Author Archives: pappp

Article note: Fuck yeah. Not just because this one case is bullshit, but because we desperately need precedent that due-process-free, transparency-free pre-crime bullshit doesn't pass constitutional muster in all the places it's creeping in on the back of pearl-clutching and low-hanging surveillance.

Enlarge / NEW YORK, NY - NOVEMBER 22: A Transportation Security Administration (TSA) worker screens passengers at LaGuardia Airport (LGA) on the day before Thanksgiving, the nation's busiest travel day on November 22, 2017 in New York City. (credit: Spencer Platt | Getty Images)

A federal judge in Virginia has ruled that the government's terrorism screening database (TSDB) is unconstitutional because people on the list are not given an adequate opportunity to contest their inclusion. The ruling is a victory for a group of almost 20 Muslim Americans who sued the government over the list in 2016.

"There is no independent review of a person's placement on the TSDB by a neutral decisionmaker," Judge Anthony Trenga wrote on Wednesday. "Individuals are not told whether or not they were or remain on the TSDB watchlist and are also not told the factual basis for their inclusion."

As a result, the judge concluded, the watchlist system is unconstitutional.

Article note: Interesting, not surprising that students appear to learn more in active environments but like it less. The "forcing them to engage with the material" explanation for the learning more has always made sense to me. I suspect the distaste is largely that designing not-awful active learning exercises, especially ones that can be done in a normal classroom, is _hard_, and dragging yourself through hours of doing even good exercises is exhausting. Certainly the suppositions about students tending to approach education as a consumer seem likely as well. There's some side-stuff, like the frequency of no-effort textbook-slide lectures, and the various cultures of shaming people for asking questions (when people whine about "men trying to come up with clever questions" or "that chatty bitch who keeps restating what the instructor said to look smart" they are literally complaining about the audience tangibly engaging and integrating the material) that probably harm the effectiveness of lectures to factor in as well.

Enlarge (credit: US Dept. of Education)

One of the things that's amenable to scientific study is how we communicate information about science. Science education should, in theory at least, produce a scientifically literate public and prepare those most interested in the topic for advanced studies in their chosen field. That clearly hasn't worked out, so people have subjected science education itself to the scientific method.

What they've found is that an approach called active learning (also called active instruction) consistently produces the best results. This involves pushing students to work through problems and reason things out as an inherent part of the learning process.

Even though the science on that is clear, most college professors have remained committed to approaching class time as a lecture. In fact, a large number of instructors who try active learning end up going back to the standard lecture, and one of the reasons they cite is that the students prefer it that way. This sounds a bit like excuse making, so a group of instructors decided to test this belief using physics students. And it turns out professors weren't making an excuse. Even as understanding improved with active learning, the students felt they got more out of a traditional lecture.

Article note: 1. Identify a positive correlate 2. Decide it's a silver bullet and invest heavily in it (either because you believe it or because doing so advances your career interests) 3. Discover it's far less effective than promised It's the ciiirrrrrcle of hype. This one is especially gross because it justifies tangible surveillance and pushes responsibility for student well-being onto instructors. And now that it's largely discredited, the administrative class is going to notice and justify a tsunami of cloying faux-personal spam as "nudges."

Article note: This is a thing there should be a *lot* more of.

Article note: The publication process is BS. It's an obvious consequence of the incentive structure. Nearly everyone in academia know this, but I've never seen anything resembling an effort to change things in nontrivial ways.

Article note: This will be a major convenience thing both for building embedded things that use large flash storage, and for interacting with cameras and such from Linux machines.

Article note: Fuck's sake yes. Enable Notifications: Fuck No. Join Mailing List: No. RSS subscription: Maybe, it lets me manage your noise to work for me. I've had some sites who killed their RSS (eg. Woot) and I just forgot existed for extended periods of time because "put it in the managed queue" is the only reasonable way to interact with the modern glut without completely abdicating curation to a third party.

Article note: Summary: "Oh no, a nation-state actor might intentionally publish fake research... like we keep catching academics doing because the incentive structure encourages them to."

Article note: As the article obliquely points out, behavioral tracking is _only_ valuable in net-harmful ways. No one except the ad brokers is making any extra money from hyper-targeted advertising. The 'content producers' aren't actually getting any extra revenue from gathering reams of behavioral data, and now the reams of behavioral data are available for abuse. The rent-seeking middle men, and bad actors seeking to stir shit and manipulate people are the only ones coming out ahead on this regime, and society at large would be better without them. Furthermore, you shouldn't need to be me (with graduate degrees in computing-adjacent fields) to hope to even lessen the degree of surveillance and surveillance-based harassment you are subjected to.

Enlarge (credit: Leni Tuchsen)

Google's Chrome team is feeling pressure from competitors over ad tracking. Apple has long offered industry-leading protection against tracking cookies, while Mozilla recently announced that Firefox will begin blocking tracking cookies by default. Microsoft has been experimenting with tracking protection features in Edge, too.

But Google has a problem: it makes most of its money selling ads. Adopting the same aggressive cookie blocking techniques as its rivals could prevent Google's customers from targeting ads—potentially hurting Google's bottom line.

So in a blog post last week, Google outlined an alternative privacy vision—one that restricts some forms of user tracking without blocking the use of tracking cookies any time soon.

Article note: So, alarmist BS aside, I learned something useful from this article. The legitimate reason those "Everything but drilling the holes" suppressor kit "Filters" have proliferated recently is that currently the average backlog for filing an ATF Form 1 (to legally manufacture NFA item) is like 20 days, and a Form 4 (to transfer an NFA item) is like 200 days.