Petey

Recent blog posts by Petey

My Friend Martin

Submitted by Petey on April 18, 2013 - 12:03pm

Please donate to the Richard Family Fund.

Martin Richard died Monday, killed by bombs hidden at the Boston Marathon. He was 8. He was my friend.

 

 

Many people have come to know Martin through this picture, shared by a teacher of his at Neighborhood House Charter School in Dorchester where he was a student. They’ve come to know his poignant poster which pleads for peace. They’ve come to know his toothy, goofy grin. He was too young for braces. He was too young to die.

I first met Martin when he was a toddler. We'd not been there five minutes before his older brother bonked him on the head with a basketball. Not maliciously, but curiously, as if to see what would happen. As the eldest of three brothers, I understood, since I also saw younger siblings as interesting experiments. Behold, science in action! Martin blinked, screwed up his face as if to cry, hesitated, and laughed instead. Hypothesis validated: Martin was awesome.

Boston

Submitted by Petey on April 15, 2013 - 6:32pm

trigger warning for intense imagery

Here's what we know:

At 2:50 PM two explosions occurred along on Boylston Street near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Police later detonated a third device further down the street.

Beyond the presence of As of 6 PM, two people are dead, and nearly 90 injured, according to the Boston Globe. At Civic, we have been following along through both broadcast and social media, including the Globe's liveblog and Completure's News Scanner.

The Fault, Dear Reddit, Is Not In Our Bots, But In Ourselves: The Case of LibertyBot

Submitted by Petey on March 22, 2013 - 12:15am

During the 2012 election, The ~2000 members of an anti-Ron Paul subreddit discovered that anything they posted, anywhere on reddit, was being rapidly, repeatedly downvoted. They created a diagnostic subreddit and began posting otherwise meaningless text to verify this otherwise odd behavior.

 

 

 

Another redditor posted a “Java program for reddit liberty lovers” in a Libertarian subreddit. According to its alleged creator, the program it allowed Ron Paul supporters to enter in their login information and voluntarily enroll their account in a downvoting botnet. The botnet would automatically follow members of the anti-Ron Paul subreddit and downvote them.

Google NegativeSEO: Case Study in User-Generated Censorship

Submitted by Petey on March 20, 2013 - 6:42pm

The origin myth is as familiar as that of any dominant empire. Romulus and Remus Larry Page and Sergey Brin met as graduate students at Stanford. Page, casting about for a dissertation topic, settled on the Web as a graph of links. He and Brin began building a program called BackRub which would “crawl” the graph, visiting and counting links between pages, and aggregate the weighted counts into a value called PageRank. This value, they claimed, constituted “an objective measure of its citation importance that corresponds well with people's subjective idea of importance.” BackRub became Google, a prototype search engine which, powered by PageRank, incorporated user input into its ranking algorithm.

At first, Page and Brin were not only confident that they’d built a better search engine, but, as they wrote in a paper explaining PageRank, one “virtually immune to manipulation by commercial interests”:

How Do We Make Social Media In Higher Ed More Awesome?

Submitted by Petey on March 4, 2013 - 12:44pm

In a guest post published today on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Head Count” admissions and enrollment blog (for which I myself have written), Jack Baworowsky, VP of enrollment management at Dominican University, warns his colleagues that it “is not a question of if but when will there be a major shift in the way we think about student recruitment.”

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