Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002

Daily Archives: August 18, 2019

Google’s ‘Assignments’ tool flags plagiarism and missing sources

engadget – Students can proactively use the tool to improve their work. “Google is setting out to make plagiarism harder than ever. The search giant today announced the launch of Assignments, a new grading software for higher education instructors who use G Suite for Education. Formerly known as Coursework, Assignments will allow instructors to create, assign and grade coursework with Google Docs and Drive. To boot, all student work turned in through Assignments and Classroom (its K-12 counterpart) will receive its own “originality report”, a new feature that is essentially a litmus test for plagiarism…”

Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a Crawl of 11K Shopping Websites

“Dark patterns are user interface design choices that benefit an online service by coercing, steering, or deceiving users into making unintended and potentially harmful decisions. We conducted a large-scale study, analyzing ~53K product pages from ~11K shopping websites to characterize and quantify the prevalence of dark patterns. We discovered 1,818 instances of dark patterns on… Continue Reading

Cutting the Funding of Disinformation: The Ad-Tech Solution

Global Disinformation Index: “Based on our research, we have mapped out how there is an unchecked funding line provided to disinformation domains thanks to online ads automatically placed by ad exchanges on them.” The world wide web turned 30 years old in 2019. Since its invention, how we live our lives online – and off… Continue Reading

Effects of the Flipped Classroom: Evidence from a Randomized Trial

Effects of the Flipped Classroom: Evidence from a Randomized Trial Elizabeth Setren, Kyle Greenberg, Oliver Moore, and Michael Yankovich SEII Discussion Paper #2019.07 August 2019 “In a flipped classroom, an increasingly popular pedagogical model, students view a video lecture at home and work on exercises with the instructor during class time. Advocates of the flipped… Continue Reading

Attempting to to keep your name and address off the internet – not easy

Cory Doctorow – Boing Boing – A tip on how to keep your name and address off the internet. “There are dozens of free “peoplefinder” sites that buy up commercial databases and combine them with other sources to make your home address searchable. You can find instances where this has happened to you by googling… Continue Reading

Update Windows 10 Immediately, Warns Microsoft

Fortune: “Microsoft is sounding a red alert to Windows 10 users, warning them to update their operating systems immediately. The company, in a blog post Tuesday, warned of two “critical” vulnerabilities that rival the previous “BlueKeep” crisis. As with that bug, the new issues are described as “wormable,” meaning hackers could use them to spread… Continue Reading

The Regulation of Cryptocurrencies – Between a Currency and a Financial Product

Jabotinsky, Hadar Yoana, The Regulation of Cryptocurrencies – Between a Currency and a Financial Product (February 7, 2018). Hebrew University of Jerusalem Legal Research Paper No. 18-10. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3119591 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3119591  – “As cryptocurrencies gain popularity, the issue of how to regulate them becomes more pressing. The attractiveness of cryptocurrencies is due in… Continue Reading

Google open-sources Live Transcribe’s speech engine

VentureBeat: “Google today open-sourced the speech engine that powers its Android speech recognition transcription tool Live Transcribe. The company hopes doing so will let any developer deliver captions for long-form conversations. The source code is available now on GitHub. Google released Live Transcribe in February. The tool uses machine learning algorithms to turn audio into… Continue Reading

To Everything There Is a Season

The American Archivist, Frank J. Boles: “Three ideas, not always juxtaposed to one another in the literature, have had a pro-found impact on what archivists preserve. The ideas that archivists should create a universal record of human activity, that social justice should inform archival selec-tion decisions, and that archivists hold a unique form of power… Continue Reading