… and is thus must fall under Fourth Amendment protections, says the US Supreme Court. (Cool.)
Mar 312015
Mar 292015
The role of Google in liberal politics – especially President Obama’s campaign – is highlighted in this article. Besides providing cash, they provided big infrastructure and small nuances (times millions of searches) to influence consumers of political news and activate voters – at least ones who would produce the right outcomes.
Feb 142015
Ohio taxpayers who thought they were getting refunds from the state instead got a quiz that they had to pass in order to have tax overpayments returned to them. Part of an ill-conceived program verify identity in the face of a rising tide of identity theft and scams, the quiz asked questions based on – and this is the good part – “information taken from national databases and other sources.” If you choose to participate (you know, like you actually want your property to be returned to you) then giving answers different from what the ‘national resources’ believe are true about you will result in denial of funds, and probably a requirement to bring identity papers into an office personally.
Of course, this kind of request looks indistinguishable from a host of other scams out there, which is why the linked article reports tens of thousands of calls came in to the tax offices and police. In truth, police probably should investigate, since we are unaware of any Ohio regulation that authorizes officials to burden citizens with such obligations as condition of exercise of their rights. What next? Maybe that they can require citizens to demonstrate they can play a musical instrument?
Once people have been assured that these kinds of requests are somehow okay, then the next wave of phishing from scam artists is likely to take a real toll.
Jan 192015
Motion detectors which use radio waves are now easily deployed and enable police to scan building interiors from the outside. And they’re doing this without warrants. This is not new in concept, but what is novel is the level of sophistication of the technology employed.
Jan 162015
The USM Board of Regents will shortly consider mid-year tuition and fee hikes across campuses. And quoting from the linked article: “College Park, Towson, Frostburg and Salisbury will use some of the funds generated by tuition increases to aid low-income students, officials said.”
Jan 152015
Federal legislation being introduced will dramatically raise the cap on H-1 (guest worker) visas for the tech industry. This will have the effect of gutting the domestic job market, and is opposed by such groups as the IEEE (in our field.)
Students who seem pleased that officials are giving increased emphasis on STEM education should be alarmed that those same officials are working hard to make sure there will be few or lower paying jobs for those having gone the distance in demanding degree and training programs. The American tech worker is being commoditized, and this will coincide with dramatic shifts of the market to overseas development operations, as the guest workers go home and take their tech skills with them to compete in far friendlier regulatory and tax environments.
Jan 052015
A principal in Chicago public schools unloads on education reform – and gives citations to support his assertions as well. Quoting the linked article:
Here we are, trying to revolutionize education with ideas that failed long ago. We can thank groups like the Gates Foundation for this new push for mechanized learning. With all their money, any idea that pops into Bill Gates head, even when he’s on the treadmill, can become an overnight national fad if he dangles a few million dollars in front of superintendents of starved school-districts.
A particular target in this explanation of why the emperor wears no clothes is ‘Ed Tech’, the promotion of lots of whacky software for lots of whacky teaching ideas as a replacement for sound teaching practices in the classroom.
If that sounds a lot like what is starting to happen on our campus too then you’re right. But there is nothing deep or mysterious about what is going on. To understand this, just follow the money. The shot callers in leadership don’t get personal career boosts by doing a great job as it has been done before, rather they often feel they are measured by how much change they effect – and recently, how such change saves money too. Companies promoting Ed Tech offer change, and never mind that they have an equity interest in people adopting their products. Eager empire builders thus have no self interest in vetting ideas based on how well they will help us accomplish core missions – that after all might get in the way of change, which they need for their own advancement.
This is how high schools get a lot of crap software and tools — it is all change done under the guise of helping the children, where nobody looks closely to see whether it all works (or if they do look then there are plenty of other culprits to spread blame) but everyone knows it is great for the tech industry in the long run. And it is why in College Park we get less investment in professorial resources, more ‘innovation’ that nobody substantively vets to see whether it improves our core missions, and an ever-increasing stream of graduates who are less prepared for careers than their counterparts in the prior cohort.
Jan 032015
This is a nice overview of legal cases which might be taken up by the Supreme Court in the new year. Will any surveillance cases involving NSA practices go the distance and win cert? Only time will tell, but the issues presently poised for consideration are laid out in the linked article.
Dec 302014
That’s the message of government if we go by its actions, as flagged in commentary on the role of government. “Regulations and rules are making it harder to do the right thing.”
Dec 282014
Stanford law professor Peter Berkowitz describes where political correctness has brought our campuses in America – an unconstitutional and “illiberal fantasy world” in which policies for handling allegations of sexual assault “harms women as well as men”.
What comes across in his article is that academia is building a liberal ‘shadow government’ which takes to itself the role of investigation, prosecution and punishment, but without authorities nor constitutional checks and balances. Is College Park immune? No. All undergraduates this year are required to take and pass an on-line sexual assault training course which teaches that the first step in responding to an assault is not to call 911 or contact police, but contact the appropriate campus office to enable them to take up their extra-legal processes.
The commentary from Berkowitz is especially striking in that it posts at the same time that the debunked one-in-five statistic – the much-cited number of women sexually assault on college campuses – is called out as obviously incorrect: “The rise and fall of the distractingly false claim that “one in five women is sexually assaulted in college” is the biggest math story of the year.”
We will be waiting to see what update to campus training is issued.