Several weeks ago I went shopping for a new clock for my office and my kitchen.  I made my purchases.  And the next day my Facebook page was still covered in clock ads.  The sites I was shopping on (Amazon and Etsy) shared the fact that I was interested in clocks with Facebook (probably through ‘cookies’—little pieces of information stored by the sites I accessed on my computer.)  It’s weeks later, and I am still getting clock ads.  I have never been less likely to buy a clock—I just bought two.  

Or take the case of my son’s bathing suit.  We bought him a matching bathing suit and swim shirt a few months ago, and got the suit one size too small.  It fit him in March, but doesn’t still fit him now in June.  Ooops.  The top still fits, so a couple days ago I went on the Gymboree website to see if we could get him the bottom a size bigger.  Unfortunately, they’re out of his size.  Ah well.  But a picture of that bathing suit is still showing up as my top ad on Facebook.  I think it’s taunting me. 

When you think of the data and social subtlety required to solve these problems, it seems like a daunting task.  OK, the first one might not be so bad—maybe if someone actually completed a clock purchase, the system should infer that they might not be interested in more clocks?  But it’s hard to fathom how they could solve the bathing suit case.  From the data trail I left, it looks like I might be interested in that suit but hesitated.  The idea of a system that would have enough data to solve the problem is frightening.  A system that knows the browsing was for my son and not for a gift, and knows my son’s correct size? I can’t always get his size right myself.

So it was with genuine appreciation that earlier this week I realized I had received a social media ad that worked—it was what I wanted, when I wanted it.  PhD student Casey Fiesler posted on her Facebook page several weeks ago that she recommends the book Ready Player One.  She said it was the first good cyberpunk she’d read since Snowcrash.  She included a link to the book on Amazon.  I had a look, and decided to buy it.  It is quite possibly the geekiest piece of media in any form I have ever encountered—and I loved it.  It’s a page turner. 

What I didn’t realize until this week is that it was not entirely accidental that I saw it in Casey’s Facebook newsfeed.  Facebook offers ‘promoted posts’—you can pay a few dollars to increase the chance that your friends will see something you post.  If you have more than a few Facebook friends, you likely are seeing only a fraction of what your friends are posting. The algorithm that determines what you see and don’t is proprietary.  Did Casey pay to promote her post?  Of course not.  Amazon did.  Amazon is paying Facebook to raise the profile of postings that include URLs to products on their site.  My friend genuinely recommended that book to me—Amazon just helped make sure I saw it. Violá—a targeted ad that made everyone happy!  I hope they invent more clever techniques for win-win advertising.

Addendum:
Sean Munson points out that this technique results in people seeing links to Amazon products with joke reviews over and over. Some people post links to products just because the reviews are funny–like the infamous Bic for Her pen reviews, where one review was found helpful by currently over 31,000 people. But I saw that post so many times that it became maddening. Two key points: 1) There is such a thing as over-promoting, and 2) Social subtlety is hard!

I was just saying to Susie—“Evan’s Mom is here—what a suuuuurprise!”

This was months ago, and I’m still replaying it in my head.  If I have a sensitive spot, she found it and jumped up and down on it with both feet. 

In general I feel like I’ve experienced less sexism than I expected in life.  But the sexism that has caught me by surprise is the sexism of a certain class of wealthy stay-at-home moms.

I wish I had more time to volunteer at our school.  Our elementary school is excellent, and a great part of the reason why is because of superb parent involvement, primarily by stay-at-home moms.  They invest tremendous amounts of time, and my children benefit from their efforts.  I appreciate their efforts, and feel guilty that I can’t contribute more. 

I have made different life choices, and I accept the tradeoffs involved.  My home is not as impeccably furnished or as neat.  My children are not as neatly dressed.  But I read to them more, and they’ve been taken to more museums than probably anyone you’ve met.  My time is tight, so I prioritize.

Notice that the sarcastic mom did not comment on the fact that my husband is rarely at school.  Nor are any of the fathers in our class.  They’re not expected to be.  They’ve got jobs, after all.  Well, I also have a job.  But somehow I’m expected to do everything the stay-at-home moms do and everything working dads do?  Really?  It’s not possible. Her sexism is so blatant and yet I’m sure she’s entirely unaware of it.

OK, I can tolerate a frosty attitude from a fellow parent—not a big deal.  But where it begins to bother me is that this negatively affects my children.  It turns out that the stay-at-home moms in my son’s class meet sometimes after school in the park—with a bottle of chardonnay on Fridays.  The moms chat, the kids play.  And they get to be friends.  And the moms who are friends arrange playdates for their kids on weekends.  So the children of stay-at-home moms get invited to playdates and birthday parties when the children of working moms get left out.  No one planned it that way, but that’s how it happens.  And the crazy thing is that who the children actually like and play with at recess has little to do with it—it’s all about which moms are friendly. 

To my working mom friends: Don’t let this catch you by surprise.

To my stay-at-home mom friends: Thank you for everything you do for our school!  It is sincerely appreciated.  I respect your choices, and I hope you will make a bit more effort to understand and respect mine.

Are checks and balances functioning as intended?  And what about provisions of the USA Patriot Act like National Security Letters (NSLs) that circumvent checks and balances entirely?

A bit of historical context will help. In the wake of the Watergate scandal, we were left with a quandary: when is it OK to spy on people?  Clearly it’s not OK to spy on other political parties in the US, but what if we suspect someone is actually spying on us for a foreign power?  What if we want to spy on foreign powers? The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) set up rules, and created the FISA court to make decisions about where to draw the line.  FISA sets up checks and balances between branches of government–the judiciary (The FISA Court) oversees what the federal government and law enforcement are doing and helps them figure out what is allowable. The people going after the bad guys are expected to pursue their targets with maximum enthusiasm using every tool at their disposal, and the judiciary sets limits and helps them draw the line in an appropriate place. As far as I can tell, FISA did a nice job of balancing privacy and security.

In the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the USA Patriot Act eroded that balance.  It is an enormous document that legislators literally could not have read before approving.  The time between introduction of the bill and congressional approval was too short for anyone to have even read it through once. Two areas are particularly concerning to me: National Security Letters and Section 215.

When the government issues a National Security Letter (NSL), it can obtain access to all of a person’s records of any kind, even if that person is not suspected of a crime.  The information merely needs to be declared relevant to an ongoing investigation of terrorism or espionage.  Anyone receiving a request for documents under this provision is barred from telling anyone–a “gag order.”  There is no court review.  In March 2013, in a case brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, NSLs were declared unconstitutional and the government was barred from enforcing gag orders on them.  This is just latest in a long series of legal battles, and an appeal of this decision is expected.

Section 215 of the Patriot Act modifies FISA to allow the FBI to request “books, records, papers, documents, and other items.”  Like NSLs, the materials merely need to be deemed relevant to an investigation–the targets need not be suspected of any crime.  Fortunately, section 215 requests do undergo judicial review. However, such requests are made ex parte–the person themselves is never notified of the request and has no opportunity to oppose it.  In 2003, the ACLU brought suit against the government on behalf of a Mosque in Michigan that believes its membership records had been obtained by these means.  Slate believes that section 215 has been used to authorize PRISM.

I give a lecture each year in my class CS4001 Computer, Society, and Professionalism on FISA and The USA Patriot Act.  And it’s a labor of love–I spend more time updating my notes for that class each year than for any other half a dozen classes combined.  This stuff is insanely complicated and confusing.  (And if there are experts who see any errors in what I’ve written, corrections are greatly appreciated!)  There are provisions of these acts that are important to our safety and security.  For example, wiretaps used to be restricted to a particular (land) phone line in a particular jurisdiction.  In the age of cheap disposable cell phones, The Patriot Act allows law enforcement to get a warrant to tap the phone of a particular individual, whatever phone they are using and wherever they are located.  That’s just common sense.  The USA Patriot Act is a complicated combination of essential tools to help law enforcement in their important job, and egregious erosions of our liberty.  In a 90-minute lecture I feel like I barely scratch the surface of the topic. Although I have been able to glean a bit by reading original legislation and court documents online, much of what I have able to figure out is thanks to documents posted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).  They are both bringing lawsuits on the public’s behalf, and educating citizens about the issues.

If you care about these issues, please support EFF and the ACLU.  The defense of our liberty is supposed to be done by checks and balances between branches of government.  But since those checks are sometimes lacking, our nonprofit watchdog organizations have a key role to play.

Notice that the number one search on the website is something they have no answer for! The “top searches” list must be generated automatically. (A search for “nitrites” sends you to their FAQ, with an article from The American Meat Institute saying the preservatives are safe.) One risk of user-generated content is that your users may highlight exactly the thing you don’t want to talk about!

Mom, did Uncle Oscar die?

In February 2008, I called my mother to inquire about the health of my great uncle Oscar Brodney, because Wikipedia told me he had passed away. Uncle Oscar was a Hollywood screenwriter. He wrote the screenplay for The Glenn Miller Story (for which he was nominated for an academy award), Abbott and Costello’s Mexican Hayride, Harvey, and many more.  In June 2007, I updated his Wikipedia page to say “Brodney still lives in Hollywood, California and celebrated his 100th birthday in February 2007.”  Actually, he was in Beverly Hills, California–as someone else quickly corrected. 

Editing Oscar’s page put it on my watchlist.  Wikipedia editors have a list of pages they’re interested in, so they can check changes.  Anything you edit is automatically added to your watchlist.  That’s one way quality is maintained.  On February 16^th, 2008, I checked my watchlist and saw that someone had updated Oscar’s page.  It now said:

Brodney passed quietly in his sleep on February 12, 2008 in Playa del Rey, CA.

He did?  That was news to me.  So I called my mother. 

Me: Mom, did Uncle Oscar die?

Mom: I don’t think so, but let me call Betty.

My great aunt Betty is Oscar’s youngest sister.  Mom called Betty and asked if Oscar had died.  Betty said, “I don’t think so… But let me check my email.”  Betty checked her email, and sure enough there was a message waiting for her from a few days earlier saying her brother had passed away.  Oscar’s closest living relative learned of his death via my Wikipedia watchlist.

The edit to Oscar’s page was made the day after his death by an anonymous user –someone who didn’t even log in. It wasn’t made by a family member, as far as I’ve been able to determine.  The IP address of the anonymous user was apparently from Las Vegas, Nevada. Oscar lived in a nursing home for the last few months of his life, and the specific detail about the manner and place of death makes me wonder if the anonymous editor was someone who worked at the home or a friend of someone who worked there.  We’ll probably never know. (If you made that edit, please email me!  I’d love to know who you are and how you knew.)

However, the story doesn’t stop there.  No one placed an obituary for Oscar in Variety or other newspapers.  He was almost 101 years old, and most people who would have cared were long gone.  So a careful Wikipedia user undid the edit.  In accordance with Wikipedia’s policy on Biographies of Living Persons, declaring someone dead is serious business.  You can’t do it without proof.  I replied back on the article’s talk page (each Wikipedia article has a place for editors to discuss it) saying

I have confirmed that the information about Brodney’s death is correct from a primary source (his sister). Can we redo this?

Another editor replied back,

Per WP:OR and WP:BLP, we need an independent, third party reliable source to report a death. Is there a news article anywhere?

I couldn’t find a newspaper ad or public notice anywhere, so for months Oscar stayed undead–not dead on Wikipedia I mean.  Until in July a kind Wikipedia editor noticed that his name had appeared in the social security administration death records, and Oscar was finally allowed to officially rest in peace.

Two things strike me as remarkable about this story.  The first is the speed and power of Wikipedia’s social network.  My network of strong ties failed to get this news to me in a timely fashion. Wikipedia’s global network routed around that blockage through an anonymous person.

Second, Wikipedia’s commitment to verification is remarkable for its tenacity, in certain areas.  As I’ve written before, a high profile page (like that of a current world leader) is scrutinized in every detail. In less popular pages (like the page for Oscar Brodney), errors can creep in.  But even on a low profile page, editors are incredibly careful about certain things. And deaths are one of those things.  You don’t go around declaring people dead without proof.  And the editor who undid the change to Oscar’s page was right–how do we really know he has passed away?  We need proof.  And luckily another Wikipedia editor knew how to find acceptable proof when I did not. 

A “socio-technical system” is a combination of people, artifacts (in this case the MediaWiki software that Wikipedia runs on), and social practices.  And in this example, all those parts worked together in a remarkable way.  Oscar would have approved.

Gargoyles are no fun to talk to. They never finish a sentence. They are adrift in a laser-drawn world, scanning retinas in all directions, doing background checks on everyone within a thousand yards, seeing everything in visual light, infrared, millimeter. wave radar, and ultrasound all at once. You think they’re talking to you, but they’re actually poring over the credit record of some stranger on the other side of the room, or identifying the make and model of airplanes flying overhead.

Since the announcement of Google Glass (for which Thad was lead technical advisor), a productive public conversation about its privacy implications has begun.  I’m glad we’re all talking about the privacy factor, but I don’t think enough attention has yet been paid to the distraction factor.  Sherry Turkle wrote in her book Alone Together that our devices are increasingly preventing us from being fully present. I recently quit playing the game Words with Friends because it was always drawing my attention.  I would start playing at an entirely appropriate moment, but then that moment would pass and part of my attention would still be on the game. I have a tendency to be absorbed by games, and having a really good one in my pocket wasn’t working for me.  So I made a conscious decision to quit, and have been in a more comfortable daily rhythm since.

Since some time around the invention of stone tools, humans have lived immersed in socio-technical systems: richly connected combinations of people, tools, and social practices.  Each of these affects the others.  Who we are as individuals and who we are as a culture are intertwined with what tools we possess and how we choose to use them.  There are things about future wearable computers that I am looking forward to.  I said hi to a Georgia Tech student on my way into a restaurant with my family last night.  If my glasses could have reminded me of her name, I would have been grateful.  And I hope this support would help me truly learn her name, though I fear some people would use such a support to not bother to try. And the privacy implications of course are headache inducing.  When we have face recognition working, next could I please have bird recognition?  (Was that really a piping plover or just a sandpiper?)  How about rock recognition?  (Is that schist or gneiss?)  It’s a naturalist’s dream.  There will be a myriad new applications of wearable computing and augmented reality, some trivial and some profound, that we can’t yet begin to imagine.

But you know what I’m not looking forward to?  Hey–are you listening to me or are you reading your email?  I’ve spent 20 years with friends with wearables, and some of them, sometimes, do indeed live up to Stephenson’s “gargoyle” moniker.  Are we about to be even more alone together?

Some wearables advocates argue the opposite–that a wearable stops you from having to look down at your phone, and helps keep (at least part of) your attention where you are.  Only time will tell if they are right.  If wearables ever play Words With Friends… look out.

It’s not just the device, but how people use it.  And a key challenge is that we are all increasingly connected.  Teenagers say they text so many times a day because their friends are texting them.  It’d be rude not to reply, wouldn’t it?  It can become a challenge for any one individual to opt out and make a different choice.  In the 1990s, the director of the MIT Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte, told faculty that he expected them to read email every day–even while on vacation.  One faculty member responded to this by planning a vacation to a remote island where there was literally no possibility of Internet access.  One wonders if such islands even exist any more.  It can be a challenge for any one of us to change the pattern, because we are all interwoven in it.

What is mindful use of technology? To address that question, we have to ask, what is the good life–for us as individuals?  As families?  As communities? The issues expand uncontrollably.  We can in the end merely say: Mindfulness is important.  We must make self-reflective choices and not get sucked into dysfunctional patterns by our technologies.  And it’s a learning process.  We all learn together to put a new technology in its proper place in our lives.  My children don’t watch as much television as I did as a child—they don’t want to.  Sometimes it takes a generation to adjust. And then a newer technology comes along and we all go back to square one.

For the present, I have a call to action: Can we all agree not to silently tolerate gargoyles?  If you’re talking to someone with a Google Glass and they seem to be not paying attention to the conversation, do something goofy and see if they notice.  Make a silly face or stick a finger in your nose.  When they ask, “What are you doing?” You can grin and reply, “I was wondering what you were doing…..”

The game SimLife came out in 1992, and I used to enjoy playing it on my computer at The Media Lab in the evenings.  I’d set up a world, and let it run all night.  One evening before I went home, I added a new species that I called a “mountain beast.”  I made the mountain beast the best possible at everything.  Does it eat plants?  Sure. Eat meat? Sure.  Live in deserts?  Sure.  Live in mountains? Of course!  Eats everything, lives everywhere.  I added a few mountain beasts and went home.  And in the morning… I had nothing but mountain beasts.  Every other species had gone extinct!

It was a memorable experience.  Ecosystems are complex and hard to understand, but I felt like my mountain beast experience taught me something.  So tip of the hat to the memory of a good simulation, and to my mountain beast. 

I’ve been going to a lot of talks like that lately–they seem to be breeding.  People are playing with big data and coming up with incredibly clever results–with no evident broader implications.  Lately, Twitter data seems to be a chief culprit.  It’s so easy to get (or it was), and look at all the cool analysis you can do on it!  I’m betting most of the those papers will rot uncited. I hope when our enthusiasm for this new big data toy wears off, people will invest their energies in results that matter.  Of course, defining “matter” is the challenge.

What is the distinction between basic research and playing with data as a clever puzzle game?  How do you even tell the difference?  That’s the hard part. Personally, I’d like to see more people doing user-centered design: starting with problem statements that are significant for some group of people for some reason.  

Mobile: I need to explicitly ask students, does your site have a mobile app?  What is the relationship between mobile and desktop use?  Is all the functionality of desktop available on mobile?  Are mobile and desktop user behavior different?  This wasn’t even a blip on the radar in 1998 or even 2008, but today it’s essential to understanding many sites.

New Project Option: a Cross-Site Phenomenon.  In some ways it’s increasingly an anachronism to ask students to study a single site.  This became particularly clear in a great project my students did this year on “bronies,” grown men who are fans of the television show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.  My students focused their study on the site Equestria Daily, but it became increasingly apparent in their work that there are a set of sites that form a kind of ecosystem, with activity on any one of them affecting the others.  It’s impossible to understand Equestria Daily without understanding the adult site Equestria After Dark.  And did you know that bronydom’s early history is tied to 4chan, and led to the creation of PonyChan?  Amazing stuff.  So next year, students will optionally be allowed to pick a focus site plus surrounding online ecosystem to study (with a warning that this is harder!)

Thanks to my awesome students for a great semester. Looking forward to next year!

“Then we learned why cyberspace wasn’t going to stop wars, wasn’t going to bring peace and understanding throughout the world, tra-la-la-la.” — Stacy Horn, Cyberville, 1998

Writing in 1998, Horn was retelling the story of a racist woman on Horn’s ECHO BBS who hated Korean people. After discovering her online buddy was actually Korean, she didn’t change her racist views at all.  For Horn, it was a coming of age moment.  And today we have another coming of age moment: crowdsourcing will not necessarily save the world either, and some jobs are best left to professionals.  In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, netizens on a special subreddit and from the group anonymous banded together to try to identify the bombers.  And ended up finding and harassing the wrong people.

This morning, participants on the find Boston bombers subreddit wrote:

 All this subreddit has done is make a bad situation worse.

This is why you leave important work to professionals, not kids with an internet connection and too much time on their hands.

The baseless accusations and harassment this subreddit enables is disgusting. When it actually appeared that one of the guesses here was right, there was a smug celebration over just how right you were, like you bet on the right racehorse. You aren’t helping and you should probably close this subreddit if you have any shame. I sure hope demonizing that family’s missing son was worth the couple hours where you felt like Encyclopedia Brown.

There will still be miraculous things the crowd accomplishes. Things we can not yet dream of. Things that will make you grin from ear to ear.  But not everything can be crowdsourced, and we need to temper our enthusiasm.  In the age of the amateur, we also need to honor professionalism and hone our sense of when professionals are needed.