Conservative or liberal? : personalized differential privacy

Differential privacy is widely accepted as a powerful framework for providing strong, formal privacy guarantees for aggregate data analysis. A limitation of the model is that the same level of privacy protection is afforded for all individuals. However, it is common that the data subjects have quite different expectations regarding the acceptable level of privacy for their data. Consequently, differential privacy may lead to insufficient privacy protection for some users, while over-protecting others. We argue that by accepting that not all users require the same level of privacy, a higher level of utility can often be attained by not providing excess privacy to those who do not want it. We propose a new privacy definition called personalized differential privacy (PDP), a generalization of differential privacy in which users specify a personal privacy requirement for their data. We then introduce several novel mechanisms for achieving PDP. Our primary mechanism is a general one that automatically converts any existing differentially private algorithm into one that satisfies PDP. We also present a more direct approach for achieving PDP, inspired by the well-known exponential mechanism. We demonstrate our framework through extensive experiments on real and synthetic data

A Next, Big Step for the West (Part II): Model Water-Climate Enabling Legislation with Commentary

This model legislation is the culmination of an earlier work, A Next, Big Step for the West: Using Model Legislation to Create a Water- Climate Element in Local Comprehensive Plans.\u27 That articleargues that local governments, as the primary regulators of land use and population planning, are integral to our climate and drought response in the West. That article then calls for a new, freestanding waterclimate element in local government comprehensive plans that integrates the often disparate realms of land use, water use, and climate planning and better prepares communities for managing water in wise, resilient, and collaborative ways. 2 This approach offers the possibility of uniform water-climate planning across local jurisdictions and watersheds and pushes us to think beyond the short-term, assured supply paradigm that limits our current thinking.3 This approach also provides a tangible response to the emerging consensus that local-level initiatives may be the most essential path to confronting the climate challenges of our time.4 Inspired by the model land use enabling legislation that swept our nation in the 1920s, the earlier article generally outlines the content for new model enabling legislation that the state legislatures of today can adopt.5 What follows below is the specific language of that model legislation, patterned after its 1920s predecessors, with annotations and supporting commentary.

"Tiny Flashing Thumbs: How to Bot Your Way to Fake News Success"

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: An important role of the historian is to humanize the past, while confronting the audience with the simultaneous alienness of it. What Mark Sample calls “bots of conviction” can enable that confrontation (“Protest”). This artifact shows how to make a Twitter bot (an account that tweets automatically) powered by a variety of different generators. The potential power of a Twitter bot for history is demonstrated by Caleb McDaniel’s “Every Three Minutes” bot, which tweets every three minutes with the historical details of a slave sale in the United States. The associated paradata post by McDaniel, “Slave Sales on Twitter,” discusses the underlying research and rationale for this particular bot. Students could use Zach Whalen’s templates to tweet a historical event in real time, to adopt the persona of a historical personage, or to follow McDaniel’s example to uncover similar histories

A Next, Big Step for the West (Part II): Model Water-Climate Enabling Legislation with Commentary

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Cataclysmic Variables in the First Year of the Zwicky Transient Facility

Using selection criteria based on amplitude, time, and color, we have identified 329 objects as known or candidate cataclysmic variables (CVs) during the first year of testing and operation of the Zwicky Transient Facility. Of these, 90 are previously confirmed CVs, 218 are strong candidates based on the shape and color of their light curves obtained during 3–562 days of observation, and the remaining 21 are possible CVs but with too few data points to be listed as good candidates. Almost half of the strong candidates are within 10 deg of the galactic plane, in contrast to most other large surveys that have avoided crowded fields. The available Gaia parallaxes are consistent with sampling the low mass transfer CVs, as predicted by population models. Our follow-up spectra have confirmed Balmer/helium emission lines in 27 objects, with four showing high-excitation He ii emission, including candidates for an AM CVn, a polar, and an intermediate polar. Our results demonstrate that a complete survey of the Galactic plane is needed to accomplish an accurate determination of the number of CVs existing in the Milky Way

The Zwicky Transient Facility Alert Distribution System

The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) survey generates real-time alerts for optical transients, variables, and moving objects discovered in its wide-field survey. We describe the ZTF alert stream distribution and processing (filtering) system. The system uses existing open-source technologies developed in industry: Kafka, a real-time streaming platform, and Avro, a binary serialization format. The technologies used in this system provide a number of advantages for the ZTF use case, including (1) built-in replication, scalability, and stream rewind for the distribution mechanism; (2) structured messages with strictly enforced schemas and dynamic typing for fast parsing; and (3) a Python-based stream processing interface that is similar to batch for a familiar and user-friendly plug-in filter system, all in a modular, primarily containerized system. The production deployment has successfully supported streaming up to 1.2 million alerts or roughly 70 GB of data per night, with each alert available to a consumer within about 10 s of alert candidate production. Data transfer rates of about 80,000 alerts/minute have been observed. In this paper, we discuss this alert distribution and processing system, the design motivations for the technology choices for the framework, performance in production, and how this system may be generally suitable for other alert stream use cases, including the upcoming Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.Comment: Published in PASP Focus Issue on the Zwicky Transient Facility (doi: 10.1088/1538-3873/aae904). 9 Pages, 2 Figure

Single-Family Residential Development in DeKalb County 1945-1970

The Case studies class of spring of 2010 compiled this resource material. This study focused on suburban residential developments in DeKalb County, Georgia between the end of World War II and 1970 in order to better understand the transformation of the area after the Second World War. The resource includes data on national residential trends, architectural and landscape designs, as well as information on metropolitan Atlanta. The resource was created to support the effort to preserve local neighborhoods, buildings, and landmarks by providing the historic context in which they were created.https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/history_heritagepreservation/1038/thumbnail.jp

Cataclysmic Variables in the First Year of the Zwicky Transient Facility

Using selection criteria based on amplitude, time, and color, we have identified 329 objects as known or candidate cataclysmic variables (CVs) during the first year of testing and operation of the Zwicky Transient Facility. Of these, 90 are previously confirmed CVs, 218 are strong candidates based on the shape and color of their light curves obtained during 3–562 days of observation, and the remaining 21 are possible CVs but with too few data points to be listed as good candidates. Almost half of the strong candidates are within 10 deg of the galactic plane, in contrast to most other large surveys that have avoided crowded fields. The available Gaia parallaxes are consistent with sampling the low mass transfer CVs, as predicted by population models. Our follow-up spectra have confirmed Balmer/helium emission lines in 27 objects, with four showing high-excitation He ii emission, including candidates for an AM CVn, a polar, and an intermediate polar. Our results demonstrate that a complete survey of the Galactic plane is needed to accomplish an accurate determination of the number of CVs existing in the Milky Way