Computer science largely devoid of ethics

Computer science largely devoid of ethics

True. What many are only just now discovering about social media (or what you might have known if you’d be reading this web site for a while) is the serious problems manifested by social media, particularly Facebook. As Zunger notes in further comments, software development has not suffered the consequences of massive systemic failures like what we are seeing with Facebook. Other fields, like civil and mechanical engineering did, long ago (think bridge and building collapses), which led to professional…

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Store “Loyalty Cards” are combined with social media data to log your purchase habits

Store “Loyalty Cards” are combined with social media data to log your purchase habits

Stores use your loyalty card to identify you and all of your purchases. Your purchase transactions are then sold to other marketing companies. This data, in turn, can and is matched to your Facebook account and other online data using the phone number that you gave to the store and to Facebook or Google. Source: Loyalty Cards are used to spy on  your purchases, and not just with the vendor | Coldstreams The matching operation uses the phone number you…

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“Americascrumblinginfrastructure” meme. Again.

“Americascrumblinginfrastructure” meme. Again.

I’m so old, I remember 10 weeks ago when a brand new locomotive leading the inaugural run of a brand new train on a brand new rail line crashed – on its first run, and many people blamed that on “Americascrumblinginfracture” (that really is one word you know!) Today, another tragedy with the collapse of a brand new bridge still under construction. This of course is blamed on “Americascrumblinginfracture“. I wonder if Crumblingthinkingskills might be a problem. These Twitter posts show the…

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The World Happiness Report 2018: Fairy Tales and Myths for influencing the world!

The World Happiness Report 2018: Fairy Tales and Myths for influencing the world!

The propaganda machine is at it again: The World Happiness Report is a landmark survey of the state of global happiness. The World Happiness Report 2018, ranks 156 countries by their happiness levels, and 117 countries by the happiness of their immigrants. Source: World Happiness Report 2018 | World Happiness Report This report, as described in extreme detail by us in the past, is a myth. Numerous organizations create “world’s happiest” metrics and they all mostly disagree with one another….

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I’m so old, I remember writing about fake news in 2014 :) #fakenews

I’m so old, I remember writing about fake news in 2014 :) #fakenews

Social media, confirmation bias and its use in marketing #FakeNews #Propaganda #SocialMedia (I originally posted this on my tech blog, May 24, 2014, about 2 1/2 years before “fake news” became a popular meme. Since then, social media has become a friction-less platform for the spread of propaganda, fake news, and worse.) Confirmation bias occurs when we tend to give weight to information that supports our beliefs and to ignore or discard information that opposes our beliefs. There are several studies…

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National Geographic admits to being a racist, mysognist "click bait" fake news operation for a century

National Geographic admits to being a racist, mysognist "click bait" fake news operation for a century

The headline to this post sounds like a headline from The Onion, but its not. National Geographic admits to exploiting their staffs own racism and misogyny to spin their stories to increase readership, the same concept as modern fake news click-bait operations: People of colour were often scantily clothed, people of colour were usually not seen in cities, people of colour were not often surrounded by technologies of automobiles, airplanes or trains or factories,” he said. “People of colour were…

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Youtube’s recommendation algorithm pushes people to watch ever more extreme content

Youtube’s recommendation algorithm pushes people to watch ever more extreme content

“Soon I noticed something peculiar. YouTube started to recommend and “autoplay” videos for me that featured white supremacist rants, Holocaust denials and other disturbing content. … What we are witnessing is the computational exploitation of a natural human desire…. YouTube leads viewers down a rabbit hole of extremism, while Google racks up the ad sales.”   Regardless of topic, Youtube’s recommendation algorithm  recommends videos containing more extreme versions of whatever it is you just watched. This makes sense from a…

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Protests seldom about “object of the protest” but about the protestors?

Protests seldom about “object of the protest” but about the protestors?

Protestors shut down a speaker at an event that is local to where I live. I am not familiar with the speaker or the protestors and their issues but I found this description of interest: Protests are seldom really about the object of the protest. They are about the protesters, who seek attention for their organizations, their causes, their ideologies, and themselves. And they are about achieving a certain kind of emotional release, bordering on frenzy. The scheduled talk by…

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Who spreads fake news on social media? You do.

Who spreads fake news on social media? You do.

As noted here and in the next post, below, fake and false items spread faster on social media than truthful items. Based on widespread news reports, you’d think that bots and the Internet Research Agency were the primary cause but look again: When they looked at who was spreading the wrong stuff, they found it was ordinary users of social media. “We conclude that human behavior contributes more to the differential spread of falsity and truth than automated robots do,”…

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