Most dangerous nations for women in 2018: US in top 10

Reuters recently published a news report, Factbox: Which are the world’s 10 most dangerous countries for women?. The results were the subject of a post at Feminist Philosophers blog, where I occasionally visit and even understand a bit, without being a philosopher nor much of a feminist. I reacted with incredulity to the results.

United States is the 3rd most dangerous country for sexual violence?

Sexual violence is defined by the survey as follows:

“This includes rape as a weapon of war; domestic rape; rape by a stranger; the lack of access to justice in rape cases; sexual harassment and coercion into sex as a form of corruption.”

How often was rape used as a weapon of war in the United States in 2018?

Yes, this fact check—based on investigative journalism that was funded, produced, and published by the Thomson Reuters Foundation—reports that women in the US are more at risk of sexual violence than in Syria! The US is considered more dangerous for women than nations where female genital mutilation is common, and untreated obstetric fistulas ruin lives.

Ad hoc text analytics

I found an old sentiment analysis application. It has very unglamorous packaging but a  good algorithm under the hood. I ran the Twitter user id’s of the brightest people I know. well, know of, who are active Twitter users. The assessment of “bright” was subjective by me.  All are acknowledged experts or advanced degree holders. Maybe half speak English as a second language, but are sufficiently articulate that their “essence”, well, intelligence shines through.

Guess what: It worked! I don’t know if anyone cares about this sort of thing, that really sharp successful people score well on this sentiment analysis indicator. That doesn’t necessarily mean it would have any predictive value. And no one seems to care much about this anyway. But what I’m saying is that most of these people only have okay-ish Klout scores e.g. 40’s. But they’re not trying to use Twitter for any particular social media purpose. Well, I don’t know that with certainty.

Twitter Influence System

Twitter influence is subtle and difficult to capture

Twitter influence ranges beyond measuring followers, @ replies and re-tweets. It isn’t trivial to calculate the true reach of an individual’s Twitter updates. Such are the challenges encountered in quantifying influence (perhaps even value) of Twitter users’ activity.

Actual percentage of Twitter content read

This chart shows the percentage of tweets read in relation to the number of people followed. As could be expected, the more people you follow, the smaller the percentage of tweets you actually read.

Both images, Twitter Influence EcoSystem and Percentage of Tweets Read are original work by John V Lane, via Flickr, and reproduced here under Creative Commons License/by-sa/2.0.

CrunchGear and TechCrunch

I found a recent TechCrunch post about FaceBook and “domain squatting” amusing. Initially. Especially charming was this gem of an insert, which was NOT banner advertising, to buy the KillFacebook.com domain.

Facebook Tries To Squash 21 Squatted Domain Names

Facebook is trying to gain ownership over 21 domain names that include the term ‘facebook’, including FacebookSafety.com. The domain names are all currently owned by Domain Asset Holdings… when you visit those URLs, they are all listed for sale – some even feature the reserve prices (FacebookCheats.com is priced at $4,000).

When I scrolled to the end of the article to indicate my approval in the reader feedback section, I was reminded that TechCrunch only accepts comments using the FaceBook social plug-in. They recently switched from Disqus comment service. Then I felt irritated rather than amused.

The gadget-specific associated site CrunchGear has very sensibly returned to Disqus comments. Interesting that they broke ranks. By the way, the link to CrunchGear that I provided does not lead to a canned Wikipedia definition. It goes instead to a lightly amusing story about stress testing iPad glass. For your reading pleasure. I think CrunchGear is quite under-appreciated.

UPDATE: Disqus recently made it even easier to comment and give feedback by offering integration with Google accounts yesterday.

Vestiges of Dutch Colonialism in the New World

Saint Eustatius Harbor circa 1750

Despite my best efforts at over-dramatization, and some inclination toward satire, I could not bring myself to title this post without any regard for accuracy. I did spin some sensationalist gems that I can’t resist sharing. I discarded these candidate titles due to their obvious discrepancy with reality:

• Kingdom of the Netherlands: Autonomy or subjugation for vassal states Bonaire, Saba and Saint Eustatius?
• Landscape of imperialism in the twenty-first century: Historically significant changes in sovereignty in the Netherlands Antilles.

Or most misleading and untruthful of all:

• Turmoil revisits Dutch West Indies half a millennium after rout of Spanish Armada!

Birth of Nations

In fact, the Netherlands Antilles ceased to exist as of October 2010. Curacao and Saint Maarten are now autonomous nations, governing themselves. The three islands Bonaire, Saba, and Saint Eustatius became municipalities in the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Residents now have the same benefits and rights as Dutch citizens.

While browsing the GeoNames site a few days ago, I first learned of the transformation of the Netherlands Antilles.  It motivated today’s post, whose primary topic is privacy considerations for social networking. Location sharing (and associated geodata) is part of the privacy issue.

I was evaluating an alternative micro-blogging platform, identi.ca. It is a status.net project. identi.ca is like that mainstay of micro-blogging, Twitter. The two platforms even have a certain measure of cross-compatibility. In terms of branding, good choices were made: identi.ca is a partner, or possibly a subsidiary, of laconi.ca. laconi.ca is the perfect name for a communication medium restricted to 140 characters or less!

identi.ca is conceptually similar to the highly anticipated Facebook alternative, Diaspora. Both Diaspora and identi.ca are open source projects. For the user, the relevant issue is that both assure a higher level of privacy. The design model for Facebook, and many other social networking applications, is that very little information will be retained on the client side. Most everything goes to a server-side repository. It is irrelevant whether user data resides in the cloud, or the Facebook data center. Neither is under the control of the user.

identi.ca and Diaspora are different in that they do not require users to relinquish all personal data. One way to do this is by running one’s social network on one’s own server, thus avoiding the concerns of information misappropriation, be it intentional or accidental. Running one’s own server does not sound very feasible for most people, and in fact, the shift to client side is probably more subtle e.g. greater reliance on the user’s browser.

Google Buzz provides an example of accidental over-sharing.  In the early days of Google Buzz, the full power of Open Social API was unleashed without forewarning users. This was accidental, and Google didn’t profit from the mishap. Google Buzz was irresponsible for not first offering opt-out to segregate some or all account contacts from participation.  The issue was promptly remedied. Unfortunately, despite the rapid redress and that there was no revenue stream associated with the disclosure of information (unlike the copious chronology charts of Facebook’s information peddling showcased in the Wall Street Journal), Google’s temporary disclosure of information about users to each other had a very negative impact on acceptance, usage and success of Google Buzz.

Identi.ca includes a location identification option using GeoNames data.  Tie-in to the Dutch West Indies follows:

Flag of Curacao

Three new countries came into being after the dissolution of the Netherlands Antilles in October 2010… ISO assigned the code BQ to the three BES islands … Read More via GeoNames

URL Tall Tales

I really enjoyed Bit.ly versus Goo.gl, by Jonah Keegan. It was written in December 2009, about the impact of the new Google short URL service, goo.gl on link relationships throughout the internet.

Bit.ly and Goo.gl: A URL Shorter Story?

Jonah indicated that bit.ly, owned by BetaWorks, was the most commonly used URL short link service. He described how many users were baffled about how to use Goo.gl, myself included! Also, goo.gl was restricted to Google product pages only, and not for broader consumer use. See image* for details, and please click to view with better resolution.

Google shorter URLs

The demand for shortened URL’s has burgeoned. Bit.ly self-describes as The Bitlyverse!

Update: Type is Art to Take With You

Parts of A Character U.S. Postal Stamp

Parts Of A Character stamps by scerha

The Type Is Art interactive site, which I was introduced to by via ProArt on Twitter, has a store on Zazzle. There are some delightful and truly original products here, and they are actually made by Susanne Cernha of Silo Designs, who is associated with the Type Is Art project.

Unlike most of the promotional product pages that link to many blogs and fan websites, this one is not a tired old recycling of the same t-shirts, porcelain mugs and canvas bags with a logo stamped on the front that I see everywhere. Update 17 Aug 2010: There are plenty of t-shirts, porcelain mugs, canvas bags and baseball caps on Zazzle, I just hadn’t found them when I wrote this post. However, that doesn’t extend to the TypeIsArt site.

Parts of a Character is a bona fide U.S. Post Office stamp. Denominations are U.S. First Class (first and second ounce) and U.S. Priority Mail < 1.0lb.  Update 17 Aug 2010: I was incorrect about quantity purchase requirements. They are not huge, but pricing is in fact based on order quantity. Another plus: there are no huge bulk purchase requirements.

I found another data-related site at Zazzle, the pleasant ethnographers from Floating Sheep. I’ll take the liberty of cross-linking to Ellie Asks Why Annex on Blogger, and my post about geo-tagging and Microsoft’s Tag application. It offers a curious opportunity for creating linkages between the physical world and the interwebs.

Monetize Your Followers

As a statistician and mathematical modeling practitioner, I’m not a stranger to the concept of quantifying the value of intangibles.  In the ethical framework in which I studied and worked, such quantification might be applied to a concept such as negative dollar value of ill-will (per person) generated by denied boarding due to passenger aircraft over booking.  Yet I found myself rather unnerved today by TweetUp’s article today, How much is a follower worth?.  According to TweetUp analytics, the answer is $136.80, as of June 2010.

What is so troubling about this? I believe in free enterprise, von Neumann economic utility theory, liquidity, efficient capital markets, Keynesian economics,  freedom of choice for retail consumers, Adam Smith, and evolution.

Nomenclature confusion: Friends, family, followers versus customers?

I suppose I draw a distinction between the categories of “friends and family” versus “customers and clients”. I want to look out for the best interests of the first category. However, I’m willing to let the Efficient Frontier do its best for the rest, knowing that in the long-run, everything should work out.

Friend, Fan, Follower or Something Else Entirely?

Twitter assigns two only two types of user roles: follower and following. Google’s Picasa photo application assigns roles of friend, fan and favorite, which is no less confusing.

Google Buzz is more flexible, allowing users to name categories of contacts without restriction. One may have family, friends, colleagues/ coworkers, business contacts and so on.

Facebook is starting to move in the right direction, with friends kept distinct from fans, the latter usually pertaining to organizations or public figures. However, there remains no ability to capture the nuances within the friend category.

I perceive these oddly and inconsistently defined user roles as a discontinuity embedded within the social networking model of Web 2.0. For many months, I could not articulate my unease with certain social networking applications, but not others. Now I understand. I balk at the logical inconsistency and behavioral proscription (as defined by my personal moral framework) in these follower/friend (but no family) role definitions.

My instinct is to avoid any entangling of ties between family/ friend/ loved ones and my customer base. Behavior that is required to achieve the goals of commercial enterprise is not appropriate for those with whom I am emotionally involved.

Perhaps the conflict can be resolved through better nomenclature.

Social Collider One Year Later

The Social Collider arrived about a year ago. I haven’t heard any updates, particularly regarding the discovery of the Zeitgeist at work, see below.

Social Collider is a Google Chrome-backed experimental application. It’s functional design objective is to reveal cross-connections between conversations on the Twitter platform. The actual intent of the Social Collider experiment is quite a bit more interesting. As data is collected and accrues, the application’s designers hope to uncover multiple layers of person-place-location-event relationships which can be fully comprehended best only when viewed with the additional perspective of chronology.  

This is an excerpt from the site http://socialcollider.net:

One can search for usernames or topics, which are tracked through time and visualized much like the way a particle collider draws pictures of subatomic matter. Posts that didn’t resonate with anyone just connect to the next item in the stream. The ones that did, however, spin off and horizontally link to users or topics who relate to them, either directly or in terms of their content.

The Social Collider acts as a metaphorical instrument which can be used to make visible how memes get created and how they propagate. Ideally, it might catch the Zeitgeist at work.

Output is on display at a London museum, although primarily as a work of art. I was curious if I could find the Zeitgeist at work, so I tried entering a search query with the promising term “facebook”, selecting the past week for my time interval. Probably unwise for an online application: Windows 7 abended and I was forced to reboot my PC.  

I'm waiting for the results of the collision. And where's the Zeitgeist?

Social Web Pathology Part 1

Share and Share A-like

Note: this is an updated version of my April 28th post on the theme of Social Web Pathology.

I’ve been pondering the theme of “Social Web 2.0 Pathology: Are We Connected Yet?”, and will introduce it with this mild example. Today’s post will then assess recent developments in our vanishing degrees of separation.

The date of this graphic was April 16, 2010 thus it does not contain the very consequence-laden “Like” button. Facebook announced the release of the Like button to the World Wide Web domains-at-large at the F8 conference on April 22.

There is a recent development, and it should encourage advocates of the individual’s right to privacy. U.S. Congressman Charles Schumer has an awareness of the potential for abuse via social networking, due to accelerated data sharing.  He seems to have focused his concerns around the announcement at F8 of Facebook’s Open Graph and Like button data collector. Media coverage by wire services such as Reuters – Schumer vs Facebook was prompt: Congressman Schumer explicitly stated his concern over negative impact on the consumer’s right to privacy. Shortly after, Schumer was joined by other lawmakers, who proposed a sweeping internet privacy bill on May 4, 2010, indicating grave concern over the potential risks due to information disclosure resulting from participation in social networks. Not surprisingly, Facebook was mentioned by name, as it has been on the leading edge of the social media innovation.

What abuses might result from the Like button, and by whom? The abusers could be hackers aka crackers. Their method of infiltration might include harvesting of newly accessible personal data (mostly due to recent trends in over-sharing) using social engineering techniques. Alternatively, the traditional exploits involving unauthorized elevation of privilege would remain viable. Such is now facilitated by easier password breaking due to a larger pool of availale data. This becomes more straightforward as we tie ourselves closer and tighter together, along with our most critical identifying information via Social Networking sites and applications.

The other source of abuse might be from Facebook itself, due to sharing of user’s personal information with third-parties. FB announced policy that users will no longer have an opt-out feature available, regarding disclosure of certain basic identifying data.

Maybe the need to prove to one and all that “I have the most friends”, a sort of Web 2.0 version of Thorstein Veblen’s concept of “status seeking” and “conspicuous consumption”, will be reined in (see Professor Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899). While the impulse is present in most of us, many resist the temptation. FB was well-designed, though, because it seems to have overwhelmed common sense for even the most reticent of us. Similar observations could be applied to the rise of Farmville. With 86 million players, this game that seems primarily motivated by guilt (Professor Howard Linn wrote a paper on the subject shortly before his death earlier this year) has spread like wildfire. We will hope that Congressional scrutiny will slow the onslaught of the Like button, and hold it in check until the consequences are more carefully considered.