Category: Other Topics
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Princeton likely to rescind grade deflation policy
A Princeton faculty committee recommended yesterday that the university rescind its ten-year-old grading guideline that advises faculty to assign grades in the A range to at most 35% of students. The committee issued a report explaining its rationale. The recommendation will probably be accepted and implemented. It’s a good report, and I agree with its…
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Criminal Copyright Sanctions as a U.S. Export
The copyright industries’ mantra that “digital is different” has driven an aggressive, global expansion in criminal sanctions for copyright infringement over the last two decades. Historically speaking, criminal penalties for copyright infringement under U.S. law date from the turn of the 20th century, which means that for over a hundred years (from 1790 to 1897),…
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Are We Rushing to Judgment Against the Hidden Power of Algorithms?
Several recent news stories have highlighted the ways that online social platforms can subtly shape our lives. First came the news that Facebook has “manipulated” users’ emotions by tweaking the balance of happy and sad posts that it shows to some users. Then, this week, the popular online dating service OKCupid announced that it had…
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Fair Use, Legal Databases, and Access to Litigation Inputs
In copyright-and-fair-use news, a significant case for the legal profession’s access to the inputs of judicial decision-making was decided last week in federal district court in New York. The case was brought against West Publishing Corp. (owner of the Westlaw database) and Reed Elsevier (owner of the LexisNexis database) by two lawyers who alleged that their…
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On the Ethics of A/B Testing
The discussion triggered by Facebook’s mood manipulation experiment has been enlightening and frustrating at the same time. An enlightening aspect is how it has exposed divergent views on a practice called A/B testing, in which a company provides two versions of its service to randomly-chosen groups of users, and then measures how the users react.…
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Facebook's Emotional Manipulation Study: When Ethical Worlds Collide
The research community is buzzing about the ethics of Facebook’s now-famous experiment in which it manipulated the emotional content of users’ news feeds to see how that would affect users’ activity on the site. (The paper, by Adam Kramer of Facebook, Jamie Guillory of UCSF, and Jeffrey Hancock of Cornell, appeared in Proceedings of the…
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Free Law Project Partnering in Stewardship of RECAP
More than five years ago, I spoke at CITP about the US Federal Courts electronic access system called PACER. I noted that despite centuries of precedent stating that the public should have access to the law as openly and freely as possible, the courts were charging unreasonable rates for access to the public record. As…
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Reflecting on Sunshine Week
Last Wednesday evening, I attended the D.C. Open Government Summit: Street View, which took place at the National Press Club in conjunction with Sunshine Week. The Summit was sponsored by the D.C. Open Government Coalition, a non-profit that “seeks to enhance the public’s access to government information and ensure the transparency of government operations of…
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Algorithms can be more accountable than people
At an academic meeting recently, I was surprised to hear some social scientists accept as obviously correct the claim that involving “algorithms” in decision-making, instead of sticking with good old-fashioned human decision-making, necessarily reduces accountability and increases the risk of bias. I tend to believe the opposite, that making processes algorithmic improves our ability to…
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Information Facilitating Participation in Elections Must Be Readily Available – Principle #10 for Fostering Civic Engagement Through Digital Technologies
For the final installment of my series of blog posts outlining ten principles that governments and local communities should consider when evaluating whether they are using digital technology effectively to facilitate civic engagement, I will discuss the issue that goes to the core of democracy in our country – the public having access to information…