knowtheory

Steve Rich posted all the documents on DocumentCloud and all the data on Github too.

The post about the documents (which you can search) and the data: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/2015/01/1...

Amazon and online retail are actually a huge sociological problem in this context. If you can just order manga you like, and form bonds w/ online communities of folks w/ similar tastes on tumblr or twitter or wherever, what's the incentive to go to a physical place in your town?

Gaming stores have reinvented themselves as places to play games with others, but it'd be an interesting challenge to reinvent comic shops in that same way.

Github should warn you how many other repositories are named "PANDA" when you try to name a repository that.

(edit: looks like this PANDA has been around since 2012, so i guess it's one of the earlier ones)

You can order people to do all manner of things, but i think you'd be much harder pressed to enforce such a stricture.

You're not going to shut down someone's corneal reflex obviously: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corneal_reflex but that requires poking a guard in the eye or shining a bright light at them.

if you read up on foldit they take a hybrid strategy, for proteins that are simpler, they are using automated techniques. For proteins that are more complicated and harder to solve where folding requires satisfying a variety of conflicting constraints, Foldit is an experiment in using computer assisted human solving.

You're letting a single Buzzfeed article define what journalism is to you, and then complain about others presenting half-facts?

c'mon.

So is this intended as a single user sort of tool? I'm curious how merges, conflicts & branching would interact w/ a tool like this, or whether it's just intended as a way to implement a versioned file system essentially where files can be rolled back to previous states.

This would have been a much more interesting origin story for the Matrix, esp to play off of what machines would optimize for regarding human longevity.

DocumentCloud - US - REMOTE - Full time back-end (ruby/java/etc), front-end (js, backbone) or full-stack developers

DocumentCloud is a platform journalists use to analyze and publish primary source documents which they can embed along with their stories. We help people find interesting things in documents and share them with others.

If you read the Ferguson grand jury documents last week, you probably read them on DocumentCloud. We're also the platform from which Backbone.js and Underscore.js were extracted.

DocumentCloud is a Ruby/Rails & Javascript/Backbone webstack, plus a data processing stack written in a variety of languages (java, ruby, node, & some c).

We've received 1.4m$ in funding and are looking for developers to help us expand our platform & products. We're looking for developers who can contribute to our either/both our front end product experiences and/or our backend data/document processing pipelines (especially if you're interested in building open source tools used to make journalism better).

We work remotely with an agile planning process.

Join us and hack on open source software in the public interest! Shoot us an email with a resume to: jobs@documentcloud.org

https://www.documentcloud.org/home https://www.documentcloud.org/opensource

Sure, i don't normally like linking to TC but this has a pretty good roundup of links: http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/20/following-pressure-from-u-s...

The whole point is that it's not anonymized and it's being inspected for and used for purposes that have little to do with the ostensible customer-service agreement.

People aren't used to transit companies interrogating them about the purposes of their journeys, they just want the transit company to get them from point A to point B (imagine if they did this when you got in the car: "Where are you going? Why?")

And obviously from a business perspective the more you understand your customers and their motivations the better you can serve them.

But lets not kid ourselves. This isn't anonymized data. Uber's publishing in a format that is unspecific, but they have all of the detailed data and can poke through it and infer things at their leisure, and they have no compunction around how they're doing it or why.

This is why ethics and trust around data collectors is really important. Uber seems pretty cavalier about it, and that actually is a problem.

1) you haven't answered the question. Is it okay for people to go around spreading lies about you?

2) As Cory Doctorow put it "Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is time rich and cash poor." demanding payment of legal fees from someone who has no money doesn't get you very far.

3) The question is whether there is a societal problem here that we should care about at the level of governance. I'd argue yes, but what the remedy should be is way more complicated a topic, and something that i think is probably only worth discussing in good faith. So if you don't think this is a problem, that should be addressed first.

I'd like to point out that you're trying to execute a rhetorical slight of hand that diverts attention away from the issue.

Harassment is real. This isn't about hurt feelings. This is about concerted attempts to ruin ppl's lives. Kathy Sierra's case for example included lies being spread about how she was an actual prostitute (not as an insult).

Should trolls be allowed to spread lies about other people?

Sure, Sierra legally probably was entitled to sue these trolls, but now it's on Kathy to expend her time, effort & resources trying to identify the trolls to sue them. Even if it's legal, harassment can also be used as a DoS against the victim, which is frankly, still bullshit.

Yeah. So there's a lot going on with harassment charges. First things first, i'm not a lawyer. I'm just a dude who cares about civics.

The internet makes harassment considerably more problematic. Even setting aside constitutional defenses of speech, just trying to figure out which agency should be in charge of investigating and prosecuting harassment is confusing at best.

Do you go to your local police? Do you go to a federal agency? Which one? Even when you do approach a law enforcement agency after receiving threats, do they think its worth their time to investigate? (Amanda Hess's piece on harassment is an interesting for her interactions w/ the police alone: http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/women-ar... )

Revenge porn is an analogous (but not identical) problem, and even in that case, where basically everyone can agree it's a bad thing, it's clear first that states don't have statutes which they can use to prosecute (until very recently at least: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenge_porn#U.S._laws ), and in several cases some of the laws being written are complete clusterfucks.

The truth of the matter is that you can get away with a whole lot of bullshit before anybody starts trying to drop hammers on you. And harassers live in that space between what is legal and what is enforceable (a lot of other interesting stuff lives in that space too).

Kathy Sierra made her feelings on the subject very clear on twitter before she left.

Weev is a horrible person, and probably he even deserves to go to jail. But he does not deserve to go to jail based on bullshit.

We should never forget that injustice done to Weev is not the same as justice for the things he done.

1) Mozilla's stated mission is an Open Web. Any society has culture, and technology certainly does. Deciding not to talk about culture is a cultural choice.

2) Ignoring GamerGate is basically tacit approval. It's a banner used to harass people over the flimsiest and stupidest of reasons.

You can stick your fingers in your ears and ignore it if you want. That's kind of a shitty move but ultimately your prerogative. But to say that nobody should talk about it because you don't want to hear about it? Who says that's your decision to make?

Edit for replies:

Ignoring harassment of others doesn't make it go away. In fact all it does is allow harassment to go unchallenged.

I don't expect people to go actively confront people on whether they think gamergate is dumb or not, but if your position is "i don't want to talk about it" or "i don't know, maybe both sides have good points" then you need to reexamine what you think living together what other human beings means.

Gamergate is a fucking stupid reason to harass anybody. Anybody who is neutral or pro-gamergate needs to contend with that fact.

Worth checking out if you have a chromecast or if you're interested in seeing how news orgs are experimenting with delivering news via new means.

Here's the thing. Even if GNAA is trolling everyone, GamerGate is a terrible excuse for letting them continue a reign of terror.

Even if there were corruption in game journalism, video game journalism is so meaninglessly inconsequential that it wouldn't countenance the death threats, doxxing and harassment that is being done under it's aegis.

Do you know anybody who makes purchasing decisions based on how high a score a game reviewer gives it? Do you? It just seems unfathomable to me in a world where we have Steam, Twitch, Project Greenlight, Humble Bundle & indie games galore that video game journalism matters enough that it should be destroyed.

It just seems like Gamergate is bullshit from top to bottom, and it's completely mystifying to me why anyone who loves games should want to identify with it.

> Phil Fish forced himself off the internet by being a contemptible jackass

So he totally deserved what was coming to him when GamerGate leaked his bank details and social security number to the public!</derp>

Even if someone is an asshole that doesn't legitimize harming them. This is exactly what is wrong with Gamergate.

Hey man, i'm not criticizing you. You're making a good point. I want to make that point even stronger.

It's not semantics in the sense that we're quibbling over the definition of words. Your point can be even more definitive. Gamergaters are claiming something that is not true.

It doesn't matter if Gamergaters believe it to be true. It's not. <3

Yes, but saying "supposedly" is leaving the door open. The door is not open. No such thing ever happened.

Those are the stated reasons.

It's worth noting no such review was ever written for Zoe Quinn's game.

GamerGate has now doxxed and threatened a number of women in the gaming world (developers, critics, actresses) and Phil Fish the creator of Fez. They publicly organize to drive advertisers away from publications which disagree with them or call Gamergate out as misogynistic or threatening.

In some ways it's a bit more dramatic than that.

Oklahoma's being sued by the ACLU and newspapers because the state restricted the press's access to what was happening during Claton Lockett's botched execution:

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/newspapers-are-suing-oklaho...

People sometimes forget that while the press is often accused of being lurid and prurient, they do actually serve a civic function. (Or really, the Press is an overly broad category, and there are good investigative journalists whom people throw under the bus because CNN is terrible)

Maybe that's controversial because it's wrong?

One of the major hurdles this ebola outbreak presents is the fact that it is now spreading through much more heavily populated west Africa, a place that has never known Ebola, and does not have the public health infrastructure to deal with the disease.

Most Ebola outbreaks have taken place in central Africa, and usually in relatively remote locations.

It's frustrating to hear conjecture like this because it elides so much confused or incorrect information into a jumbled mess. Africa is a huge and diverse place just like any other continent.

Yep, and still worth reading in either place.

This is only true if OP's arguments have no content and their qualities are attributed solely to a particular group.

Given that OP's argument does have content that we can evaluate your argument is irrelevant.

So that propaganda thing is just jumping to conclusions.

Why would this have to be "uniquely feminist"?

If it's a feminist value, and that's how OP comes by the value... isn't that good enough? Seems like that's a fine way to arrive at human-centric design?

OP's point is actually broader than just human-centric design too. She's not just talking about consideration for users, but also a manner of collaboration w/ other developers too.

Er, why not? Are reasonable behaviors a scarce commodity?

If the argument is that

1) Feminism is a tradition of empathy and humanism 2) the application of OP's feminist ethos led OP to prioritize the needs of users in a particular way

then isn't this particular manner of operating, by OP's definition, feminist?

You can argue that Feminism is indistinguishable from other sorts of ethos, but it'd be hard to argue that it's not an ethos at all.

Looks like they wrote up a piece about how the project came together at Poynter too:

http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/270633/news-for...

As per usual, the analysis by the biz folks at Gannett makes no sense:

> To help gauge reader reaction, Gelman said the Register may hold town hall meetings or other events where Des Moinesers will be able to pass around headsets and experience the farm tour. He said he’s especially interested in hearing feedback on the presentation from the target demographic.

Because clearly it's Des Moinesers who are the ones curious what experiences on a farm in the midwest are like.

Right, but certain individual events are signifiers for larger systemic changes. If one needs reliable summer access through the arctic for this to work, relying on a fluke isn't going to work.

The problem with climate change is that there is plenty of rigorous statistical analysis... and yet ppl deny the analyses, deny the evidence collection, deny that there is any evidence. I'd like to think this is a different game now that business are making decisions predicated on it.