The Structure Whisperer

How a data analytics firm allegedly ‘weaponized’ Facebook to swing votes in 2016 | PBS NewsHour

On Friday, Facebook suspended Cambridge Analytica, a UK-headquartered data analytics firm, for allegedly using user data to devise election advertising strategy, particularly for undecided voters, in the run-up to the 2016 election. The U.S. arm of the firm reportedly received information on 50 million American voters from Facebook without disclosing its intentions to the social media giant.…

Here’s a primer on the professor–student relationship.

…I wonder if college students today truly understand the nature of their relationship to professors. Perhaps their experiences with other authority figures — high-school teachers, parents, and bosses — have led them to make assumptions that aren’t quite accurate. Or perhaps students are just not too thrilled with authority figures in general. That’s always been the case, to some extent. But it seems to me, after 31 years of college teaching, that the lines have grown blurrier, the misconceptions more profound. So I’d like to take a few moments to define the professor-student relationship.

Where Americans see sin that should be punished, Europeans often see a problem that needs a solution. Drug policy is the obvious and important example. Our forty-year prison-bulging moral panic contrasts with policies in the Netherlands, for example, which focused less on righteous punishment for offenders and more on reducing harm. 

 The same rational, non-moralistic approach applied to sex was the topic of a recent “Friday Flashback” post by Lisa Wade at Sociological Images (here), posted originally in 2010. Lisa mentioned Dutch government policies on prostitution – Amsterdam’s red-light districts for legal and regulated prostitution may be more famous even than the cannabis-selling coffee shops. But her example was from Scotland.

Julieta R. sent in this picture, shot by her friend at the Aberdeen Pub in Edinburgh, Scotland. Sex in the bathroom, it appears, had begun to inconvenience customers. But, instead of trying to eradicate the behavior, the Pub just said: “Ok, fine, but just keep it to cubicle no. 4.”

Mount St. Mary's fires two faculty members. One was tenured professor charged with lack of loyalty. The other advised student newspaper that recently exposed president's quotes about "drowning bunnies."

The Hungarian government implemented tough new immigration laws Tuesday as it seeks to stem the flow of refugees and other people crossing the country’s border with Serbia: the outer frontier of the European Union’s borderless Schengen zone.

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)

One of my UMass Lowell North Campus majors (read: science and engineering) introduced this in class. It’s my new favorite.

The average amount that college students spend on course materials appears to be declining. But not necessarily because textbooks are cheaper. A growing number of students, surveys show, simply skip buying required course materials.