California lawmakers propose bills to teach students to identify 'fake news'; Guardian, 1/12/17

Alan Yuhas, Guardian; 

California lawmakers propose bills to teach students to identify 'fake news'

" In northern California, state senator Bill Dodd proposed a measure that would ask the state education board to create a “media literacy” curriculum. His proposal would incorporate training in social science courses from first through 12th grade and try to teach students critical thinking, independent research and “digital citizenship”.

“The rise of fake and misleading news is deeply concerning,” Dodd said in a statement. “Even more concerning is the lack of education provided to ensure people can distinguish what is fact and what’s not.”

“By giving students the proper tools to analyze the media they consume, we can empower them to make informed decisions,” he added.

Jason Chaffetz Doesn’t Care About Ethics; Slate, 1/13/17

Dahlia Lithwick, Slate; Jason Chaffetz Doesn’t Care About Ethics

"In a letter to [Jason] Chaffetz, [Elijah] Cummings called for a public hearing with Shaub as the main witness, as opposed to the closed-door meeting Chaffetz is seeking.

But of course, there is no shaming Chaffetz, the guy who announced that he could never again look his daughter in the eye if he endorsed Trump in October, subsequently promised to vote for Trump, and now feels the need to carry Trump’s top secret manila folders around...

Whether it meant attempting to dismantle the congressional watchdog or gunning for the independent ethics chief, it’s now clear that working in a nonpartisan fashion to try to uphold ethical norms is now prohibited in Republican-controlled Washington. You can be sure that so long as it’s ethically bankrupt individuals like Chaffetz in charge of enforcing these norms and laws, then our system will be as rife with corruption as our incoming president wants it to be."

Head of Ethics Office Speaks Out. Some Republicans Ask, Was It Ethical?; New York Times, 1/13/17

Jennifer Steinhauer and Steve Eder, New York Times; Head of Ethics Office Speaks Out. Some Republicans Ask, Was It Ethical?

"Mr. Shaub, a longtime government lawyer who has led the Office of Government Ethics since 2013, has been accused by Representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah, the Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee, of playing politics and letting “public relations” seep into the office’s ethical guidance. Mr. Chaffetz requested that Mr. Shaub be interviewed by committee staff members by the end of the month.

“I’m concerned that the person in charge of our office of ethics is not the most ethical person,” Mr. Chaffetz said in an interview on Friday, a day after he sent a stinging letter to Mr. Shaub raising the possibility of a congressional investigation. Mr. Chaffetz noted that Mr. Shaub had made critical public comments, including in a recent speech at a left-leaning think tank, about Mr. Trump’s efforts to separate himself from his business interests."

'Could You Patent The Sun?'; New York Times, January 2017

Video, New York Times; 'Could You Patent The Sun?'

"Decades after Dr. Jonas Salk opposed patenting the polio vaccine, the pharmaceutical industry has changed. What does that mean for the development of innovative drugs and for people whose lives depend on them?"

Trolls decided I was taking pictures of Rex Tillerson’s notes. I wasn’t even there.; Washington Post, 1/12/17

Doris Truong, Washington Post; Trolls decided I was taking pictures of Rex Tillerson’s notes. I wasn’t even there.

"Why are people so quick to look for someone to condemn? And during the confusion about the woman’s identity, why is it presumed that she is a journalist? Or that taking pictures of notes in an open hearing is illegal? Or, for that matter, that she was even taking pictures of Tillerson’s notes?

The bright spot is that a few people have acknowledged that they erred. One person left this note on my Facebook timeline: “I was shocked to find that you are in fact not the fox in the henhouse. For that I do apologize. As penance I have gone to several sites that have posted the untrue information about you and corrected them. I doubt it will do a bit of good. I am terribly sorry and wanted you to know that not all Trump supporters are mindless and that the real truth does matter. Hope this mess gets cleared up real soon. God bless.”

The whole episode is not going to drive me off social media, which provides a way for me to connect with people across the miles, including strangers, and to be exposed to a diversity of opinions — including ones I disagree with. But I hope the ridiculousness of what happened to me in less than 12 hours makes others think critically before sharing something that can be easily disproved." 

More New Ways to Explore Patent Data; Blog by Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the USPTO Michelle K. Lee, Director's Forum Blog, 1/12/17

Michelle K. Lee, Blog by Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the USPTO Michelle K. Lee, Director's Forum Blog; More New Ways to Explore Patent Data

"Making patent data accessible to the public has been a cornerstone of this agency’s policy since its inception. I’m pleased to announce yet another step we’ve taken at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to make such data even easier for the public to understand and use, namely the addition of new features to our patent data visualization and analysis tool, PatentsView. First launched in 2014, PatentsView provides the public a variety of ways to interactively engage, through a web-based platform, the highest-quality patent data available. The underlying database connects 40 years’ worth of information about inventors, their organizations, and their locations in unprecedented ways. PatentsView is a key component of our open data efforts to improve the accessibility, usability, and transparency of U.S. patent data...

You could argue that the innovations documented in our records may very well, collectively, constitute the world’s largest repository of scientific and technological knowledge. But the larger a data set, the more challenging it is to find useful information or trends or, put another way, to separate the signal from the noise. This collaborative tool, developed by the USPTO’s Office of the Chief Economist in conjunction with the American Institutes for Research, New York University, the University of California at Berkeley, Twin Arch Technologies, and Periscopic, aims to make that sorting and separation possible. The shared public and private effort in creating and improving the platform is symbolized in the “.org” domain of http://www.PatentsView.org.

By providing new tools and data to the public, PatentsView demonstrates this agency’s continuing commitment to open data, open government, and evidence-based policymaking."

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."