The Outline: “Facebook’s January 12 announcement that it would begin to deprioritize news in users’ News Feed left publishers shaking in their boots. “[B]y making these changes, I expect the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will go down,” admitted Mark Zuckerberg, much to the horror of every major media outlet,… Continue Reading
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Monthly Archives: May 2018
Supreme Court Says Your Expectation of Privacy Probably Shouldn’t Depend on Fine Print
EFF: “The Supreme Court unanimously ruled yesterday in Byrd v. United States that the driver of a rental car could have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the car even though the rental agreement did not authorize him to drive it. We’re pleased that that the Court refused to let a private contract dictate Fourth… Continue Reading
How to uncover Excel data only revealed by a drop-down menu
Online Journalism Blog: “Sometimes an organisation will publish a spreadsheet where only a part of the full data is shown when you select from a drop-down menu. In order to get all the data, you’d have to manually select each option, and then copy the results into a new spreadsheet. It’s not great. In this… Continue Reading
How to Automate Repetitive Tasks in Google Sheets With Macros
makeusof.com: “Record a task, save that task, and run the task whenever you want. Macros are finally available to Google Sheets users. Macros allow you to automate repetitive tasks in documents and spreadsheets without having to learn to write code. They have been a core productivity tool in Microsoft Office for a long time. Excel… Continue Reading
Ireland’s Open Data Portal
Ireland launches the third version of their national data portal DATA.GOV.IE – Promoting innovation and transparency through the publication of Irish Public Sector data in open, free and reusable formats. “A new and improved version of the national Open Data portal, data.gov.ie was recently launched. It is the third iteration of the portal now using… Continue Reading
Twitter will hide more bad tweets in conversations and searches
Twitter: “In March, we introduced our new approach to improve the health of the public conversation on Twitter. One important issue we’ve been working to address is what some might refer to as “trolls.” Some troll-like behavior is fun, good and humorous. What we’re talking about today are troll-like behaviors that distort and detract from… Continue Reading
Big banks including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs say their legal costs are tumbling
BizJournals: The nation’s largest banks — and public companies, for that matter — are preparing for a timeout from the courtroom following years of being pummeled by shareholder and investor lawsuits in the wake of the Great Recession. At the end of 2017, the country’s largest banks collectively decreased their estimates for future legal costs… Continue Reading
CFPB techies blast talk of taking down complaint portal
FCW.com: “…Created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank law, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is one of the first federal examples of bringing in outside tech talent to deliver government services. “If you’re going to build a government agency from scratch, you’re going to get the chance to do things differently,” one former CFPB senior official told… Continue Reading
NBC – Google sells the future, powered by your personal data
NBC News: Personal data collection practices are in the hot seat. So why isn’t Google, which collects more data than Facebook, feeling the heat? The more Google products you use, the more Google can gather about you. Whether it’s Gmail, the Android smartphone operating system, YouTube, Google Drive, Google Maps, and, of course, Google Search… Continue Reading
Unions and Inequality Over the Twentieth Century: New Evidence from Survey Data
NBER [access req’d]: Unions and Inequality Over the Twentieth Century: New Evidence from Survey Data. Henry S. Farber, Daniel Herbst, Ilyana Kuziemko, Suresh Naidu. NBER Working Paper No. 24587 Issued in May 2018, “It is well-documented that, since at least the early twentieth century, U.S. income inequality has varied inversely with union density. But moving… Continue Reading
What You Need to Know About E-Fail and the PGP Flaw
EFF: “…you should stop using PGP for encrypted email and switch to a different secure communications method for now. A group of researchers released a paper today that describes a new class of serious vulnerabilities in PGP (including GPG), the most popular email encryption standard. The new paper includes a proof-of-concept exploit that can allow… Continue Reading
Mapping Immune Cells in the Human Body
Center for Data Innovation: “Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Broad Institute, a genomic research center, have published a database of genetic profiles of over half a million immune cells. The data includes information about the characteristics, structure, and metadata of 224,000 cells from bone marrow and 306,000 cells from umbilical cord blood. This… Continue Reading
