Tweets (in English) about the Israeli election within 50 km of Tel Aviv
Monthly Archives: March 2015
Twitter curation, not so easy…
After the last class I was still unclear what to think about Twitter and social medias as a way to report news. I was not a big Twitter user and this class made me use it more. I was curious to investigate more and see how good Twitter was to report on some heated subjects where having someone on the ground could be either difficult or could bring significant value and truth. After searching a few hashtags, I found it was virtually impossible to take anything for true unless methodically searching for clues on the veracity of the tweet. Also, many tweets were a vessel for articles and pictures and opening each content was sometime a mess. I thought through a few actions that could be useful to curate tweets and get a larger picture and tried to build that into a simple tool.
This is still more of an example on what could be done than something ready for daily usage but I tried to get a sense of what a curated twitter feed could look like. Being able to search for a subject, get translation (non-latin characters are still an issue in my tool), get attached pictures and article right at the same place, get past tweets of the same user, know his location if available and do a reverse query on attached image to know if it was already present on the web.
The work in progress can be found HERE, let me know what you think and I will continue to improve it as the time constraint didn’t allow me for more advanced features and a bug-proof solution yet.
Virtually Legal
A modest proposal by three U.S. Senators to relax federal laws on medical marijuana became a road map to legalizing weed. For a few days at least.
https://storify.com/PotReporter/historic-hype
Mexican journalist fired, had revealed government scandals
During the weekend one of the Mexico’s most popular journalist had been fired. Trying to understand what was happening I made a Storify, it’s abailable here.
How and why The Economist`s “Latino” Chili Peppers cover got Hispanic Americans “fired up”
I reported on the debate over Twitter about The Economist`s latest cover story and the concept used by the publication to talk about Latinos.
The debate ranges between healthy criticism to some opportunism as news organizations that picked up the issue, just focus on the red peppers and not about the story. It is also interesting to see – and this is a opinion based on perception not fact – how the same cover seems to be interpreted differently in the US (very PC) and outside the country (not so PC). Unfortunately I did not have access to geolocated data to review in detail.
I used Fold for this (got a beta access yesterday). The story It`s still not publicly available. But I can show it in class.
Arizona vs. Activists
On October, 11th, 2013, thirteen activists stopped two buses in Tucson, Arizona, carrying detained undocumented immigrants as a protest against the federal immigration enforcement program Operation Streamline. The trial began today in the Pima County Consolidated Justice Court. I made a Storify you can read here.
Joys of the rumor mill: Putin disappears. Netizens have a ball.
I wrote this week’s social media-oriented piece about the mysterious 10-day disappearance of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Given the speed and scale of the virtual outpouring of speculations about his whereabouts, the story seemed particularly fitting for social media curation. I used Martin Hawksey’s TAGS [Twitter Archive Google Spreadsheets] to scrape some Twitter API for statistics, read through various hashtag archives related to the topic during this past week, and to generate the network visualizations.
See the entry on Medium here.
Diversity in Tech sees lively discussion at SXSWi
Representation of women and people of color in Silicon Valley has long been cited as a serious problem, but this issue has in recent years been pushed to the center of conversations about technology and society. At this year’s SXSW Interactive, a four day technology conference in downtown Austin, TX, many sessions focussed on diversity in tech, creating spaces at the conference and online for participants to express both optimism and frustration with issues of opportunity and representation in technology.
The Kapor Center for Social Impact, an organization based in Oakland with a venture capital arm that supports work at the intersection of technology and social change, hosted a panel on Saturday called “Beyond the Diversity Data: Strategies That Work” as well as a $500 start-up pitch contest for “seed and pre-seed stage founders of color”.
Sitting on the panel was Lisa Lee, who leads diversity initiatives at Pandora. She addressed the need for a top-down approach to prioritizing diversity as a company. “It’s one thing to have a diversity recruiter reaching out to a group of people. It’s a totally different thing to have your CEO talk about diversity at a company meeting.”
Lee also pointed out geographical problems in recruiting engineers of color, citing that over 60% of black Americans don’t live in the Western region of the United States. “We now look at distance traveled in hiring.”
Echoing Lee’s argument, Makinde Adeagbo, an engineer and head of recruitment at Pinterest, described Silicon Valley’s diversity problem as more than just a pipeline issue that begins and ends in high school and college classrooms, in a session cheekily titled “How to Not Hire and Retain Employees of Color”, also on Saturday. “The number of black engineers in tech companies is still lower than the number of black engineers graduating from top schools.”
Ana Diaz-Hernandez from the Kapor Center also sat on the panel, calling out start-ups who emphasize “culture fit” as a culture of weak internal communication and “mirror-tocracy”.
Audience members jumped in with the panel on twitter with the hashtag “#moreofus. “Personally, I think “culture-fit” is made more complex than it should be, culture should always be evolving, not stagnant,” said Candace Queen, an Austin-based designer, responding to Hernandez.
Across many panels this weekend and scheduled for the coming days of the conference, attendees and speakers are challenging long-held ideas of what Silicon Valley culture looks like.
“Impressive , conference room full of tech savy latino entrepreneur women #latinoTech” tweeted @julianitaM.
The panel “Diversifying the Tech Workforce: Impact at Scale” generated a particularly lively discussion about the need for a culture change in tech. “We will navigate cultural differences to get code from halfway around the world but not from halfway across the city,” said Hank Williams, founder of Kloudco and Platform and a presenter on the panel. “The set of biases triggered by a white kid showing up in an interview in a hoodie is different than a minority kid.”
Jay Z admits to plagiarizing
Listen to the first 15 seconds of this music sample from 1978 by Swiss jazz and electronic musician Bruno Spoerri:
Now compare it to famous US rapper Jay Z’s song from 2013:
It makes you wonder what took Jay Z so long to admit to plagiarizing. News broke today that Jay Z finally agrees to pay Bruno Spoerri 50% royalties for using his music without permission. In this BBC interview from 2013 (YouTube, 8:03), Jay Z claims to have composed the song with his fellow musicians.
A musician from Los Angeles is happy about the news and calls Jay Z out on Twitter:
Good! Stop stealing other people’s music while calling yourselves GENIUSES. http://t.co/qayM0HmLnL
— Sandra Booker (@sandrabooker) March 13, 2015
The 79-year-old Swiss musician published a letter on Facebook his record company had sent to Jay Z’s management in 2014 saying that stealing music was not cool, particularly not by a rich musician. The letter concludes “shame on you, Jay Z, we expected more respect from you as a colleague to fellow musicians!” Spoerri says he was never in for the money but thinks that Jay Z should have asked. He added that getting his permission to use his 35 year old music sample would have been very cheap.
The story was widely shared and commented on on Twitter:
MMR Vaccine Actually Prevents Autism–By Preventing Congenital Rubella
In 1998, Andrew Wakefield published a study in The Lancet that has since been repeatedly and widely discredited, claiming that the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine might cause autism. No such thing is true. It later came to light that Wakefield had violated ethics in many ways and deliberately lied about the results, and The Lancet retracted the paper in 2010.
Unfortunately, much damage was already done, as thousands of parents had decided not to vaccinate their children. In recent years, measles epidemics have been making a comeback, especially in Europe, where the MMR autism scare was greatest. In 2011 alone, measles outbreaks in Europe sickened 26,000 people and killed nine.
The irony of all this is that the MMR vaccine has been preventing autism all along, by protecting pregnant women from rubella.
The rubella virus
Rubella—the virus putting the R in the MMR vaccine since 1971, when the combined vaccine was licensed—is not generally a fatal or even severe disease. Like the common cold, it is transmitted by airborne droplets. Patients can be contagious for a week before showing symptoms. In children, rubella can cause a fever, sore throat, and a rash of pink spots that spread from the face across the body. In adults, it may also cause headaches, pinkeye, and arthritis.
But the greatest danger is if a pregnant woman contracts rubella, especially during her first trimester. Rubella can cause congenital rubella syndrome (CRS) in the fetus. CRS is characterized by permanent birth defects, including hearing loss, cataracts, heart abnormalities, diabetes, liver damage, and autism.
A study led by Bryn Berger at Emory University estimated that, between 2001 and 2010 in the US alone, rubella vaccination prevented about 1200 cases of autism spectrum disorder. The study was published in the journal BMC Public Health in 2011.
Based on research in Jamaica and mathematical modeling in Norway and Australia, the researchers conservatively estimated that the incidence of CRS in the US without the rubella vaccination would be about 4 per 10,000 births. Taking that number and multiplying it by the number of births in the US from 2001 to 2010, they estimated that 16,600 cases of congenital rubella syndrome were prevented by rubella vaccination in the US just those 10 years.
Berger and his colleagues then used a 1971 study by Stella Chess that looked at 243 preschool children with CRS. This was just after a worldwide rubella epidemic from about 1963 to 1965—the US alone saw 12.5 million cases of rubella, about 11,000 babies who died after contracting the disease, and 20,000 children born with CRS. Chess’s study found that 7.4% of the 243 children with CRS had either full or partial autism.
If the rubella vaccine prevented 16,600 cases of CRS, and roughly 7.4% of those would have had autism, then the vaccine prevented autism in about 1,200 US children over ten years.
The authors of the study point out that by using Chess’s numbers for the percentage of CRS children who have autism, they are actually underestimating the number of autism cases being prevented, because the diagnostic criteria for autism have widened since 1971.
Rubella was declared eliminated in the US in 2004, and in the Americas in 2009, thanks to the rubella vaccine, first developed in 1969 by Maurice Hilleman and later improved into the form we use today by Stanley Plotkin.
But rubella has not yet been eliminated completely. Worldwide, about 100,000 babies are born with CRS each year. Even in the US and other places where rubella has been eliminated, people from areas where rubella still occurs can travel or immigrate here, bringing the virus with them. So women who are thinking of becoming pregnant are advised to get a rubella vaccination four weeks before pregnancy if they haven’t already been vaccinated or developed immunity. Once a woman is pregnant, the rubella vaccination is not recommended until after she gives birth.
Clearly not everyone who becomes pregnant has four weeks of advance warning to get a rubella vaccination. So what happens when all the kids who haven’t gotten the MMR vaccine grow up and begin getting pregnant?