Public Policy:
Private Companies Profit from Almost Every Function of America’s Criminal Justice System (infographic)
Today, private companies hold contracts that allow them to profit from all corners of America’s criminal justice system. Consequently, many people charged with crimes are exposed to the profit-seeking of companies every step of the way, from entering the system to being released: Fine collections, jails, bail bonds, court transportation, ankle monitors, DUI schools, psychiatric hospitals, probation, and deportation.
http://www.inthepublicinterest.org/private-companies-profit-from-almost-every/.
Gun Deaths Surpass Motor Vehicle Deaths in 21 States and the District of Columbia
Gun deaths outpaced motor vehicle deaths in 21 states and the District of Columbia in 2014, the most recent year for which data is available, a new analysis from the Violence Policy Center (VPC) finds. This is the fifth edition of the VPC report comparing gun deaths to motor vehicle deaths by state. The number of states where gun deaths exceed motor vehicle deaths has increased from just 10 states in 2009 – the first year of data analyzed by the VPC – to 21 states in 2014.
In 2014, there were more gun deaths than motor vehicle deaths in Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and the District of Columbia, the analysis finds. Nine out of ten American households have access to a motor vehicle while fewer than a third of American households have a gun. Yet nationwide in 2014, there were 33,599 gun deaths compared to 35,647 motor vehicle deaths.
http://www.vpc.org/press/gun-deaths-surpass-motor-vehicle-deaths-in-21-states-and-the-district-of-columbia/.
America’s lead poisoning problem isn’t just in Flint. It’s everywhere
The city of Flint, Michigan, is in the midst of a terrible and rightly shocking lead poisoning crisis. The number of kids testing positive for elevated lead levels in their bloodstreams has doubled in the past few years, after the city switched to a new, cheaper water source.
This is an extreme case, but the problem of lead exposure among children is not a local Flint story. If you look at public health data, you begin to realize two things. The first is that it’s actually really hard to get good data on which kids do and don’t experience lead exposure, and which parents should worry about the issue.
Second: The data that is available shows that lead exposure is a pervasive issue in the United States. In some places outside of Flint, more than half of children test positive for lead poisoning. Of the 3,143 counties in the United States, only 1,573 reported lead poisoning data in 2014. Forty-four percent of those counties reported no confirmed cases of lead in the bloodstream. But there are also the nine counties, largely in the south, where more than 10 percent of kids tested positive.
http://www.vox.com/2016/1/21/10811004/lead-poisoning-cities-us.
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Freedom of Information:
FCC votes to expand transparency for political ads
The FCC voted unanimously today to require cable, satellite and radio stations to upload their political files online. Cable systems with fewer than 1,000 subscribers are exempt from the rule. This is another victory for transparency, following a 2014 rule that required broadcast television stations to upload their records of political ad buys online. These political files contain valuable information about the ads, such as how much they cost and when they ran. Having the political ad files online is important: In some cases they provide the only public information available on groups that are thinly disguised as nonprofit "social welfare" organizations but are, in fact, major campaign players.
Until now, these providers only had to make files physically available to view – if you wanted to know who bought an ad on a radio, satellite or cable station, you would have to go to the provider’s headquarters and ask to see the file on paper. This was also the case for broadcast TV stations until 2014, something Sunlight and our allies fought to achieve. Our tool Political Ad Sleuth allows anyone to search and sort these political files for valuable information – like who is buying ads, which firms are doing it for them, and how much they’re spending on it – and we’re aiming to integrate these new filings into the tool once they become available.
http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2016/01/28/fcc-votes-to-expand-transparency-for-political-ads/.
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Open Data:
Yahoo Releases the Largest-ever Machine Learning Dataset for Researchers
Data is the lifeblood of research in machine learning. However, access to truly large-scale datasets is a privilege that has been traditionally reserved for machine learning researchers and data scientists working at large companies – and out of reach for most academic researchers.
Research scientists at Yahoo Labs have long enjoyed working on large-scale machine learning problems inspired by consumer-facing products. This has enabled us to advance the thinking in areas such as search ranking, computational advertising, information retrieval, and core machine learning. A key aspect of interest to the external research community has been the application of new algorithms and methodologies to production traffic and to large-scale datasets gathered from real products.
Today, we are proud to announce the public release of the largest-ever machine learning dataset to the research community. The dataset stands at a massive ~110B events (13.5TB uncompressed) of anonymized user-news item interaction data, collected by recording the user-news item interactions of about 20M users from February 2015 to May 2015. The Yahoo News Feed dataset is a collection based on a sample of anonymized user interactions on the news feeds of several Yahoo properties, including the Yahoo homepage, Yahoo News, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Movies, and Yahoo Real Estate.
http://yahoolabs.tumblr.com/post/137281912191/yahoo-releases-the-largest-ever-machine-learning.
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Internet Access:
Internet Fragmentation: An Overview
Future of the Internet Initiative White Paper. Internet Fragmentation: An Overview. William J. Drake, Vinton G. Cerf, Wolfgang Kleinwächter. January 2016 – "A thriving and open Internet provides the foundation for the fourth industrial revolution. There has been growing concern that the Internet may be in danger of splintering into a series of bordered cyberspace segments endangering its very nature. World Economic Forum’s Global Challenge on the Future of the Internet supported research highlights a number of fault lines that need to be addressed by bringing all stakeholders together…The purpose of this document is to contribute to the emergence of a common baseline understanding of Internet fragmentation. It maps the landscape of some of the key trends and practices that have been variously described as constituting Internet fragmentation and highlight s 28 examples. A distinction is made between cases of technical, governmental and commercial fragmentation. The technical cases generally can be said to involve fragmentation “of” the Internet , or its underlying physical and logical infrastructures. The govern mental and commercial cases often more directly involve fragmentation "on" the Internet, or the transactions and cyberspace it conveys, although they also can involve the infrastructure as well. With the examples cited placed in these three conjoined baskets, we can get a holistic overview of their nature and scope and more readily engage in the sort of dialogue and cooperation that is needed."
http://www.bespacific.com/internet-fragmentation-an-overview/.
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Privacy Issues:
States Take Steps to Limit School Surveillance of Student Social Media Pages
It’s no secret that schools across the country regularly monitor students’ social media pages. In Florida and California, for example, school districts hire "social media listening" services to monitor students’ pages for threats of violence. The New Jersey department of education has used social media monitoring to flag violations of state Common Core testing rules. A law just went into effect in Illinois that actually gives schools the right to demand login credentials to a student’s social media account.
Federal student privacy laws do not address social media surveillance, and few state laws prevent schools from accessing content students post on social media pages that are not private (such as a public Twitter feed). However, states have proposed laws that prohibit schools from compelling students to allow access to or provide login credentials for their private social media accounts. Alaska, DC, Missouri, Minnesota, and North Carolina recently introduced such bills. These proposed laws are modeled after draft legislation released last week as part of the ACLU’s #TakeCTRL campaign. Additionally, Wyoming introduced a similar bill in October.
https://cdt.org/blog/states-take-steps-to-limit-school-surveillance-of-student-social-media-pages/.
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Intellectual Property:
No One Owns The Law. Everyone Owns The Law
In a democracy, no one owns the law—or to put it another way, everyone owns the law. If a judge claimed that she should be paid a toll every time someone copied a passage from one of her decisions, we would find it absurd. If the lobbyist who wrote sections of your city’s business code announced he could decide, at any time, to sharply limit public access to those sections, he would be run out of town. The right to read the law—and just as important, the right to copy, discuss, and share the law—is essential to the rule of law itself.
But six huge industry associations are trying to undermine that principle, insisting that it doesn’t apply to a growing category of law: laws that began as private standards but are later incorporated into federal and state regulations. Insisting that they own a copyright in these laws, they’ve joined forces to stop a tiny non-profit, Public.Resource.Org, from posting them online. In 2013, three SDOs sued Public Resource, claiming that only they have the right to say who can copy dozens of standards incorporated into law, and at what price. These are some of the most important laws governing our daily lives and the safety of the buildings and products we encounter, yet copies are expensive to obtain. And while the SDOs put some of the standards online, they load up their sites with registration requirements, copy restrictions, and difficult user interfaces in a deliberate attempt to make the sites hard to use.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/01/no-one-owns-law-everyone-owns-law.
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Reading:
11-Year-Old ‘Sick of Reading About White Boys and Dogs’ Launches #1000BlackGirlBooks
Marley Dias is an 11-year-old New Jersey resident who’s spent more time giving back to her community in her brief time on this planet than most of us will spend in a lifetime. She’s received a grant from Disney, traveled to Ghana to help feed orphans, and now—in her latest act of altruism—she’s rounding up children’s books that feature black female leads so that she and her peers have more fictional characters to look up to.
The project, titled #1000BlackGirlBooks, started when Marley complained to her mother about reading too many books about white male protagonists in school. "I told her I was sick of reading about white boys and dogs," Dias said, pointing specifically to "Where the Red Fern Grows" and the"Shiloh" series. "‘What are you going to do about it?’ [my mom] asked. And I told her I was going to start a book drive, and a specific book drive, where black girls are the main characters in the book and not background characters or minor characters."
http://jezebel.com/11-year-old-sick-of-reading-about-white-boys-and-dogs-l-1755021888.
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The Intersect Alert is a newsletter of the Government Relations Committee, San Francisco Bay Region Chapter, Special Libraries Association.