Survival of the Cryptic

Should we have privacy for the weak and transparency for the powerful? Sarah Myers West reminds us that we've been agonizing over this question since at least the 1990s, when the cypherpunks first started discussing it

Raging Against the Machine: Network Gatekeeping and Collective Action on Social Media Platforms

Social media platforms act as networked gatekeepers—by ranking, channeling, promoting, censoring, and deleting content they hold power to facilitate or hinder information flows. One of the mechanisms they use is content moderation, or the enforcement of which content is allowed or disallowed on the platform. Though content moderation relies on users’ labor to identify content to delete, users have little capacity to influence content policies or enforcement. Despite this, some social media users are turning to collective action campaigns, redirecting information flows by subverting the activities of moderators, raising the visibility of otherwise hidden moderation practices, and organizing constituencies in opposition to content policies. Drawing on the example of the campaign to change Facebook’s nudity policy, this paper examines the strategies and tactics of users turning to collective action, considering which factors are most influential in determining the success or failure of a campaign. It finds that network gatekeeping salience is a good model for assessing which collective action efforts are most likely to be effective in achieving individual user goals. This indicates that the users who are already most able to harness the attention economy of social media platforms are more likely to successfully navigate the content moderation process. The analysis concludes by attending to what users might learn from the dynamics of network gatekeeping as they seek to resist the asymmetrical power relations of platforms

AI Now Institute 2023 Landscape: Confronting Tech Power

This report highlights a set of approaches that, in concert, will collectively enable us to confront tech power. Some of these are bold policy reforms that underscore the need for bright-line rules and structural curbs. Others identify popular policy responses that, because they fail to meaningfully address power discrepancies, should be abandoned. Several aren't in the traditional domain of policy at all, but acknowledge the importance of nonregulatory interventions such as collective action, worker organizing, and the role public policy can play in bolstering these efforts. We intend this report to provide strategic guidance to inform the work ahead of us, taking a bird's eye view of the many levers we can use to shape the future trajectory of AI – and the tech industry behind it – to ensure that it is the public, not industry, that this technology serves

Raging Against the Machine: Network Gatekeeping and Collective Action on Social Media Platforms

Social media platforms act as networked gatekeepers—by ranking, channeling, promoting, censoring, and deleting content they hold power to facilitate or hinder information flows. One of the mechanisms they use is content moderation, or the enforcement of which content is allowed or disallowed on the platform. Though content moderation relies on users’ labor to identify content to delete, users have little capacity to influence content policies or enforcement. Despite this, some social media users are turning to collective action campaigns, redirecting information flows by subverting the activities of moderators, raising the visibility of otherwise hidden moderation practices, and organizing constituencies in opposition to content policies. Drawing on the example of the campaign to change Facebook’s nudity policy, this paper examines the strategies and tactics of users turning to collective action, considering which factors are most influential in determining the success or failure of a campaign. It finds that network gatekeeping salience is a good model for assessing which collective action efforts are most likely to be effective in achieving individual user goals. This indicates that the users who are already most able to harness the attention economy of social media platforms are more likely to successfully navigate the content moderation process. The analysis concludes by attending to what users might learn from the dynamics of network gatekeeping as they seek to resist the asymmetrical power relations of platforms

The after party: Cynical resignation in Adtech's pivot to privacy

Digital advertising and technology companies are resigned to a new privacy imperative. They are bracing for a world where third-party tracking will be restricted by design or by law. Digital resignation typically refers to how companies cultivate a sense of powerlessness about privacy among internet users. Our paper looks through this optic from the other end of the lens: How is the digital advertising industry coping with the increasing salience of privacy? Recent developments have forced companies to implement “privacy-preserving” designs—or at least promise some semblance of privacy. Yet, the industry remains dependent on flows of data and means of identification to enable still-desired targeting, measurement, and optimization. Our paper analyzes this contradiction by looking at systems that aim to replicate existing functionalities while protecting user “privacy.” We call this a form of “cynical resignation” and characterize its key maneuvers as follows: (a) sanitizing surveillance; (b) party-hopping; and (c) sabotage. We argue that this “cynical resignation” to a privacy imperative represents a policy failure. In the absence of decisive interventions into the underlying business models of data capitalism, companies offer techno-solutionism and self-regulations that seem to conform to new laws and norms while reinforcing commitments to data-driven personalization. This may benefit the largest tech companies, since their privileged access to first-party data will make more companies reliant on them, and their computational power will be even more valuable in a world where modeling is used to compensate for the loss of third-party data and traditional methods of personal identification

The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey of SDSS-III

The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) is designed to measure the scale of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) in the clustering of matter over a larger volume than the combined efforts of all previous spectroscopic surveys of large scale structure. BOSS uses 1.5 million luminous galaxies as faint as i=19.9 over 10,000 square degrees to measure BAO to redshifts z<0.7. Observations of neutral hydrogen in the Lyman alpha forest in more than 150,000 quasar spectra (g<22) will constrain BAO over the redshift range 2.15<z<3.5. Early results from BOSS include the first detection of the large-scale three-dimensional clustering of the Lyman alpha forest and a strong detection from the Data Release 9 data set of the BAO in the clustering of massive galaxies at an effective redshift z = 0.57. We project that BOSS will yield measurements of the angular diameter distance D_A to an accuracy of 1.0% at redshifts z=0.3 and z=0.57 and measurements of H(z) to 1.8% and 1.7% at the same redshifts. Forecasts for Lyman alpha forest constraints predict a measurement of an overall dilation factor that scales the highly degenerate D_A(z) and H^{-1}(z) parameters to an accuracy of 1.9% at z~2.5 when the survey is complete. Here, we provide an overview of the selection of spectroscopic targets, planning of observations, and analysis of data and data quality of BOSS.Comment: 49 pages, 16 figures, accepted by A

The Eighth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: First Data from SDSS-III

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) started a new phase in August 2008, with new instrumentation and new surveys focused on Galactic structure and chemical evolution, measurements of the baryon oscillation feature in the clustering of galaxies and the quasar Ly alpha forest, and a radial velocity search for planets around ~8000 stars. This paper describes the first data release of SDSS-III (and the eighth counting from the beginning of the SDSS). The release includes five-band imaging of roughly 5200 deg^2 in the Southern Galactic Cap, bringing the total footprint of the SDSS imaging to 14,555 deg^2, or over a third of the Celestial Sphere. All the imaging data have been reprocessed with an improved sky-subtraction algorithm and a final, self-consistent photometric recalibration and flat-field determination. This release also includes all data from the second phase of the Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Evolution (SEGUE-2), consisting of spectroscopy of approximately 118,000 stars at both high and low Galactic latitudes. All the more than half a million stellar spectra obtained with the SDSS spectrograph have been reprocessed through an improved stellar parameters pipeline, which has better determination of metallicity for high metallicity stars.Comment: Astrophysical Journal Supplements, in press (minor updates from submitted version

The Ninth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: First Spectroscopic Data from the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III) presents the first spectroscopic data from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). This ninth data release (DR9) of the SDSS project includes 535,995 new galaxy spectra (median z=0.52), 102,100 new quasar spectra (median z=2.32), and 90,897 new stellar spectra, along with the data presented in previous data releases. These spectra were obtained with the new BOSS spectrograph and were taken between 2009 December and 2011 July. In addition, the stellar parameters pipeline, which determines radial velocities, surface temperatures, surface gravities, and metallicities of stars, has been updated and refined with improvements in temperature estimates for stars with T_eff<5000 K and in metallicity estimates for stars with [Fe/H]>-0.5. DR9 includes new stellar parameters for all stars presented in DR8, including stars from SDSS-I and II, as well as those observed as part of the SDSS-III Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Exploration-2 (SEGUE-2). The astrometry error introduced in the DR8 imaging catalogs has been corrected in the DR9 data products. The next data release for SDSS-III will be in Summer 2013, which will present the first data from the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE) along with another year of data from BOSS, followed by the final SDSS-III data release in December 2014.Comment: 9 figures; 2 tables. Submitted to ApJS. DR9 is available at http://www.sdss3.org/dr

How Experiences Become Data: The Process of Eliciting Adverse Event, Medical History and Concomitant Medication Reports in Antimalarial and Antiretroviral Interaction Trials.

Accurately characterizing a drug's safety profile is essential. Trial harm and tolerability assessments rely, in part, on participants' reports of medical histories, adverse events (AEs), and concomitant medications. Optimal methods for questioning participants are unclear, but different methods giving different results can undermine meta-analyses. This study compared methods for eliciting such data and explored reasons for dissimilar participant responses. Participants from open-label antimalarial and antiretroviral interaction trials in two distinct sites (South Africa, n = 18 [all HIV positive]; Tanzania, n = 80 [86% HIV positive]) were asked about ill health and treatment use by sequential use of (1) general enquiries without reference to particular conditions, body systems or treatments, (2) checklists of potential health issues and treatments, (3) in-depth interviews. Participants' experiences of illness and treatment and their reporting behaviour were explored qualitatively, as were trial clinicians' experiences with obtaining participant reports. Outcomes were the number and nature of data by questioning method, themes from qualitative analyses and a theoretical interpretation of participants' experiences. There was an overall cumulative increase in the number of reports from general enquiry through checklists to in-depth interview; in South Africa, an additional 12 medical histories, 21 AEs and 27 medications; in Tanzania an additional 260 medical histories, 1 AE and 11 medications. Checklists and interviews facilitated recognition of health issues and treatments, and consideration of what to report. Information was sometimes not reported because participants forgot, it was considered irrelevant or insignificant, or they feared reporting. Some medicine names were not known and answers to questions were considered inferior to blood tests for detecting ill health. South African inpatient volunteers exhibited a "trial citizenship", working to achieve researchers' goals, while Tanzanian outpatients sometimes deferred responsibility for identifying items to report to trial clinicians. Questioning methods and trial contexts influence the detection of adverse events, medical histories and concomitant medications. There should be further methodological work to investigate these influences and find appropriate questioning methods

Common variation near CDKN1A, POLD3 and SHROOM2 influences colorectal cancer risk

We performed a meta-analysis of five genome-wide association studies to identify common variants influencing colorectal cancer (CRC) risk comprising 8,682 cases and 9,649 controls. Replication analysis was performed in case-control sets totaling 21,096 cases and 19,555 controls. We identified three new CRC risk loci at 6p21 (rs1321311, near CDKN1A; P = 1.14 × 10(-10)), 11q13.4 (rs3824999, intronic to POLD3; P = 3.65 × 10(-10)) and Xp22.2 (rs5934683, near SHROOM2; P = 7.30 × 10(-10)) This brings the number of independent loci associated with CRC risk to 20 and provides further insight into the genetic architecture of inherited susceptibility to CRC.Swedish Research Council et al.Manuscrip