 1/11/17

Eric Westervelt, NPR; 

The Higher Ed Learning Revolution: Tracking Each Student's Every Move

"Another physicist-turned-education-innovator (is there something in the physics lab water?) named Timothy McKay sees great promise in "learning analytics" — using big data and research to improve teaching and learning.

McKay, a professor of physics, astronomy and education at the University of Michigan argues in a recent white paper, that higher ed needs to "break down the perceived divide between research and practice."

There are privacy and ethical concerns, of course, which in turn has prompted fledgling codes of conduct to spring up.

I reached out to Professor McKay, who also heads Michigan's Digital Innovation Greenhouse, to dig deeper on how learning analytics work in higher ed."

KFC China is using facial recognition tech to serve customers - but are they buying it?; Guardian, 1/11/17

Amy Hawkins Guardian; 

KFC China is using facial recognition tech to serve customers - but are they buying it?

"Of course, the prospect of a company storing data about customers’ faces and fried-chicken preferences raises the ever present trade-off between convenience and privacy. One woman tells me she wouldn’t use the machine for that reason, but most customers are nonplussed. “In China, you don’t have any privacy anyway,” said Li.

He’s right, sort of. Beyond the world of fast-food, personal data in China is becoming an increasingly valuable commodity. A Chinese newspaperrecently conducted an experiment, which found that a citizen’s private data, including apartments they’d rented and internet cafés they’d visited, could be bought using their personal ID number at the cost of just 700RMB (£82). Meanwhile, the government is rolling out a “social credit” system of digitally stored information about a person’s credit history, consumption habits and incidences of “conduct that seriously undermines … the normal social order”. The system also awards points for good behaviour; a person’s point score affects their ability to travel abroad, buy property and enrol their children in certain schools, among other privileges."

Russia waging information war against Sweden, study finds; Guardian, 1/11/17

Jon Henley, Guardian; 

Russia waging information war against Sweden, study finds

"Sweden’s most authoritative foreign policy institute has accused Russia of using fake news, false documents and disinformation as part of a coordinated campaign to influence public opinion and decision-making in the Scandinavian country.

The Swedish Institute of International Affairs said in a comprehensive study that Sweden had been the target of “a wide array of active measures” aimed at “hampering its ability to generate public support in pursuing its policies”...

“We believe it demonstrates an intent to influence decision-making,” Martin Kragh, one of the report’s authors, told Dagens Nyheter newspaper...

It also identified “troll armies” targeting journalists and academics, hijacked Twitter accounts and pro-Kremlin NGOs operating in Sweden as further weapons in what it said amounted to a Russian information war."

Obama Uses ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ To Remind Americans Of The Importance Of Empathy; Huffington Post, 1/10/17

Marina Fang, Huffington Post; 

Obama Uses ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ To Remind Americans Of The Importance Of Empathy

"President Barack Obama in his farewell address to the nation Tuesday argued that empathy for those who are different is an essential pillar of democracy.

Quoting one of American literature’s most famous characters, Atticus Finch from “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Obama urged Americans to “start with the premise that each of our fellow citizens loves this country just as much as we do; that they value hard work and family like we do.”

He asserted that fighting racism and bigotry requires both political and social change. 

“Laws alone won’t be enough. Hearts must change,” he said. “If our democracy is to work in this increasingly diverse nation, each one of us must try to heed the advice of one of the great characters in American fiction, Atticus Finch, who said, ‘You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.’”"

True Lies; Slate, 1/10/17

Dahlia Lithwick, Slate; True Lies

"Whitehouse wondered whether Sessions would have a problem with career lawyers “with secular beliefs,” having in the past criticized department attorneys for being secular. Sessions replied that he has used that language about secular attorneys to differentiate between people who recognize objective “truth” and those who take positions “in which truth is not sufficiently respected.”

Whitehouse replied, with a leading, and perhaps slightly conclusory question: “And a secular person has just as good a claim to understanding the truth as a person who is religious, correct?” At which point Sessions responded, “Well, I’m not sure.” For a few seconds the Senate chamber seemed to go completely silent.

Sessions was quick to reiterate that he doesn’t believe in religious tests, and Whitehouse moved on to questions about whether Sessions could be persuaded to abandon the GOP denial of global warming. (He says he can.) But it was one of the very few moments in which Sessions’ deft denials of prior positions and statements veered completely off script. It spoke to the levels of obfuscation that are now customary in such confirmation hearings, especially about matters of faith, and the degree to which hearings become theater in which little true about the nominees and their most deeply felt positions are revealed. It also demonstrated that the views that Sessions is hiding are absolutely inimical to the democratic values of many members of the Senate and a large portion of the country...

Again, the only moment during which the mask seemed to slip was in that exchange with Sen. Whitehouse about whether secular people are capable of knowing the truth.

In a deep sense the language of religious morality has crept into this transition period with arguments that words spoken have no real meaning anymore, and that nobody—save, perhaps God—can know what is truly in a man’s heart. Sessions inadvertently conceded Tuesday that people of God are closer to truth, including those who happen to be at the Justice Department he’s almost certainly going to lead. Nobody in the chamber knew what to do with that statement. But as is the case with the very finest gaffes, this was the moment that revealed both why Jeff Sessions will be handily confirmed, and also why Democrats are rightly very, very afraid."

With New Law Shielding Negative Reviews, It's Time to Update Terms of Use; Inside Counsel, 1/12/17

Jennifer Williams-Alvarez, Inside Counsel; 

With New Law Shielding Negative Reviews, It's Time to Update Terms of Use

"The Consumer Review Fairness Act of 2016, signed into law by President Barack Obama on Dec. 14, voids provisions in form contracts that aim to prohibit or restrict a consumer's ability to leave a negative review. While a number of exceptions are included to allow businesses to take action for such things as defamatory or vulgar reviews, the CRFA makes it unlawful to include so-called gag clauses in contracts with consumers and authorizes the Federal Trade Commission, and in some cases, state attorneys general, to bring enforcement actions.

The law makes it unlawful to offer contracts with these clauses 90 days after enactment, in mid-March, and the enforcement provisions are effective one year after enactment, in December.

The law was enacted in response to a number of news stories about businesses going to battle with customers over bad reviews."

Should software developers have a code of ethics?; CIO, 1/11/17

Sharon Florentine, CIO; 

Should software developers have a code of ethics? 

"While there are organization-- and company-specific codes of conduct -- like these guidelines from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers - Computer Science (IEEE-CS) joint task force on software engineering ethics professional practices, there's no one all-encompassing set of standards that includes the entire industry.

But maybe there should be...

Teaching people to ask the right questions involves understanding what the questions are, says Burton, and that everyone's values are different; some individuals have no problem working on software that runs nuclear reactors, or developing targeting systems for drones, or smart bombs, or military craft...

The questions should be around should it be built, what are the fail-safes, and what can we do to make sure we're having the least harmful impact we can?" he says.

There's no one "right answer" here, and a code of ethics certainly won't put all the ethical issues to rest. But it could be a good place to start if individuals and organizations want to harness the great power of technology to create solutions that serve the greater good."

U.S. Ethics Official: Trump's Divestiture Is Hard, Pricey And Essential; NPR, 1/12/17

Christopher Dean Hawkins, NPR; U.S. Ethics Official: Trump's Divestiture Is Hard, Pricey And Essential:

"It wasn't nearly enough, according to Office of Government Ethics Director Walter Schaub.

"The president is now entering a world of public service," Schaub said in a speech at the Brookings Institution. "He's going to be asking his own appointees to make sacrifices. He's going to be asking our men and women in uniform to risk their lives in conflicts around the world. So no, I don't think divestiture is too high a price to pay to be the president of the United States of America."...

"The ethics program starts at the top — the signals a president sends [set] a tone across the executive branch," Schaub said, adding that "officials in any administration need their president to show ethics matters, not only through words but through deeds."

The ethics official pointed to the steps undertaken by Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson, whose separation from Exxon Mobil reportedly will cost the former CEO about $7 million...

And it's not just inside the government that the president's example matters, Schaub said. The ethics program run by the executive branch, including presidential divestment, has been viewed as a gold standard internationally, he said, with the office frequently consulting with governments in the developing world to set up similar programs."

Trump is headed toward an ethics train wreck; Washington Post, 1/12/17

Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post; Trump is headed toward an ethics train wreck:

"Ironically, for someone who ran on changing the way Washington does business, Trump has distinguished himself as the sole example of a president unprepared to comply with bipartisan ethical norms and the text of the Constitution. The question for Republicans is now whether they want to collaborate in an egregious violation of the Constitution and in an arrangement that will inevitably call into question virtually every regulatory action, policy decision and personnel pick the administration makes. (Any senator with judicial aspirations should register complaints loudly and clearly; consent to an unconstitutional arrangement should be a disqualifier for any future judicial post.)

Republicans who opposed Trump predicted that he would intellectually, morally and financially corrupt his party and others around him. Nothing we have seen so far indicates that this prediction was off-base. Voters who want a check on an imperial, amoral president will need to elect Democrats to check Trump if Republicans are not up to the job."

Tech luminaries team up on $27M A.I. ethics fund; PC World, 1/10/17

Blair Hanley Frank, PC World; 

Tech luminaries team up on $27M A.I. ethics fund:

"Artificial intelligence technology is becoming an increasingly large part of our daily lives. While those developments have led to cool new features, they’ve also presented a host of potential problems, like automation displacing human jobs, and algorithms providing biased results.

Now, a team of philanthropists and tech luminaries have put together a fund that’s aimed at bringing more humanity into the AI development process. It’s called the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Fund, and it will focus on advancing AI in the public interest...

[Reid] Hoffman, a former executive at PayPal, has shown quite the interest in developing AI in the public interest and has also provided backing to OpenAI, a research organization aimed at helping create AI that is as safe as possible."

Your private medical data is for sale – and it's driving a business worth billions; Guardian, 1/10/17

Sam Thielman, Guardian; 

Your private medical data is for sale – and it's driving a business worth billions:

"Your medical data is for sale – all of it. Adam Tanner, a fellow at Harvard’s institute for quantitative social science and author of a new book on the topic, Our Bodies, Our Data, said that patients generally don’t know that their most personal information – what diseases they test positive for, what surgeries they have had – is the stuff of multibillion-dollar business.

But although the data is nominally stripped of personally identifying information, data miners and brokers are working tirelessly to aggregate detailed dossiers on individual patients; the patients are merely called “24601” instead of “Jean Valjean”."

WhiteSpace Project Could Grow Rural Broadband Access; Library Journal, 1/10/17

Matt Enis, Library Journal; 

WhiteSpace Project Could Grow Rural Broadband Access:

"Leveraging TV white space (TVWS)—unused, license-exempt portions of the radio spectrum that have been traditionally allocated to television broadcasters—could expand broadband Internet access in rural areas. The San José State University (SJSU) School of Information, in partnership with the Gigabit Libraries Network (GLN), has been assessing ways to do so through  the Libraries WhiteSpace Project.

As a secondary goal the project, which recently was awarded a National Leadership Grant of nearly $250,000 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), also aims to evaluate how public libraries and other Community Anchor Institutions (CAIs), such as schools and hospitals, might provide TVWS-based Wi-Fi access as a component of local disaster response. Additional partners include the Schools, Health and Libraries Broadband Coalition (SHLB), National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA), and Information Technology Disaster Resource Center (ITDRC)."

Roberts Recuses From Patent Case After Discovering Conflict; Associated Press via New York Times, 1/4/17

Associated Press via New York Times; 

Roberts Recuses From Patent Case After Discovering Conflict:

"Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts says he will no longer participate in deciding a patent infringement case because he discovered he owns shares in the parent company of one of the parties.

Roberts took part in arguments in the dispute between California-based Life Technologies Corp. and Wisconsin-based Promega Corp. on Dec. 6."

Ethics reports lag for Trump nominees facing confirmation hearings this week; Washington Post, 1/9/17

Michael Kranish and Abby Phillip, Washington Post; Ethics reports lag for Trump nominees facing confirmation hearings this week:

"Key disclosure reports for four out of nine of Donald Trump’s nominees subject to Senate confirmation hearings this week had yet to be made public by late Monday, underscoring concerns from the Office of Government Ethics that it is being rushed to approve the documentation...

Even if all the reports are released just before the hearings, some ethics specialists said the process is too hurried for the public and senators to evaluate the information. The reports focus on potential financial conflicts of interest and agreements to divest certain holdings.

“The whole point of ventilating this stuff is to enable the American people and senators to ask questions of the nominee about how you are going to address conflicts,” said Norman Eisen, who served as an ethics lawyer in the Obama administration. Eisen cited a letter written in February 2009 by then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) that called on the Obama administration to promptly provide all ethics disclosure material “in time for review and prior to a committee hearing.”"

Find hope in your local library; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 1/10/17

Marilyn Jenkins, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; 

Find hope in your local library:

"While it is important to celebrate their success during the past 25 years, ACLA and member libraries will continue to look ahead. Constant changes in technology, pressure on the RAD to fund a wider range of assets, the growing demands of residents for current information in new formats and the continued need to diversify library funding are just a few of the issues with which we’re dealing. Fortunately, Allegheny County’s libraries now are building on a solid foundation of collaboration.

Our libraries took “A Quiet Crisis” a quarter century ago and turned it into a model of regional cooperation. It is remarkable what can happen when committed individuals share a common vision, roll up their sleeves and work together.

So, if you get discouraged in the days and weeks ahead as the new year unfolds, just pull out your library card and remember what’s possible. And if you don’t have a library card — make getting one your easiest resolution for 2017!

Just visit any local library or www.aclalibraries.org to find out how.

Marilyn Jenkins is executive director of the Allegheny County Library Association."

Kerry apologizes for past LGBT discrimination at State Department; Politico, 1/9/17

Nahal Toosi, Politico; 

Kerry apologizes for past LGBT discrimination at State Department:

"Secretary of State John Kerry is formally apologizing to gay, lesbian and other State Department employees who were fired or otherwise discriminated against in the past because of their sexual orientation.

The unprecedented apology, issued in a statement Monday, is the latest step that the Obama administration has taken to promote inclusion of the LGBT community in its ranks. It appears to refer to the "Lavender Scare" purging of gays and lesbians from U.S. government ranks in the 1950s and 1960s, and it comes less than two weeks before President Barack Obama leaves office, making the way for President-elect Donald Trump's team.

"In the past — as far back as the 1940s, but continuing for decades — the Department of State was among many public and private employers that discriminated against employees and job applicants on the basis of perceived sexual orientation, forcing some employees to resign or refusing to hire certain applicants in the first place," Kerry said in his statement. "These actions were wrong then, just as they would be wrong today,"

He added: "On behalf of the department, I apologize to those who were impacted by the practices of the past."

5 ethics principles big data analysts must follow; TechRepublic, 1/2/17

Michael Kassner, TechRepublic; 5 ethics principles big data analysts must follow

"Big data is not only big—it is also powerful and error prone, notes Susan Etlinger, an industry analyst with Altimeter Group, in her 2014 TED talk. "At this point in our history... we can process exabytes of data at lightning speed, which also means we have the potential to make bad decisions far more quickly, efficiently, and with far greater impact than we did in the past."

Besides the potential for bad decisions, Etlinger believes that humans place too much faith in technology, including, for example, our blind acceptance of charts and graphs developed from big data analysis."

Black Mirror’s Charlie Brooker Looks Back on a 2016 as Dark as Any Dystopian Future; Slate, 12/30/16

Sam Adams, Slate; Black Mirror’s Charlie Brooker Looks Back on a 2016 as Dark as Any Dystopian Future

[Kip Currier: Sophie Gilbert's Atlantic article nicely sums up the techno-angst mood of Netflix's Black Mirror TV series-- a technology-infused Information Ethics-y update of Rod Serling's classic Twillight Zone:

 "Black Mirror, a British speculative anthology series created by Charlie Brooker in 2011, considers the murky relationship between humans and technology, the latter of which often threatens to progress so quickly that our ethical frameworks don’t have the chance to catch up."]

"Black Mirror’s Charlie Brooker is best known for exploring dystopian futures, but in Charlie Brooker’s 2016 Wipe, he looks back at a year that was as dark as any future he’s envisioned."

In China, Big Brother isn’t just watching your every move. He may be selling your personal data.; Washington Post, 1/4/17

Simon Denyer, Washington Post; In China, Big Brother isn’t just watching your every move. He may be selling your personal data.

[Kip Currier: This article's chilling real-world information about Chinese authorities' "social credit" score efforts reminded me of Black Mirror's 2016 "Nosedive" episode, starring Bryce Dallas Howard, in which citizens are given crowd-sourced ranking scores that influence all areas of their lives.]

"Sometimes living in China feels like dystopia has already arrived. As thick clouds of choking smog envelop the Chinese capital this week, more bad news has emerged to make life here feel even more like a grim science fiction movie.

Not only are Chinese authorities collecting vast amounts of personal data on all of their citizens, that data is now for sale.

A report in the Southern Metropolis Daily newspaper, translated by the SupChina newsletter and website on Wednesday, found that vast amounts of citizens’ private information can be freely bought by strangers, for very affordable prices...

If that wasn’t bad enough, China is already in the midst of an ambitious plan to centralize everyone’s data and issue everyone a score based on their “social credit.”"

CRISPR will be a huge story in 2017. Here are 7 things to look for.; Vox, 1/3/17

Eliza Barclay and Brad Plumer, Vox; CRISPR will be a huge story in 2017. Here are 7 things to look for.

"We’re about to enter a golden age of genetic engineering, where huge advances in gene-editing technology are making it possible for scientists to tweak the DNA of different organisms with incredible, unprecedented precision.

Until just a few years ago, altering individual genes in everything from plant cells to mouse cells to human cells was a crude, laborious, and often futile process.

Now scientists have developed a technology called CRISPR/Cas9 (or CRISPR for short), which harnesses the immune system of bacteria to snip individual genes, either knocking them out or even inserting new ones in their place. (Here’s our full explainer on CRISPR, which is different from conventional genetic modification techniques.)

What’s impressive about CRISPR is how it’s transforming the work of so many scientists in so many different fields. Much of the important work is still in the proof-of-concept stage — for example, proving that you can use CRISPR to control transcription (making an RNA copy of a gene sequence), edit the epigenome, or image the genome in living cells. But as the details get worked out, scientists say they can imagine CRISPR becoming an incredibly powerful tool."

Donald Trump didn't save the ethics committee. You did; Guardian, 1/4/17

Richard Wolffe, Guardian; 

Donald Trump didn't save the ethics committee. You did:

"As ethics experts from both the Bush and Obama administrations have written, the founders saw the so-called Emoluments clause as a way to stop corruption by foreign powers. If a president accepts any gifts and benefits from foreign nations, he faces the threat of impeachment.

Instead the newly-elected Trump claims, wrongly, that there is nothing to prevent him from being president of the United States and CEO of his company at the same time. “In theory I could run my business perfectly and then run the country perfectly,” he told the New York Times.

It takes real leadership to create a culture of ethics, and it takes very little leadership to destroy any semblance of ethics. It’s only natural that the House Republicans would follow Trump’s lead by treating ethics as some kind of low priority interference with their real business: business itself."

From Hands to Heads to Hearts; New York Times, 1/4/17

Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times; From Hands to Heads to Hearts:

"The technological revolution of the 21st century is as consequential as the scientific revolution, argued Seidman, and it is “forcing us to answer a most profound question — one we’ve never had to ask before: ‘What does it mean to be human in the age of intelligent machines?’”

In short: If machines can compete with people in thinking, what makes us humans unique? And what will enable us to continue to create social and economic value? The answer, said Seidman, is the one thing machines will never have: “a heart.”

“It will be all the things that the heart can do,” he explained. “Humans can love, they can have compassion, they can dream. While humans can act from fear and anger, and be harmful, at their most elevated, they can inspire and be virtuous. And while machines can reliably interoperate, humans, uniquely, can build deep relationships of trust.

Therefore, Seidman added, our highest self-conception needs to be redefined from “I think, therefore I am” to “I care, therefore I am; I hope, therefore I am; I imagine, therefore I am. I am ethical, therefore I am. I have a purpose, therefore I am. I pause and reflect, therefore I am.”"

House Fires at Ethics and Shoots Self; New York Times, 1/3/17

Editorial Board, New York Times; House Fires at Ethics and Shoots Self:

"The O.C.E. is the only House body that investigates allegations from the public, including anonymous tips. Its staff of independent, nonpartisan professionals must be private citizens, not elected officials; most are lawyers and ethics experts. The O.C.E. refers cases it finds substantial to the Ethics Committee with recommendations. The committee is notoriously weak, but at least the O.C.E., by making its work public, helps hold legislators accountable. No wonder swamp dwellers of both parties have tried to put the O.C.E. more completely under the thumb of Congress.

The public protests over the House move to weaken the office were heartening. Even the conservative group Judicial Watch paused in its pursuit of Hillary Clinton to decry the Goodlatte proposal as a “poor way to begin draining the swamp.” The O.C.E. proposal has now gone back to the House, which will likely take the rest of the session to “study” it. Americans will be watching to see whether Mr. Trump, Mr. Ryan and other lawmakers return to this rotten idea."

There’s no good way to deal with trolls, so you might as well tattle to their moms; Washington Post, 1/2/17

Jessica Contrera, Washington Post; There’s no good way to deal with trolls, so you might as well tattle to their moms:

"People being harassed can alert the police, but law enforcement has struggled to identify and prosecute anonymous online harassers. Of the millions of people who were stalked and harassed online between 2010 and 2013, only 10 cyberstalking cases were filed in federal courts during that time, according to a review by “Hate Crimes in Cyberspace” author Danielle Citron. These situations nearly always involve not just one harasser, but dozens or even thousands threatening or spreading a false rumor about their victim.

“Every single individual who promotes [the rumor] is part of the problem, but none of them are actually criminally responsible,” explained Mary Anne Franks, the legislative policy director at the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, which advocates for laws to protect online victims.

Franks said there is no “one size fits all” approach for dealing with trolls, but she doesn’t recommend trying to reason with them.

“There is nothing you can say to them that won’t give them more to work with,” Franks said."

The Great A.I. Awakening; New York Times, 12/14/16

Gideon Lewis-Kraus, New York Times; The Great A.I. Awakening:

"Google’s decision to reorganize itself around A.I. was the first major manifestation of what has become an industrywide machine-learning delirium. Over the past four years, six companies in particular — Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and the Chinese firm Baidu — have touched off an arms race for A.I. talent, particularly within universities. Corporate promises of resources and freedom have thinned out top academic departments. It has become widely known in Silicon Valley that Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, personally oversees, with phone calls and video-chat blandishments, his company’s overtures to the most desirable graduate students. Starting salaries of seven figures are not unheard-of. Attendance at the field’s most important academic conference has nearly quadrupled. What is at stake is not just one more piecemeal innovation but control over what very well could represent an entirely new computational platform: pervasive, ambient artificial intelligence."

Algorithms: AI’s creepy control must be open to inspection; Guardian, 1/1/17

Luke Dormehl, Guardian; Algorithms: AI’s creepy control must be open to inspection:

"The issue of AI accountability is shaping up to be one of this year’s hot topics, ethically and technologically. Recently, researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory published preliminary work on deep learning neural networks that can not only offer predictions and classifications, but also rationalise their decisions.

Artificial intelligence achieved a lot in 2016. One of the goals in 2017 should be to make its workings more transparent. With plenty riding on it, this could be the year when, to coin a phrase, we begin to take back control."

Germany’s Latest Best Seller? A Critical Version of ‘Mein Kampf’; New York Times, 1/3/17

Melissa Eddy, New York Times; Germany’s Latest Best Seller? A Critical Version of ‘Mein Kampf’:

"The decision to bring out a new edition of a work that advocated an Aryan “master race” provoked fierce debate before publication. One side argued the new work was an important step toward illuminating an unsavory era in Germany.

The other insisted it would only encourage nationalists and xenophobes at a time when the country was engulfed in its own debate about refugees and the threat posed by foreigners."

Leave Your Laptops at the Door to My Classroom; New York Times, 1/2/17

Darren Rosenblum, New York Times; Leave Your Laptops at the Door to My Classroom:

"Focus is crucial, and we do best when monotasking: Even disruptions of a few seconds can derail one’s train of thought. Students process information better when they take notes — they don’t just transcribe, as they do with laptops, but they think and record those thoughts. Laptops or tablets can undermine exam performance by 18 percent. Other studies reveal that writing by hand helps memory retention. Screens block us from connecting, whether at dinner or in a classroom. Kelly McGonigal, a psychologist and lecturer at Stanford University, says that just having a phone on a table during a meal “is sufficiently distracting to reduce empathy and rapport between two people.”

For all these reasons, starting with smaller classes, I banned laptops, and it improved the students’ engagement. With constant eye contact, I could see and feel when they understood me, and when they did not. Energized by the connection, we moved faster, further and deeper into the material. I broadened my rule to include one of my large upper-level courses. The pushback was real: A week before class, I posted the syllabus, which announced my policy. Two students wrote me to ask if I would reconsider, and dropped the class when I refused. But more important, after my class ends, many students continue to take notes by hand even when it’s not required.

Putting aside medical exemptions, many students are just resistant. They are used to typing and prefer it to writing. They may feel they take better notes by keyboard. They may feel they know how to take notes by hand but do not want to have to do so. They can look up material, and there’s no need to print assignments. Some may have terrible handwriting, or find it uncomfortable or even painful to write.

To them, I’ll let the Rolling Stones answer: You can’t always get what you want, but sometimes you get what you need. My students need to learn how to be lawyers and professionals. To succeed they must internalize an ethos of caution, care and respect. To instill these values and skills in my students, I have no choice but to limit laptop use in the classroom.