Data

New Campaign: Classrooms Not Computers, Stop Education Profiteering

May 15, 2018 Morna McDermott, Classrooms Not Computers Educate! Biocapitalism, Data, Education

During the last few years, a lot of debate has been had over the promise and perils of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). Many education advocates argued we must embrace ESSA because it promised to reduce the federal chokehold of high stakes standardized testing that was wielded, starting with No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and ramped up further under Race to the Top. The promise of ESSA seemed too good to be true. Why would the same people who devoted decades to dismantling public schools, creating avenues for de facto segregation, and privatizing a public system suddenly want to turn around and “do the right thing?”

Liberal Ire At Trump And Cambridge Analytica Is Misdirected From Billionaires Who Own Your Data

March 24, 2018 By Bruce A. Dixon, Blackagendareport.com Educate! Data, Liberals, Surveillance, Trump Administration

Liberals this week want to drum us into outrageous fury over the fact that Facebook, with almost 2 billion accounts worldwide, handed over user data of millions of people to Cambridge Analytica, a firm retained by the Trump campaign. Cambridge Analytica, or CA for short is part of the Robert Mercer empire, which funds an entire zoo of nonprofits from Citizens United to the Cato and Heritage Foundations, and which sponsored Steve Bannon’s career and Breitbart News after the death of its founder Andrew Breitbart. CA’s claim to fame was the supposed identification of 5,000 data points on millions of people by which they could supposedly distinguish firm supporters from wavering ones, identify potential contributors and much more. Of course the millions whose data is being sold to marketers have nothing to say in the matter.

Medicare Halts Release Of Much-Anticipated Data

July 7, 2017 Charles Ornstein, www.propublica.org Educate! Data, Healthcare, Medicare, Research

By Charles Ornstein for Pro Publica - The government had planned to share data with researchers on patients enrolled in Medicare Advantage health plans. Then, suddenly, it didn’t. In the past few years, many seniors and disabled people have eschewed traditional Medicare coverage to enroll in privately run health plans paid for by Medicare, which often come with lower out-of-pocket costs and some enhanced benefits. These so-called Medicare Advantage plans now enroll more than a third of the 58 million beneficiaries in the Medicare program, a share that grows by the month. But little is known about the care delivered to these people, from how many services they get to which doctors treat them to whether taxpayer money is being well-spent or misused. The government has collected data on patients’ diagnoses and the services they receive since 2012 and began using it last year to help calculate payments to private insurers, which run the Medicare Advantage plans. But it has never made that data public. Officials at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have been validating the accuracy of the data and, in recent months, were preparing to release it to researchers. Medicare already shares data on the 38 million patients in the traditional Medicare program, which the government runs.

March For Science Becomes Worldwide Defense Of Facts

April 22, 2017 Staff, www.PopularResistance.org Resist! Data, March for Science, Research, Science

By Staff for Popular Resistance. On April 22, 2017, Earth Day, the March for Science too place across the United States and around the world. The organizers proclaimed "The March for Science is the first step of a global movement to defend the vital role science plays in our health, safety, economies, and governments." The mission for the March for Science is: The March for Science champions robustly funded and publicly communicated science as a pillar of human freedom and prosperity. We unite as a diverse, nonpartisan group to call for science that upholds the common good and for political leaders and policy makers to enact evidence based policies in the public interest. The March for Science is a celebration of science. It's not only about scientists and politicians; it is about the very real role that science plays in each of our lives and the need to respect and encourage research that gives us insight into the world. People who value science have remained silent for far too long in the face of policies that ignore scientific evidence and endanger both human life and the future of our world.

FCC Unlikely To Stop Internet Providers From Selling Your Data

March 4, 2017 Klint Finley, www.wired.com Educate! Data, FCC, Internet

By Klint Finley for Wired - LITTLE SEEMS TO be standing in the way of Comcast, Verizon, and other internet service providers selling your personal information without your permission after the Federal Communications Commission took a first step toward delaying its own rules protecting consumer privacy and security. Last October the agency passed a set of rules that would have required internet providers to take new steps to protect your private data from hackers. That same regulatory package would have required ISPs to notify you if someone hacked your data and to get your active permission before selling your data.

Law Enforcement Using Facebook And Apple To Data-Mine Accounts Of Trump Protest Arrestees

February 25, 2017 Sarah Lazare, www.alternet.org Resist! Data, Protesters Arrested, Surveillance

By Sarah Lazare for AlterNet - Law enforcement is compelling Apple and Facebook to hand over the personal information of users who were mass arrested at protests against the inauguration of Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., AlterNet has confirmed. The tech giants appear to be complying with the data-mining requests, amid mounting concerns over the heavy-handed crackdown against the more than 200 people detained on January 20, among them journalists, legal observers and medics. “This is part of an increasing trend of law enforcement attempting to turn the internet, instead of technology for freedom, into technology for control,” Evan Greer, the campaign director for Fight for the Future, told AlterNet. “This trend started long before Trump and seems to be escalating and growing in scale now."

NSA Contractor Accused Of Stealing Sensitive Data

February 14, 2017 James Holbrooks, www.activistpost.com Educate! CIA, Data, NSA

By James Holbrooks for Activist Post - According to the Times, a neighbor saw “two dozen F.B.I. agents wearing military-style uniforms and armed with long guns” storm Martin’s home and later escort the man out in handcuffs. At the time, there was speculation that Martin could be connected to stolen N.S.A. code that found its way into the hands of a group called the Shadow Brokers — for a period, Martin worked for the elite N.S.A. unit from which the data was taken — but even now, authorities can’t prove he actually passed on any information. But the mere fact that he possessed such highly sensitive material is enough to put Martin away for the rest of his life, as the recently released indictment indicates.

Guerrilla Archivists Develop App To Save Science Data From Trump

February 12, 2017 Zoë Schlanger, www.qz.com Create! Data, Science

By Zoë Schlanger for Quartz. Enthusiasm for guerrilla archiving is skyrocketing; the day at NYU was the latest in a ballooning list of “data rescues” across the country. All-day archiving marathons have been held at Toronto, Philadelphia, Chicago, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Boston, and Michigan, and by the time the NYU event was over, attendees from several other cities had volunteered to host their own. The data rescue movement is growing up fast: What started as a project coordinated through group spreadsheets in Google Docs now has a workflow formalized through a custom-built app designed specifically for this purpose by O’Brien and Daniel Allan, a computational scientist at a national lab. Meanwhile, members of the Environmental Data & Government Initiative, a group of academics and developers that has been acting informally as a liaison between the DIY events, is working on something of a starter pack for people who want to host data rescues of their own, with advice and templates gleaned from lessons learned at earlier events. All this effort is partly to preserve federal science for researchers to use in the future—the participants are going through great lengths, spurred by the librarians in the crowd . . . .

How Big Data Becomes Psy Ops And Tilts World Towards Its Own Aims

February 4, 2017 Staff, www.educationalchemy.com Educate! Data, Education

By Staff of Education Alchemy - A psychologist named Michael Kosinski (see full report) from Cambridge developed a method to analyze Facebook members, using the cute little personality quizzes or games. What started as a fun experiment resulted with the largest data set combining psychometric scores with Facebook profiles ever to be collected. Dr. Kosinski is a leading expert in psychometrics, a data-driven sub-branch of psychology. His work is grounded on the Five Factors of Personality theory which include something called OCEAN: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. So many people volunteered their personal information to play these games and take these quizzes that before long Kosinski had volumes of data...

What Can We Learn From 800,000 Comments On Net Neutrality?

September 5, 2014 Bob Lannon and Andrew Pendleton, www.sunlightfoundation.com Educate! Data, FCC, Internet Freedom, Net Neutrality

On Aug. 5, the Federal Communications Commission announced the bulk release of the comments from its largest-ever public comment collection. We've spent the last three weeks cleaning and preparing the data and leveraging our experience in machine learning and natural language processing to try and make sense of the hundreds-of-thousands of comments in the docket. Here is a high-level overview, as well as our cleaned version of the full corpus which is available for download in the hopes of making further research easier. Our first exploration uses natural language processing techniques to identify topical keywords within comments and use those keywords to group comments together. We analyzed a corpus of 800,959 comments. Some key findings: We estimate that less than 1 percent of comments were clearly opposed to net neutrality1. At least 60 percent of comments submitted were form letters written by organized campaigns (484,692 comments); while these make up the majority of comments, this is actually a lower percentage than is common for high-volume regulatory dockets. At least 200 comments came from law firms, on behalf of themselves or their clients. Below is an interactive visualization that lets you explore these groupings and view individual comments within the groups.

Report: Media Exaggerates Image Of Blacks As Criminals

August 29, 2014 Daniel Angster, Salvatore Colleluori, & Todd Gregory , www.mediamatters.org Educate! Crime, Data, New York (NY)

Coverage Of Cases Involving Black Suspects Outpaced Historical Arrest Rates From NYPD Statistics. In stories where race could be identified, the percentage of African-American suspects in murders, thefts, and assaults covered by WCBS, WNBC, WABC, and WNYW was well above the percentage of African-American suspects who have been arrested for those crimes in New York City. According to averages of arrest statistics from the New York City Police Department (NYPD) for the past four years, African-American suspects were arrested in 54 percent of murders, 55 percent of thefts, and 49 percent of assaults. Meanwhile, over the past three months, the suspects in the four stations' coverage of murders were 68 percent African-American, the suspects in their coverage of thefts were 80 percent African-American, and the suspects in their coverage of assaults were 72 percent African-American. WABC Covered Crime The Most, While WNYW Covered It The Least. In the past three months, WABC reported on crime much more than the other three stations, with 154 suspects mentioned in its reports. The race of 98 of those suspects could be identified, 75 of whom were African-American. In contrast, WNYW mentioned only 38 suspects in its reports on crime. The race of 23 of those suspects could be identified, 19 of whom were African-American. WNBC aired the second-most coverage of crime, mentioning 105 suspects in its reports. The race of 82 of those suspects could be identified, 60 of whom were African-American. WCBS mentioned 80 suspects in its reports on crime. The race of 52 of those suspects could be identified, and 35 of them were African-American.

How The NSA Built Its Own Secret Google

August 26, 2014 Ryan Gallagher, www.firstlook.org Educate! Data, NSA, Privacy, Surveillance

The National Security Agency is secretly providing data to nearly two dozen U.S. government agencies with a “Google-like” search engine built to share more than 850 billion records about phone calls, emails, cellphone locations, and internet chats, according to classified documents obtained by The Intercept. The documents provide the first definitive evidence that the NSA has for years made massive amounts of surveillance data directly accessible to domestic law enforcement agencies. Planning documents for ICREACH, as the search engine is called, cite the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Administration as key participants. ICREACH contains information on the private communications of foreigners and, it appears, millions of records on American citizens who have not been accused of any wrongdoing. Details about its existence are contained in the archive of materials provided to The Intercept by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Earlier revelations sourced to the Snowden documents have exposed a multitude of NSA programs for collecting large volumes of communications. The NSA has acknowledged that it shares some of its collected data with domestic agencies like the FBI, but details about the method and scope of its sharing have remained shrouded in secrecy.

Part IV, Data-Mining Tools To Track And Kill Activists

August 22, 2014 Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, www.occupy.com Educate! Data, Drones, Surveillance

Since 2008, the year of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the U.S. Department of Defense has funded a multimillion dollar university research program to probe the complex dynamics of mass social and political movements, anticipate global trends, and ultimately augment the intelligence community’s preparations for civil unrest and insurgencies both abroad and at home. Part of that has involved developing advanced new data mining and analysis tools for the U.S. military intelligence community to pinpoint imminent and potential threats from individuals and groups. Among its many areas of focus are ongoing projects at Arizona State University (ASU) designed to enhance and automate the algorithms used by intelligence agencies like the NSA to analyze "open source" information from social media in order to track the potential threat-level to U.S. interests. Formal organizations and broad social networks as well as individuals could be identified and closely monitored with such tools to an unprecedented degree of precision. Loosely defined concepts of political “radicalism,” violence and nonviolence, as well as questionable research methodologies, open the way for widespread suspicion of even peaceful activist groups and their members, and the equation of them with potential terrorists. Civil society organizations in the U.K., including both Muslim religious groups and non-religious anti-war networks, have been prioritized for study to test and improve the effectiveness of these data-mining tools.

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