see also: Shoshanna Zuboff (who wrote the seminal work on surveillance capitalism), Don Norman, Dystopia vs. Utopia Book List: A Fight to the Finish, surveillance capitalism dictionary Some takeaways: Example: AI modeling of potential Las Vegas ticket buyers The machine learning algorithms can classify people into two buckets, “likely to buy tickets to Vegas” and […]
Design guru Don Norman’s shortlist of everything wrong with the internet
When usability pioneers have All the Feels about the nature of our creeping technological dystopia, how we got here, and what we might need to do to right the ship, it’s wise to pay attention. Don Norman’s preaching resonated with my choir, and they’ve asked me to sing a summary song of our people in […]
Peter Thiel and Palmer Luckey: Welfare queens
Peter Thiel and Palmer Luckey are a particularly toxic breed of billionaire welfare queen, who outwardly revile government with every chance they get while having both sucked at its teat to make their fortunes, and currently making a luxe living on taxpayer largesse. Thiel’s Paypal and Facebook-induced riches rode the coattails of the DARPA-created internet, […]
Putin’s Playbook: Pull factions apart from center; exacerbate democratic crisis
While we wring our hands in the United States over whether or not such a strategy is even conceivable, the erstwhile President of Russia has been running this playbook out in the open in Ukraine and Eastern Europe for some time. With help from Propagandist-in-Chief Vladislav Surkov, Putin has leveraged the open secrets about the […]
HOWTO: A Field Guide to Identifying Bots on Twitter
While multiple formal investigations against the Trump family and administration continue to unfold, and Drumpf supporters weirdly deny the probable cause for concern, Putin’s troll army continues to operate out in the open on Twitter, Facebook, Medium, and other social media networks. The sheer scale of this operation started to become clear to me in the months […]
King of Trussia: The case for Donald Trump’s involvement with Russia
a. The Alfa Bank pinging server b. Connections in the Trump campaign Β Β Β 1. Paul Manafort — former campaign manager who helped rig elections for Ukrainian pro-Moscow former president Viktor Yanukovich Β Β Β 2.Β Sergei Millian —Β head of the Russian American Chamber of Commerce in the US Β Β Β 3. Ivanka’s friendship […]
Tests are not learning tools
Tests are evaluating tools that can only act as a diagnostic β they offer no improvement in the actual ability of children to learn. In the so-called “real worldβ we donβt take tests β we solve problems and tackle challenges that (ideally) resonate with us somehow when we manage to solve them. Unfortunately one of […]