August 2017 - isoc - Skunkworks Site

Berkley: Online Media 2016 U.S. Presidential Election
by WANGARI KABIRU 26 Aug '17

26 Aug '17

https://cyber.harvard.edu/sites/cyber.harvard.edu/files/2017-08_electionES_… You will find the research resourceful to the online media and election discourse in the lists. Would be a good analysis by having such done by local (public interest) national agencies. Have a blessed day. Regards/Wangari --- Pray God Bless. 2013Wangari circa - "Being of the Light, We are Restored Through Faith in Mind, Body and Spirit; We Manifest The Kingdom of God on Earth". Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election | | | Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election | | | | In this study, we analyze both mainstream and social media coverage of the 2016 United States presidential election. We document that the majority of mainstream media coverage was negative for both candidates, but largely followed Donald Trump’s agenda: when reporting on Hillary Clinton, coverage primarily focused on the various scandals related to the Clinton Foundation and emails. When focused on Trump, major substantive issues, primarily immigration, were prominent. Indeed, immigration emerged as a central issue in the campaign and served as a defining issue for the Trump campaign. We find that the structure and composition of media on the right and left are quite different. The leading media on the right and left are rooted in different traditions and journalistic practices. On the conservative side, more attention was paid to pro-Trump, highly partisan media outlets. On the liberal side, by contrast, the center of gravity was made up largely of long-standing media organizations steeped in the traditions and practices of objective journalism. Our data supports lines of research on polarization in American politics that focus on the asymmetric patterns between the left and the right, rather than studies that see polarization as a general historical phenomenon, driven by technology or other mechanisms that apply across the partisan divide. The analysis includes the evaluation and mapping of the media landscape from several perspectives and is based on large-scale data collection of media stories published on the web and shared on Twitter. |

1 0

Coding Boot Camps Won’t Save Us All
by WANGARI KABIRU 12 Aug '17

12 Aug '17

We are certainly here...With "coding schools" coming up locally and some opting for them or out of higher education. For educationists and the labour market; Is accreditation, recognition really relevant? Are they a band-aid, add on professional skills versus the actual education pathway. Blessings! Regards/Wangari --- Pray God Bless. 2013Wangari circa - "Being of the Light, We are Restored Through Faith in Mind, Body and Spirit; We Manifest The Kingdom of God on Earth". http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2017/08/coding_boot_c… Coding Boot Camps Won’t Save Us All 456156 A couple of recent closures prove that there are no shortcuts in education. Coding boot camps were supposed to be the next big thing in higher education, promising a compressed, career-focused alternative to traditional graduate school. In the past five years, startups offering these programs have raised millions in investment and won praise from policymakers as an innovative way to prepare (or retrain) workers for the jobs of the digital future.The enchantment around the model appears to be wearing off, though. In July, Dev Bootcamp, one of the largest and earliest coding boot camp providers,announced it would close because leaders could not find a sustainable business model. Just a few days later, another pioneer in the space, the Iron Yard, said it would also shut down this year.“I haven’t talked to a ton of coal miners who have done a boot camp and become developers.”Liz Eggleston, co-founder of Course ReportDespite their high-tech subject matter and slick Silicon Valley messaging, most boot camps take a decidedly old-fashioned approach to instruction—focusing on in-person classrooms and high student-to-faculty ratios. But because they lack accreditation, their students aren’t eligible for federal financial aid. “We’ve determined that we simply cannot reach a sustainable business model without compromising our mission of delivering a high-quality coding education that remains accessible to a diverse population of students,” leaders of Dev Bootcamp said in their farewell statement. The statement from Iron Yard cited “challenges of a nascent market” and “the demands facing all institutions in the higher education marketplace.” Get Future Tense in your inbox. That doesn’t mean the rest of the boot camps are doomed. In fact, there are at least 95 other coding boot camp companies in the U.S., and some say they are still growing. But it should bring a dose of realism to what had been a narrative of unending growth and the idea that somehow boot camps were a silver bullet for what ails higher education.“The problem with education is that we keep coming back to this one-size-fits-all approach,” says Adam Enbar, CEO of Flatiron School, who insists that he’s seeing “more demand than ever” for his company’s programs. Rhetoric around coding schools has suggested that they present an easy way to teach anyone to code, regardless of background. Flatiron, he says, has crafted its main program to be highly selective, and it runs a longer program with a different curriculum for those with less familiarity with coding. “There’s no model that fits everyone,” he says. And by the same logic, he says, no one can make a blanket statement that boot camp programs as a group can’t work.“What we really see in these boot camps is a lot of career changers,” says Liz Eggleston, co-founder of Course Report, which researches and runs reviews of coding boot camps. While there’s plenty of talk these days of retraining blue-collar workers for “new collar” jobs in tech, that hasn’t been the norm at coding boot camps. “I haven’t talked to a ton of coal miners who have done a boot camp and become developers.” More typical, she says, is someone who already holds a college degree and wants to move from the marketing department of a high-tech firm to the development team.Jessica Dembe is a good example. She graduated from the Iron Yard’s D.C. campus in January, seeing it as a “high-risk, high-reward gamble” that the training would let her jump a few rungs in her career ladder. “I wasn’t making a lot of money at my old job” as a research assistant at a consulting firm, she says. “I thought, If I could make this work, I could make a good deal more in a new position.” So she saved up roughly six months’ worth of living expenses and quit her job, thanks in part to support from a parent, and enrolled in the three-month program, which cost her about $12,000 after a diversity scholarship and a discount.She says she did her homework before plunking down that kind of cash. “At first I was really skeptical about it,” she says of the boot camp idea. For a few months she tried teaching herself with free online resources, and she even attended a hackathon for people trying to learn coding, but felt she wasn’t getting what she needed. A mentor at work had completed the Iron Yard program and recommended it, and she sought out other graduates to see if it had helped them land the kind of job she wanted. “I don’t make rash decisions,” she jokes.Dembe was “shocked” to learn the school was now closing, but she’s happy she went—after all, she found a job six weeks after graduation. If the boot camp business was so precarious, though, she wonders why the schools often occupy pricey real estate: The campus she attended was just a few blocks from the White House, for instance.When making their pitch to students, coding boot camps don’t usually talk about amenities. They often stress one number: job placement rates. Several boot camp companies have joined efforts to independently verify the percentage of students who get jobs in the field soon after graduating, such as the Council on Integrity in Results Reporting, formed by a group of boot camps, and a broader quality-control framework proposed by Entangled Solutions, a consulting firm.Neither Dev Bootcamp nor the Iron Yard joined such efforts, as their competitor Flatiron School is quick to point out. “They just weren’t releasing transparent data,” says Enbar. The Flatiron CEO isn’t part of the CIRR or Entangled framework, either, but says the company releases independently verified employment rates. “The line is being drawn around quality,” he says.Another giant in the space, General Assembly, believes success will come down to the strength of providers’ relationships with employers to create a reliable pipeline to employment. “Our vision was never, ‘Let’s build a boot camp,’ ” says Jake Schwartz, co-founder and CEO of General Assembly. “The idea was: Can we build a new way to think about people’s careers and how to build people’s careers?”Some evidence suggests that many employers aren’t yet convinced of the educational merits of coding boot camps. A report in Bloomberg in December even suggests a boot camp diploma could be seen as disqualifying.Back when Dev Bootcamp was flying high, one of its co-founders, Dave Hoover, gave an interview to a networking site for entrepreneurs that inadvertently betrayed a dirty little secret of the coding boot camp model. He said the most valuable thing a mentor gave him at a startup he worked for: You don’t need to know everything. What you need to do is be the guy who knows how to find the answer. That was eye-opening because it made me realize, especially as a software developer, you don’t have to know everything, but thanks to Google and search technology and all the online resources we have, the answers are just a few seconds away. Some academic critics of boot camps argue that the companies represent a shift to requiring workers to pay more of the bill for their own training, and one that falls disproportionately on low-income or underrepresented groups. Tressie McMillan Cottom, an assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy, recently made that argument on her blog: “Boot camps are a tax paid by suitably credentialed workers who do not have enough capital (economic, social, or cultural) to enter a high status field of work in which some job is undergoing an actual or projected short-term demand bubble,” she wrote.Boot camp leaders often take pains to distance themselves from an earlier generation of for-profit education providers like Corinthian Colleges, which shuttered after a federal investigation found that the company misrepresented to students the percentage of graduates who landed jobs. But legacy for-profit players had pushed into the nascent boot camp space: In fact, Dev Bootcamp was acquired by Kaplan in 2015, and the Iron Yard had been purchased that same year by Apollo Education Group—which also owns University of Phoenix. (Disclosure: Slate is a subsidiary of Graham Holdings Co., which also owns Kaplan and is an investor in EdSurge.)Top CommentCouldn't community colleges offer the same type of immersive short term course, but far cheaper and with accreditation? I would think if this were possible they'd be all over it. What am I missing? More... The lasting legacy of education boot camps may end up being found on traditional campuses. Several colleges are trying the boot camp approach, even in other fields like health care and political science. In fact, many upstart coding schools are now partnering with those old-fashioned campuses they were intent on replacing.Future Tense is a collaboration amongArizona State University, New America, and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, follow us on Twitter and sign up for our weekly newsletter.

1 0

A Civics Lesson for Facebook - social network’s new democratic-minded tools
by WANGARI KABIRU 12 Aug '17

12 Aug '17

Blessed Saturday! Let's get into social-democracy now in the political space! Read on... Blessings. Regards/Wangari --- Pray God Bless. 2013Wangari circa - "Being of the Light, We are Restored Through Faith in Mind, Body and Spirit; We Manifest The Kingdom of God on Earth". http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2017/08/facebook_now_… A Civics Lesson for Facebook Why there’s reason to be wary of the social network’s new democratic-minded tools. As CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid out in a sizable manifesto earlier this year, Facebook has grand ambitions to create a platform that goes beyond just connecting family and friends. More than social media, it wants to create the social infrastructure that powers communities from niche interest groups to nations. But can tools to improve civic engagement from a clickbait-driven company really be good for democracy?As part of its new Town Hall project, Facebook recently unveiled three new features aimed at linking government representatives with the citizens they’re elected to serve. The first, constituent badges, enables users to voluntarily identify themselves (via address verification) as residents of a particular district. Politicians will then be able to see these badges, allowing them to determine whether, say, a commenter on their page resides in the area they represent. The second, district targeting, will allow elected officials to create posts and polls soliciting feedback that will only be visible to their constituents. Finally, there’s constituent insights, which will permit politicians to view and comment on news stories that are popular in their political districts.Whether by intention or accident, Facebook seems to be designing democracy in its own clickbait-driven image.This all sounds nice on the surface. After all, it seems like Facebook finally is beginning to acknowledge its political influence, a role it initially rejected in the aftermath of the 2016 election. And it’s seemingly channeling that power for public benefit by making it easier for constituents to engage with elusive politicians.Yet, there’s reason to stop short of lauding the social media network’s attempts to better our representative government. Not only is it unclear whether these tools will actually foster meaningful engagement, it’s also questionable whether private companies like Facebook—even if they’re well-meaning—should be trusted to keep democracies’ best interests at heart. Get Future Tense in your inbox. For starters, whether by intention or accident, Facebook seems to be designing democracy in its own clickbait-driven image. The Town Hall tools all revolve around attention: They encourage both politicians and users to find ways to better grab one another’s eyeballs (to use the social media term of art). But the kind of attention Facebook demands from us—incessantly chasing what’s trending, viral, getting clicks—rarely works in favor of the long-term public interest. Think of Donald Trump, obsessively monitoring his ratings and flitting to whatever message gets a rise from his base. Such messaging may get attention, but it’s not what’s best for the American people. Yet this kind of frenetic attention baiting is essential to Facebook’s business model. It’s not hard to imagine a scenario in which these new tools end up pushing politicians to primarily focus on the whims or dank memes of the day, instead of heeding to the more substantial issues.I’m also concerned about the assumptions about human behavior and demographics that Facebook appears to be making with these features. For one, the Town Hall tools assume that what people read and share on the social media platform makes for a reasonably good representation of what they want their politicians to be concerned about. But there’s little reason to believe this is true. Users often post articles that they dislike, disagree with, find hilariously stupid—I certainly do. But it’s unlikely that Facebook will be successfully categorizing these posts as such before they share them with politicians. Does what you read when you’re slacking off at work actually represent the big issues you’re concerned about, or is it just what happens to catch your eye at 4:30 p.m. on a Friday? Is a news story important just because it happens to be trending?What’s more, we don’t actually control what we see in our Facebook feed; Facebook does. Unlike a newspaper or magazine that shows readers stories the editorial board deems significant, Facebook’s algorithm is designed to show stories it thinks an individual user wants to view. The website simply isn’t that motivated to get you to eat your vegetables (if vegetables are “dry foreign affairs stories with large words”). Its interests lie in keeping you scrolling endlessly through your feed. Research has shown that this filtering distorts the content that people see, possibly creating damaging filter bubbles and further polarizing politics. It also gives Facebook outsize control over what media it chooses to promote—a state of affairs that benefits the company but may not always benefit you.This distortion isn’t just coming from the company, either. As Facebook itself admitted, governments and other actors have exploited the platform to spread misinformation. The company’s efforts to eradicate this issue are still at an early stage, and from the limited information provided, it’s not hard to imagine these propaganda bots and digital information warriors gaming the address-verification system and pretending to be constituents.The second big assumption that the Town Hall tools idea makes is that Facebook users are reasonably representative of the actual opinions of the population. Except this isn’t a sure thing: There’s ample evidence that privileged groups are more “visible” in big data sets (for example, people with regular internet access are more likely to be engaged in social media than those without). While 68 percent of U.S. adults use Facebook—making it the most widely used social media platform in the country—these users are more likely to be young, low-income, and female.Bias may also impact who actually uses and engages with Facebook’s Town Hall tools. Just 9 percent of social media users say that they regularly discuss or comment on politics, and only 25 percent of social media users follow political figures. Users concerned with privacy may not feel comfortable handing over sensitive information like their home address to the company (with good reason), even if it means they can’t be verified as a constituent. Others may feel pressured to disclose their private information as a prerequisite for interacting with their representatives. While Facebook likely could correct for these biases, it might not want to; after all, the company directly benefits from more users and more user data.Finally, Facebook makes a third problematic assumption: that elected officials and their teams are capable of sifting out important, policy-actionable items from a constant, minimally curated stream of what their constituents are reading and posting. It’s a worldview with an exceptionally optimistic perspective on the filtering abilities of most people—let alone politicians. It’s not just the barrage of data that’s the issue, but the fact that it’s also essentially meaningless if it can’t be properly analyzed. Considering there are entire industries of highly trained professionals who spend their careers trying to do this—and still regularly get things wrong—what makes Facebook think these tools will be anything but a distraction for elected officials?Beyond thinking about how these tools might influence the responsiveness of politicians to their constituents, it’s also worth considering the motivations of the politicians themselves. During the 2016 election, for example, the Trump campaign worked to dissuade potential Clinton supporters from turning out through something called “dark posts”—in this case, targeted negative ads that were invisible to anyone but the recipient, obscuring them from public scrutiny. It remains unclear how much of a difference, if any, these posts made on the outcome. But the tactic is unlikely to go away—and may be made more powerful by leveraging the social media platform’s Town Hall tools by enabling politicians to better tailor their messaging to constituents’ particular pain points. Elected officials might also be able to gain an advantage over potential electoral challengers, as it doesn’t appear that Facebook offers similar tools to candidates yet. Has the company gamed out these unpleasant but realistic possibilities?We don’t know because Facebook isn’t transparent about its processes or about its overarching goals with these recent forays into democracy building. And it’s important to remember that it doesn’t have to be. It’s a publicly held company whose primary responsibility is to its shareholders. It’s not a representative government. Nor is it a public utility. Though it may be using lofty press releases and Zuckerberg’s not-so-subtle appearances at Iowa truck stops to promote a new, civic-minded image, it has no obligation to be inclusive or representative, or to do what’s best for citizens.This does not mean Facebook is evil or ill-intentioned; it simply means that Facebook can only be what it is. As Donald Trump is proving, you can’t run government like a real estate business. We shouldn’t run government like a social media company, either.This article is part of Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, New America, and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, follow us on Twitter and sign up for our weekly newsletter.

1 0

Research Report: Free Basics in Real Life - “poor internet for poor people” or "offering some web experience"
by WANGARI KABIRU 10 Aug '17

10 Aug '17

https://advox.globalvoices.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/FreeBasicsinRealL… https://advox.globalvoices.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/KENYA.pdf "Facebook’s Free Basics program aims to help bridge the digital divide through a mobile-basedplatform that allows users to connect to a handful of online services free of charge. In a visionstatement for the program, Facebook surmises that “[by] introducing people to the benefits of theinternet” they will help justify the cost of mobile data and thereby “bring more people online andhelp improve their lives.”The program has been the subject of controversy since its inception, reviving the debate overopen access and the digital divide. Digital rights experts have argued that the program violatesnetwork neutrality, brings an imbalance to local content and mobile subscription markets, andcreates a “poor internet for poor people” that does not allow users to truly explore and discover theglobal internet.1 Others have praised it for offering users some degree of experience with the web,and for incentivizing operators to make mobile data more affordable for more customers...." --Read on! Blessed day Regards/Wangari --- Pray God Bless. 2013Wangari circa - "Being of the Light, We are Restored Through Faith in Mind, Body and Spirit; We Manifest The Kingdom of God on Earth".

1 0

Fwd: [kictanet] Request for information on technology deployment during elections
by Ali Hussein 08 Aug '17

08 Aug '17

FYI *Ali Hussein* *Principal* *Hussein & Associates* Tel: +254 713 601113 Twitter: @AliHKassim Skype: abu-jomo LinkedIn: http://ke.linkedin.com/in/alihkassim <http://ke.linkedin.com/in/alihkassim> 13th Floor , Delta Towers, Oracle Wing, Chiromo Road, Westlands, Nairobi, Kenya. Any information of a personal nature expressed in this email are purely mine and do not necessarily reflect the official positions of the organizations that I work with. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Grace Githaiga via kictanet <kictanet(a)lists.kictanet.or.ke> Date: Tue, Aug 8, 2017 at 4:19 PM Subject: [kictanet] Request for information on technology deployment during elections To: ali(a)hussein.me.ke Cc: Grace Githaiga <ggithaiga(a)kictanet.or.ke> Listers We hope that you have and continue to perform your civic duty. In today's elections, technology systems deployment is at three levels: a) Voters were registered using the Biometric Voter Registration system (BVR). b) At the polling centres, voters will be identified at first instance using Electronic Voter Identification system (EVID). c) After votes are counted, results will be transmitted using the Results Transmission System (RTS). *Note: The EVID and the RTS is the SAME system. The tablet for identifying voters is the SAME tablet for scanning and transmitting results and which is referred to as the *Integrated Elections Management Systems (IEMS). Apart from the above systems, the public will also access election related information through communication systems, especially the Internet. KICTANet has been observing certain features on IEBC’s use of technology, and other related aspects to access to information. KICTANet is today observing the use of the two systems (EVID and RTS). The Network will additionally continue to observe access to election information during the period. *We request your participation in this survey.* We provide a link to a document which we are using as a guide for observers during the election. The guide covers five activities namely: opening of the polling station and set up; voter identification and assisted voters; vote counting procedures; tallying procedures; and closing procedures. Here is the link: https://docs.google.com/forms/ d/198xRPeUMoNsYPLn2rhCtZhTkxd3AxFJVgOFKwKxSjeA/edit?ts=5989b0ae Your participation is completely voluntary and all of your responses will be kept anonymous in the report that KICTANet will produce as a result of this process. As always, we highly appreciate your time and contribution. Asanteni sana. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Co-Convenor Kenya ICT Action Network (KICTANet) Twitter:@ggithaiga Tel: 254722701495 Skype: gracegithaiga Alternate email: ggithaiga(a)hotmail.com Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gracegithaiga www.kictanet.or.ke "Change only happens when ordinary people get involved, get engaged and come together to demand it. I am asking you to believe. Not in my ability to bring about change – but in yours"---Barrack Obama. _______________________________________________ kictanet mailing list kictanet(a)lists.kictanet.or.ke https://lists.kictanet.or.ke/mailman/listinfo/kictanet Twitter: http://twitter.com/kictanet Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KICTANet/ Unsubscribe or change your options at https://lists.kictanet.or.ke/m ailman/options/kictanet/info%40alyhussein.com The Kenya ICT Action Network (KICTANet) is a multi-stakeholder platform for people and institutions interested and involved in ICT policy and regulation. The network aims to act as a catalyst for reform in the ICT sector in support of the national aim of ICT enabled growth and development. KICTANetiquette : Adhere to the same standards of acceptable behaviors online that you follow in real life: respect people's times and bandwidth, share knowledge, don't flame or abuse or personalize, respect privacy, do not spam, do not market your wares or qualifications.

1 0