Category: Other Topics
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Serious design flaw in ESS ExpressVote touchscreen: “permission to cheat”
Kansas, Delaware, and New Jersey are in the process of purchasing voting machines with a serious design flaw, and they should reconsider while there is still time! Over the past 15 years, almost all the states have moved away from paperless touchscreen voting systems (DREs) to optical-scan paper ballots. They’ve done so because if a…
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Securing the Vote — National Academies report
In this November’s election, could a computer hacker, foreign or domestic, alter votes (in the voting machine) or prevent people from voting (by altering voter registrations)? What should we do to protect ourselves? The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine have released a report, Securing the Vote: Protecting American Democracy about the cybervulnerabilities in U.S. election…
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Why PhD experiences are so variable and what you can do about it
People who do PhDs seem to have either strongly positive or strongly negative experiences — for some, it’s the best time of their lives, while others regret the decision to do a PhD. Few career choices involve such a colossal time commitment, so it’s worth thinking carefully about whether a PhD is right for you,…
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Can Classes on Field Experiments Scale? Lessons from SOC412
Last semester, I taught a Princeton undergrad/grad seminar on the craft, politics, and ethics of behavioral experimentation. The idea was simple: since large-scale human subjects research is now common outside universities, we need to equip students to make sense of that kind of power and think critically about it. In this post, I share lessons for teaching…
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Teaching the Craft, Ethics, and Politics of Field Experiments
How can we manage the politics and ethics of large-scale online behavioral research? When this question came up in April during a forum on Defending Democracy at Princeton, Ed Felten mentioned on stage that I was teaching a Princeton undergrad class on this very topic. No pressure! Ed was right about the need: people with…
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Refining the Concept of a Nutritional Label for Data and Models
By Julia Stoyanovich (Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Drexel University) and Bill Howe (Associate Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington) In August 2016, Julia Stoyanovich and Ellen P. Goodman spoke in this forum about the importance of bringing interpretability to the algorithmic transparency debate. They focused on algorithmic rankers, discussed the harms…
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Ethics Education in Data Science: Classroom Topics and Assignments
[This blog post is a continuation of a recap of a recent workshop on data science ethics education.] The creation of ethics modules that can be inserted into a variety of classes may help ensure that ethics as a subject is not marginalized and enable professors with little experience in philosophy or with fewer resources…
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Ethics Education in Data Science
Data scientists in academia and industry are increasingly recognizing the importance of integrating ethics into data science curricula. Recently, a group of faculty and students gathered at New York University before the annual FAT* conference to discuss the promises and challenges of teaching data science ethics, and to learn from one another’s experiences in the…
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Are voting-machine modems truly divorced from the Internet?
(This article is written jointly with my colleague Kyle Jamieson, who specializes in wireless networks.) [See also: The myth of the hacker-proof voting machine] The ES&S model DS200 optical-scan voting machine has a cell-phone modem that it uses to upload election-night results from the voting machine to the “county central” canvassing computer. We know it’s…
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Why Everyone in Tech Should Visit the American Museum of Tort Law
This Monday, Nikki Bourassa and I organized a van from Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society to visit the American Museum of Tort Law, which I have decided to call the American Museum of Exploding Cars and Toys that Kill You. While at the museum, I came to see another way that research can…