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Daily Archives: April 26, 2021

To Be Tracked or Not? Apple Is Now Giving Us the Choice

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The New York Times – “On Monday, Apple released iOS 14.5, one of its most anticipated software updates for iPhones and iPads in years. It includes a new privacy tool, App Tracking Transparency, which could give us more control over how our data is shared. Here’s how it works: When an app wants to follow our activities to share information with third parties such as advertisers, a window will show up on our Apple device to ask for our permission to do so. If we say no, the app must stop monitoring and sharing our data. A pop-up window may sound like a minor design tweak, but it has thrown the online advertising industry into upheaval. Most notably, Facebook has gone on the warpath. Last year, the social network created a website and took out full-page ads in newspapers denouncing Apple’s privacy feature as harmful to small businesses…”

See also Wired – The New iOS Update Lets You Stop Ads From Tracking You

CEO Pay Remains Stratospheric Even at Companies Battered by Pandemic

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The New York Times – “…The coronavirus plunged the world into an economic crisis, sent the U.S. unemployment rate skyrocketing and left millions of Americans struggling to make ends meet. Yet at many of the companies hit hardest by the pandemic, the executives in charge were showered with riches. The divergent fortunes of C.E.O.s and… Continue Reading

Zoom’s new meeting option could make your video calls a lot more interesting

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ZDNET – “Zoom has released a new feature for free accounts that places up to 25 people in the same virtual room, such as an auditorium, classroom or boardroom. The new Zoom feature matches Microsoft Teams Together Mode, which it released in July and brought to Skype in December, using AI segmentation to put participants… Continue Reading

A brief history of how it took almost 300 years to pass the Americans with Disabilities Act

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Fast Company – “By now you’ve probably heard that the pandemic has hit certain groups more than others. Women, particularly women of color, have lost a historic number of jobs, which has a ripple effect on the wage gap and the global economy overall. What’s less well known is that between March and August 2020… Continue Reading

Academic Feeder Judges: Are Clerkships the Key to Academia?

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Wasserman, Howard, Academic Feeder Judges: Are Clerkships the Key to Academia? (April 19, 2021). Florida International University Legal Studies Research Paper No. 20-02, Howard M. Wasserman, Academic Feeder Judges: Are clerkships the key to academia?, 105 Judicature 1 (2021)., Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3526903 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3526903 “This paper identifies “academic feeder judges”—the federal judges (especially from… Continue Reading

Qui Tam: The False Claims Act and Related Federal Statutes

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CRS Report – Qui Tam: An Abridged Look at the FalseClaims Act and Related Federal Statutes, Updated April 26, 2021: “Qui tam statutes enlist the public to sue to recover civil penalties and forfeitures from those who have defrauded the government. Qui tam rewards those who sue in the government’s name (called relators) with a… Continue Reading

Supreme Court will hear a major Second Amendment case that could gut US gun laws

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Vox: “The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it will hear New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Corlett, a case that could transform the judiciary’s understanding of the Second Amendment and lay waste to many of the nation’s gun laws. The case involves New York state’s handgun licensing law — a law… Continue Reading

Counter-friction to Stop the Machine: The Endgame for Instructional Design

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Hybrid Pedagogy: “If you had asked us in early 2020 about the state of instructional design within higher education, we would have told you it was suffering; much of the field, with its roots in military training, had evolved into a landscape of prescriptive models based on a poor understanding of human learning. Private companies… Continue Reading

It’s time to consider a patent reprieve for COVID vaccines

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Nature Editorial – “The world needs around 11 billion doses of coronavirus vaccine to immunize 70% of the world’s population, assuming two doses per person. As of last month, orders had been confirmed for 8.6 billion doses, a remarkable achievement. But some 6 billion of these will go to high- and upper-middle-income countries. Poorer nations… Continue Reading