Policy Aware Social Miner

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2013.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 67-69).The Policy Aware Social Miner (PASM) project focuses on creating awareness of how seemingly harmless social data might reveal sensitive information about a person, which could be potentially abused. It seeks to define good practices around social data mining. PASM allows people to create policies governing the use of their personal information on social networks. Using linked data, PASM semantically enhances the usage restrictions to ensure that potentially sensitive information is identified and appropriate policies are enforced. PASM also enables people to provide refutations for other information about them that is found on the Web. PASM encourages consumers of social information on the Web to use the mined data appropriately by enforcing data policies before returning the search results. PASM provides a solution to the following issue of privacy in social data mining - although people know that searches for data about them are possible, they have no way to either control the data that is put on the Web by others or indicate how they would like to restrict use of their own data. In a user study conducted to measure the performance of PASM in identifying sensitive posts as compared to the study participants, PASM obtained an F-Measure of 84% and an accuracy of 80%. Interestingly, PASM demonstrated a higher recall than precision, a property that was valued by the study participants as all but one participant indicated that they would prefer receiving false positives rather than false negatives.by Sharon Myrtle Paradesi.S.M

An Ethnography of Entanglements: Mercury’s Presence and Absence in Artisanal and Small-scale Gold-mining in Antioquia, Colombia

This paper describes a ‘follow the thing’ methodology as applied to an ethnography of entanglements. This methodology allowed for a materially and politically nuanced understanding of Antioquia, Colombia’s response to mercury pollution. This pollution primarily originates from the Artisanal and Small-Scale Gold Mining (ASGM) industry where mercury is employed in the gold extraction process. In following the mercury, the authors experiment with an ethnography of entanglements. The paper discusses how they address the current lacunae in mining ethnographies by focussing on mining as ‘practice’, going past the provision of technical descriptions of mining and ethnographic descriptions of miners to an ethnography of mining. This ethnographic approach considers the politics of materiality and addresses a lack of attention to the impacts of the presence and absence of materials on social life. Various mining practices in Antioquia illuminate how entanglements between miners and mercury have been co-constitutive of particular modes of ASGM. The paper will also provide examples of ‘negative mercury entanglements’ where efforts have been made to extricate mercury from mining practices. Rather than creating a vacuum, these mercury absences have been generative of new contested symbolic and material arrangements including entrepreneurial and ‘responsible’ mining, debates over miners’ rights, and the creation of new political relationships between ASGM and large-scale mining companies.fals

SCALE, ECOLOGY AND COMPLEX SYSTEMS

The relationship between political jurisdictions and ecologically-sensible geographic areas is a central concern of political ecologists; few are the cities, provinces, states or countries which map closely onto watersheds, airsheds, aquifers, ranges of migratory birds or top predators, or any other terrestrial space which makes (more-than-human) ecological sense. As the need becomes more pressing to devise policies which help to reduce human impact on ecological systems, the inefficiencies and dysfunctionalities which result from this disjuncture between political spaces and ecological spaces are becoming more readily apparent. It is extremely difficult to devise and implement policies to protect Monarch butterflies, the ozone layer, North Atlantic groundfish stocks, or even the Oglalla aquifer, due in large part to the many political jurisdictions which must commit to policies and their enforcement. Ecological issues which are of central concern for some jurisdictions matter only peripherally or are swamped by other economic or foreign-policy considerations for other jurisdictions, leading to the familiar gridlock in environmental policy -- which of course exists not just at the international level, but also at regional and local scales (Press, 1994:84-107; Bhaskar and Glyn, 1995; Borgese, 1995:151-166; Schreurs and Economy, 1997; Adam, 1998:104-125; Altvater, 1998:34-39; O’Connor, 1994; Eckersley, 1998; Harvey, 1996:203-204; Rifkin, 1991:288-289). Even in the unlikely event that political (and other) ecologists were to reach a consensus on how to create a global, nested series of political jurisdictions and boundaries which respected the earth’s most important ecological features and systems, it would not be at all easy to redraw political boundaries in this way, especially if democratic principles were to be employed (Low, 1997). Moreover, much of the literature on globalization stresses the declining importance of political jurisdictions and policy-making anyway, in the face of increasing global corporate power (Korten, 1995; Sachs, 1993). So what is the point of discussing the relationship between political scales and ecological scales? In this paper, I will try to argue that the importance of political scale (both as a concept and in its grounded, appropriate ecological application) extends far beyond policy-making and supersedes corporate erosion. Political scale provides a primary means for humans to “make sense of” the world and come to terms with our place in it, as individuals and as a species.Its value is educational, epistemological, ontological, and cultural; in fact, political scale can be seen as both a motivator and agenda for action.Complex systems theory offers a number of insights about scale questions. After discussing some of these theoretical issues, I will return at the end of the paper to the role of political scale in a practical sense for activists

Identifying and managing asbestiform minerals in geological collections

Asbestos is widely recognised as a serious hazard, and its industrial use is now banned within the UK, and EU, and strict regulations govern the use of older manufactured materials which may contain asbestos. However, asbestos is also a natural geological material, and may occur in museum collections as minerals or constituents of rock specimens. In the UK the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012 (CAR 2012) provides the legal framework for the safe identification, use and disposal of asbestos. However, these regulations, and other EU regulations, provide no specific guidance on dealing with potentially asbestos-containing natural materials. CAR 2012 specifies just six asbestos minerals although a number of other minerals in museum collections are known to have asbestiform structures and be hazard-ous, including other amphiboles, and the zeolite erionite. Despite the lack of specific guid-ance, museums must comply with CAR 2012, and this paper outlines the professional ad-vice, training and procedures which may be needed for this. It provides guidance on identifi-cation of potential asbestos-bearing specimens and on procedures to document them and store them for future use, or to prepare them for professional disposal. It also makes sug-gestions how visitors, employees and others in a museum can be protected from asbestos as incoming donations and enquiries, managed in the event of an emergency, and safely included in displays

Spartan Daily, May 23, 1968

Volume 55, Issue 131https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/5130/thumbnail.jp

Spartan Daily, May 8, 1968

Volume 55, Issue 120https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/5119/thumbnail.jp

Spartan Daily, October 8, 1968

Volume 56, Issue 10https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/5157/thumbnail.jp