May 1
Co-presented today at the UBC Graduate Students in Teaching, Mini Conference 2018 [Link]
May 8
How one country blocks the world on data privacy [Link]
- Serious questions being asked here about Ireland’s competence (/willingness) to be proactive in their role as the main enforcer of the GDPR.
- “Despite its vows to beef up its threadbare regulatory apparatus, Ireland has a long history of catering to the very companies it is supposed to oversee…”
May 10
A few days ago in our class we were discussing one of the challenges of doing online research (netnography, virtual ethnography, digital anthropology); namely, how do we know who the people we are interacting with are actually the people they say they are. Of course, this is a challenge for many online interactions these days but it is of particular concern to those doing online research as the results can be skewed by inaccurate participant data. A still greater concern arose; how do we know if the “people” we interact with online are actually people! This brought me back to Brian Christian’s (2003) The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive (Goodreads,NYT review). I remember checking out a chatbot as I was reading this and thought I’d provide a link. As you can see from the screenshot, Cleverbot certainly isn’t going to fool anyone into believing it’s human but, as Christian’s book tells us, we’re already close to Turing’s prediction that computers could fool us into believing they were human 30% of the time.
May 16
I was asked for my soda bread recipe. Click on the pick to check it out.
May 22
I was thinking about the Collison brothers this morning and just spent a short while reading about them.
- In November 2016, the Collison brothers became the world’s youngest self-made billionaires, worth at least $1.1 billion, after an investment in Stripe from CapitalGand General Catalyst valued the company at $9.2 billion (Forbes.com)
- I also checked out John’s website. It’s definitely worth a look. I particularly like his advice section.
I was just reading a Globe and Mail article and noticed that they have a “respect” button rather than a “like” button. Love the handshake icon too; classy move by Canada’s “newspaper of record”.
