O’Brien, Daniel P. and Smith, Doug, Privacy in Online Markets: A Welfare Analysis of Demand Rotations (July 1, 2014). FTC Bureau of Economics Working Paper No. 323. Available for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2477052 “We compare the private and social incentives for privacy when sellers can commit to transparent privacy policies that are understood by consumers. The… Continue Reading
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Monthly Archives: August 2014
A Path to Understanding the Effects of Algorithm Awareness
Hamilton, K., Karahalios, K., Sandvig, C. & Eslami, M. (2014). “A Path to Understanding the Effects of Algorithm Awareness.” In CHI Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (alt.CHI). ACM, New York: “The rise in prevalence of algorithmically curated feeds in online news and social media sites raises a new question for designers, critics, and… Continue Reading
Whistleblowers Silenced by Non-Disclosure Agreements – Focus on SEC
POGO – “On July 25, the Project On Government Oversight, along with more than 50 other organizations, sent a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) expressing concern over the growing problem of silencing whistleblowers. Many companies regulated by the SEC are now requiring employees reporting misconduct to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) that undermine the force… Continue Reading
Drugs in space and sleepless in the shuttle – Study
MindHacks: “A fascinating study published in today’sLancet Neurology reports on sleep deprivation in astronauts but also describes the drugs shuttle crew members use to keep themselves awake and help them fall asleep. The study looked at sleep data from 64 astronauts on 80 space shuttle missions along with 21 astronauts on 13 International Space Station missions, and compared it… Continue Reading
Agile in the Federal Government: Improving Execution
Agile in the Federal Government: Improving Technical Execution – ccpace: “As discussed in the first paper in this series Agile in the Federal Government: Scrum and Beyond, the history of Agile adoption in industry took the path of usage of eXtreme Programming (XP) followed by the combination of Scrum and XP. In the government, the… Continue Reading
Agreement on the New Development Bank – Fortaleza, July 15
[Via Wikipedia] “People’s Republic of China and the Republic of South Africa, collectively the BRICS countries, RECALLING the decision taken in the fourth BRICS Summit in New Delhi in 2012 and subsequently announced in the fifth BRICS Summit in Durban in 2013 to establish a development bank; RECOGNIZING the work undertaken by the respective finance… Continue Reading
New FICO Score Model to Help Expand Consumer Access to Credit
Tara Siegel Bernard – NYT: “The creator of one of the most widely used and influential credit scores, FICO, said on Thursday that the latest version of its score would no longer weigh medical debts — which account for about half of all unpaid collections on consumers’ credit reports — as heavily as it did… Continue Reading
Two Factor Auth
Two Factor Auth (2FA): “Two-step verification, abbreviated to TSV (not equal to two step authentication TSA nor to Two-factor authentication, abbreviated to TFA) is a process involving two subsequent but dependent stages to check the identity of an entity trying to access services in a computer or in a network with just one factor or secret,… Continue Reading
IBM’s New Processor Uses Little Energy and Functions Mimic Human Neural Networks
New York Times – John Markoff: “Inspired by the architecture of the brain, scientists have developed a new kind of computer chip that uses no more power than a hearing aid and may eventually excel at calculations that stump today’s supercomputers. The chip, or processor, is named TrueNorth and was developed by researchers at IBM and… Continue Reading
Mesa: Geo-Replicated, Near Real-Time, Scalable Data Warehousing
Research at Google – “Mesa is a highly scalable analytic data warehousing system that stores critical measurement data related to Google’s Internet advertising business. Mesa is designed to satisfy a complex and challenging set of user and systems requirements, including near real-time data ingestion and queryability, as well as high availability, reliability, fault tolerance, and… Continue Reading
Saving the Arctic
The Urgent Need to Cut Black Carbon Emissions and Slow Climate Change – Rebecca Lefton and Cathleen Kelly, August 2014. “The Arctic is warming at a rate twice as fast as the rest of the world, in part because of the harsh effects of black carbon pollution on the region, which is made up mostly of snow… Continue Reading
Student Debt Linked to Worse Health and Less Wealth – Gallup
“College graduates who carry a high amount of student debt appear to face long-term challenges that stretch beyond just their finances. A new analysis of Americans who graduated college between 1990 and 2014 shows that graduates who took on the highest amounts of student debt, $50,000 or more, are less likely than their fellow graduates… Continue Reading
