Promiscuous online culture and the vetting process

Social networks have forever changed hiring and background checks

Social networks, and the big data to analyze them, will forever change how we vet candidates, whether for security clearance, employment, or political office. Technology can help employers check candidates' backgrounds, monitor their behavior once hired, and protect their online reputations. But using the social tracks we share -- and what we omit -- has important ethical and legal consequences.

According to CareerBuilder, 45 percent of applicants were screened in this way in 2009 — up from 22 percent the year before — regardless of legality. Seventy-four percent of Americans between 18 and 34 have an account on Facebook or MySpace, according to a Harris poll. At the intersection of promiscuous online culture and easy access to search lies a world where it's impossible to hide. And these days, you look suspicious for trying, or even forgetting something innocently.

This changes the vetting process. What once took days of phone calls and pages of forms can be done with a few clicks — whether you're a government, an employer, a reporter, or a terrorist cell. Now that the Library of Congress is archiving every Tweet, ever, your past is a matter of permanent public record.

(continue reading)

Four short links: 29 April 2010

Leaky Phones, Clustering Tweets, CS Unplugged, and Margaret Atwood on Twitter

1. Researchers Show How To Use Mobiles to Spy on People -- Using information from the GSM network they could identify a mobile phone user’s location, and they showed how they could easily create dossiers on people’s lives and their behavior and business dealings. They also demonstrated how they were able to identify a government contractor for the US Department of Homeland Security through analyzing phone numbers and caller IDs. [...] The researchers have not released details of the tools they developed, and have alerted the major GSM carriers about their results. Bailey said the carriers were “very concerned,” but mitigating these sorts of attacks would not be easy. In the meantime there is little mobile phone users can do to protect themselves short of turning off their phones. Oh joy. (via Roger Dennis)
2. A Torrent of Tweets: Managing Information Overload in Online Social Streams (PDF) -- PARC and MIT built a Twitter client that clusters messages in a useful way. Publicly accessible client due in summer.
3. Interview with Tim Bell (MP3) -- author of Computer Science Unplugged, which teaches computational thinking in a fashion that can have five year olds understanding error correction codes, and one of the people behind a new high-school curriculum for CS in New Zealand.
4. How I Learned to Love Twitter (Guardian) -- fascinating piece from writer Margaret Atwood. The Twittersphere is an odd and uncanny place. It's something like having fairies at the bottom of your garden is one of my favourite things that's ever been written about Twitter but the whole article is delightfully written.

A few weeks in, a third of iPad Books are Fiction

Measured in terms of number of titles, half of the over 46,000 (paid and free) books available through the iBooks app are from 6 categories¹. Fiction & Literature alone account for close to a third of all available iBooks titles:

The current set of titles is indicative of the publishers (and/or imprints) that Apple reached out to prior to the launch of the iPad, so expect the mix of iBooks titles to change over the next few months, as more publishers make their titles available through iBooks:

[The MEAN price of all PAID apps in the 25 largest categories can be found HERE.]

(1) There are over a hundred iBooks categories, the charts only contains the top 25. Data for this post is from 4/15 through 4/26/2010.

Setting White House priorities for electronic privacy: HIT, smart grid and education

Much of the online discussion about electronic privacy over the past week has been dominated by Facebook, particularly a new "instant personalization" feature. Is the age of privacy over? As Bruce Schneier pointed out in his essay on privacy and control, "Google Chief Eric Schmidt [has] expressed a similar sentiment. Add Scott McNealy's and Larry Ellison's comments from a few years earlier, and you've got a whole lot of tech CEOs proclaiming the death of privacy -- especially when it comes to young people.

As Schneier pointed out, it's not true. For one thing, the attitudes of young adults and older adults regarding information privacy are statistically similar, as recent research shows, differing primarily when it comes to electronic literacy. danah boyd made a compelling argument in this area at this year's SXSWi festival that made sense of privacy and publicity.

On the larger point, there's much more to electronic privacy than social networking. And as the White House deputy chief technology officer, Andrew McLaughlin, explained at Privacy Camp in Washington, D.C. this month, improving electronic privacy is crucial to the Obama administration's agenda for leveraging information technology. Video of McLaughlin, courtesy of Alan Rosenblatt, is embedded below:

McLaughlin said that there is a cluster of three verticals the White House would like input on:

1. Health information technology (HIT)
2. smart grid
3. education and student records

(continue reading)

Four short links: 28 April 2010

Fair Use Economy, Deconstituted Appliances, 3D Vision, Redis for Fun and Profit

1. Fair Use in the US Economy (PDF) -- prepared by IT lobby in the US, it's the counterpart to Big ©'s fictitious billions of dollars of losses due to file sharing. Take each with a grain of salt, but this is interesting because it talks about the industries and businesses that the fair use laws make possible.
2. Disassembled Household Appliances -- neat photos of the pieces in common equipment like waffle irons, sandwich makers, can openers, etc. (via evilmadscientist)
3. GelSight -- gel block on a sheet of glass, lit from below with lights and then scanned with cameras, lets you easily capture 3D qualities of the objects pressed into it. Very cool demo--you can see finger prints, pulse, and even make out designs on a $100 bill.
4. Redis Tutorial (Simon Willison) -- Redis is a very fast collection of useful behaviours wrapped around a distributed key-value store. You get locks, IDs, counters, sets, lists, queues, replication, and more.

The 21st-century textbook

Future textbooks could improve update cycles and create feedback loops

With new technologies constantly coming on-line, and with states like California, Texas, and Oregon allowing digital curriculum to replace printed curriculum, the question arises: what will textbooks look like in the coming years?

Dale’s post, "A hunger for good learning," featured a fantastic video about teaching math. In a few brief minutes, Dan Meyer showed us a photo of a math problem involving filling a tank of water and calculating how long that would take, then showed us why traditional approaches to teaching this problem stifled student learning. The picture showed a traditional math problem with a line drawing of the tank, a problem set-up written in text (octagonal tank, straight sides, 27oz per second, etc.) followed by short sub-steps that are needed to solve the problem (calculate the surface area of the base, calculate the volume). Then, finally, it asks the question “how long will it take to fill the tank?” Dan’s view is that this spoon-feeding of problem solving in little steps trains students not to think like mathematicians and not to have the patience for solving complex problems. Instead, Dan prefers to show his students a video of the tank filling up, agonizingly slowly, until the students are eager to know “How long until that tank fills up, anyway?” And then they’re off -- discussing, questioning, and, most importantly, formulating the problem on their own, just as good mathematicians do.

It seems that what the textbook looks like in the 21st century is a lot more like Dan's presentation than the bound paper tomes we grew up with. If the 21st century textbook is delivered digitally to students, we can expect it to be far more than a .pdf representation of a traditional text. For example, let's say the textbook publisher chose to experiment with findings from the research community that kids learn better from authentic and difficult problems than they do from bite-sized steps laid out one after the other. The publisher does what Dan Meyer did, recreates the tank problem and updates a version of the textbook for a handful of beta testers. The next morning, Dan’s students walk into class and open the book to chapter 5. The old problem is gone, instead there is just a video of a tank and instructions that say “watch me fill up -- when you know how long it takes, please enter the answer.” Sure, a student might choose to watch the video for seven-plus hours and finally write down the time it took. But when boredom sets in, a more engaging option is to just play with the problem. By staying up to date with new information and practices, this textbook is living.

(continue reading)

The military goes social

Letters from the front have been replaced with Facebook updates

For most of the 20th century, a soldier in the field could only communicate with his/her family and friends via letters that might take weeks or months to make their way to the recipient. But as the battlefield goes high tech, so has the ways soldiers can talk to the outside world.

Managing how social media interacts with the military is the job of Price Floyd, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs. Floyd, a speaker at O'Reilly's upcoming Gov 2.0 Expo, discusses how the public face of the military is changing in the following interview.

The role of the Public Affairs office:

Price Floyd: We're responsible not just for external, but also internal communication. There's about, depending on how you count it, 2.5 million members of the Defense Department at large, all of the civilian employees, contractors, the men and women in service. And if you count those who retired and their families, it comes to about 10 million. Then there's the external audiences that could be U.S. and foreign-based.

How social media is being used by the Defense Department:

PF: At the Defense Department, what we have done is embraced social media, and the technology behind it, to engage with all our audiences. That's everything from veteran's groups to foreign publics to people who follow me on Twitter. And it's a two-way engagement. The idea that social media is a better way to reach a broader audience with our message, that kind of one-way communication idea, is not what we want to do. We want to engage with our audience, all of them, on the whole host of issues and policies that we deal with.

Does social media mean losing control of the message?

PF: I think that we need to become much more comfortable with taking risk, much more comfortable with having multiple spokesmen out there, thousands of spokesmen in essence. But, for me, there's nothing more credible than the men and women who are out there on the front lines fighting the wars that we're in to send messages back to their family and friends. As you know, you send a tweet or a make a post on Facebook, it doesn't necessarily stay there. That could be forwarded around. Other people that you never thought could see it will see it, even the media. And I'm okay with that. I'm okay with us no longer controlling exactly what people say to the media and then trying to work with the media to make sure they get their story exactly the way we may want it.

(continue reading)

Pew Report: Citizens turning to Internet for government data, policy and services

Anyone who's been watching the Internet knows that a lot of interesting things are happening online with government. Government entities have begun to open up their data to the public, including state, local, and the federal government efforts with websites like data.gov.

A new research report on online government from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project shows that citizens are searching for information in unprecedented numbers. When they visit sites, they're increasingly making transactions and participating in discussion around policies.

Forty-one percent have gone online to get forms, including tax forms, health forms or student aid forms, and 35 percent have researched government documents or statistics. Roughly one-third of all Internet users reported renewing driver's licenses and auto registrations online. In general, the use of government websites for information and transactions is nearly ubiquitous among Internet users, with 82 percent of online adults surveyed reporting one of the two activities.

There's also a change in terms of how people are accessing government information, particularly through social media among traditionally underserved minorities. Nearly one third of U.S. Internet users are using social media and new tools to access government services and information. The three activities heavy users reported doing the most are reading government blogs, signing up for email alerts and watching videos.

Looking for government data

"When we saw that 40 percent of adults have gone online in the last year to look for data about the business of government, that was a really striking finding to us," said Aaron Smith, the research specialist at the Internet & American Life Project that authored the report. "I think it's indicative of something that we've seen throughout our recent research, which is that people are increasingly going around established intermediaries and they're going to the source for online data. And then they're doing that whether it's data about a health condition that they might have or data about the presidential race, as we saw in the 2008 campaign. Now we're seeing the same thing in the context of government."

Citizens are going online to see how federal stimulus money is being spent at Recovery.gov (23 percent of surveyed Internet users), read or download the text of legislation (22 percent), visit a site that provides access to government data (16 percent) or to see campaign contributions to elected officials (14 percent).

(continue reading)

Four short links: 27 April 2010

5 Links, Release Your Source to Merge, Disease Fun, Fake Vis

1. Five Short Links -- Pete Warden's one-upped me. I will not join this arms race, for I know that it will end with "5,187 short links". Pete has interesting crawling, geodata, and startup links.
2. Ticketmaster Consent Decree -- the source code to their ticketing platform is affected by the consent to merger. (via Redmonk)
3. Doctors Make Game Out of Learning Infection Control -- A table-top card battle game, "The Healing Blade" is built around a fantasy world, complete with sorcerers, villains and heroines that the two doctors created. Characters are divided into The Apothecary Healers, named after real-world antibiotics, and The Lords of Pestilence, named after actual bacterial agents. Teaches med students how to match antibiotics to infecting agents. (via Hacker News)
4. The Visualization Cargo Cult -- eyecandy is not informative. The candy examples are wincesome.

Five reasons iPhone vs Android isn't Mac vs Windows

Competitive lessons from the PC era don't always apply to mobile

Last week I presented at Stanford Graduate School of Business in a session on Mobile Computing called, "Creating Mobile Experiences: It's the Platform, Stupid."

As the title underscores, I am a big believer that to understand what makes mobile tick, you really need to look beyond a device's hardware shell (important, though it is), and fully factor in the composite that includes its software and service layers; developer tools and the ecosystem "surround." Successful platforms, after all, are more than the sum of their parts' propositions. They are not simply a bunch of dis-integrated ingredients.

Having built hardware and software platforms since 1994, this thought process has led me to harp endlessly on why the iPhone platform (and its derivatives) is such a game changer. By contrast, I would argue that the long-term success of Android is anything but a given.

It's human nature to look to the past in an attempt to understand the future. As such, I was unsurprised when I was asked during my presentation if Apple and iPhone vs Google and Android in mobile computing is "destined" to play out as Apple and the Mac did when confronted by Microsoft and Windows in the PC wars.

As I have provided "big picture" analysis on this topic before in other posts (here and here), I want to share what I see as the five "little picture" reasons Apple vs Google isn't destined for the same outcome as Apple vs Microsoft:

(continue reading)

Four short links: 26 April 2010

Brand in China, Radio Apps, Valued Free Text, and Brain TV

1. E-Commerce Booming in China (Economist) -- bad time for Google to be leaving, just as online sales take off. Chinese consumers in stores check quality by hand but buying online requires trust, aka brands. This is a turn towards Western-style commerce built on trademarks and brand promise of quality, and away from the prevalent wild East style of commerce built on cut corners, deception, and mistrust.
2. Comprehensive GNU Radio Archive Network -- collection of GNU Radio applications. (via Hacker News)
3. The Glass Box and the Commonplace Book (Steven Johnson) -- essay on connected useful text vs frozen glass-walled text. As with paywalls, I am not dogmatic about these things. I don’t think it’s incumbent upon the New York Times or The Wall Street Journal to allow all their content to flow freely through the infosphere with no restrictions. I do not pull out my crucifix when people use the phrase “Digital Rights Management.” If publishers want to put reasonable limits on what their audience can do with their words, I’m totally fine with that. As I said, I think the Kindle has a workable compromise, though I would like to see it improved in a few key areas. But I also don’t want to mince words. When your digital news feed doesn’t contain links, when it cannot be linked to, when it can’t be indexed, when you can’t copy a paragraph and paste it into another application: when this happens your news feed is not flawed or backwards looking or frustrating. It is broken.
4. Charlie Rose Brain Series -- streaming video of the TV shows about the brain. (via Mind Hacks)

Looking beyond the digital divide

At a previous point in my career, I benefited from professional development, autonomy in my classroom, and a superb technology infrastructure to become a connected, inspired and effective educator. Now, with the current climate in the field of education in the U.S., I fear that other teachers will lose, or never even experience, similar opportunities. As an education technology advocate interacting with teachers in a variety of settings, I see that our students are receiving vastly different types of education. This divide trickles specifically down to the educational technology experiences our students are receiving in schools, too.

For approximately the past 20 years, I’ve mainly worked in urban educational settings ranging from a Catholic elementary school to inner city neighborhood schools to a highly successful independent school. Not only have I seen the predictable imbalance of resources in these schools, but I have also seen distinctly different sets of educational values. Experiential education is an important part of independent school culture, but in some of the other schools I’ve come across, the focus is entirely on test scores.

In the independent school where I once worked, third grade students receive hands-on, inquiry-based science instruction two times a week from a dedicated science teacher; the students also attend a computer science class once a week. In contrast, I know of an urban public school that stopped all science teaching in third grade so that students could participate a computer-based arithmetic drill program. Data had informed the administration that these third graders were behind in their ability to compute.

I suspect this isn’t the first or last situation in which a school seeks the silver bullet solution to low test scores, but this example alarms me for two reasons. First, the students are deprived of science education, which is already traditionally low on the priority list in many schools. Secondly, I question the value of using computers for test taking and rote drills. It seems such a waste of powerful technology that could be utilized in classrooms in much more engaging ways.

(continue reading)

Recent Posts

• Gov 2.0 week in review | by Alex Howard on April 24, 2010
• Why f8 was good for the open web | by David Recordon on April 23, 2010
• Big Data shakes up the Speech Industry | by Ben Lorica on April 23, 2010
• Four short links: 23 April 2010 | by Nat Torkington on April 23, 2010
• One way to build a smarter school infrastructure | by Elizabeth Corcoran on April 22, 2010
• Preparing for the realtime web | by Mac Slocum on April 22, 2010
• Four short links: 22 April 2010 | by Nat Torkington on April 22, 2010
• Where do developers draw the line with Apple? | by Mac Slocum on April 21, 2010
• Cookbooks: The highest priced iPad book category | by Ben Lorica on April 21, 2010
• Four short links: 21 April 2010 | by Nat Torkington on April 21, 2010
• A hunger for good learning | by Dale Dougherty on April 20, 2010
• What will the browser look like in five years? | by Mac Slocum on April 20, 2010