Tag: Research

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Saudi Millennials Don’t Use Their Phones Like We Do

Saudi Millennials Don’t Use Their Phones Like We Do:

… the problem lies in [the branding/marketing companies’] intent: Instead of entering new markets with an open mind, they approach with a strategy in place and then look for the people who prove their theories right. “The only thing worse than not asking the questions, is not paying attention to the answers that don’t fit into their world view, because it’s inconvenient,” says Chipchase.

Set aside the headline. This longish read does a good job of explaining why it makes sense to hire an ethnographer before developing (to say nothing of launching) a product and, simultaneously, the intense amount of work that goes into launch a new product with a unique brand identity.

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An Internet Censorship Company Tried to Sue the Researchers Who Exposed Them

An Internet Censorship Company Tried to Sue the Researchers Who Exposed Them:

Netsweeper is a small Canadian company with a disarmingly boring name and an office nestled among the squat buildings of Waterloo, Ontario. But its services—namely, online censorship—are offered in countries as far-flung as Bahrain and Yemen.

In 2015, University of Toronto-based research hub Citizen Lab reported that Netsweeper was providing Yemeni rebels with censorship technology. In response, Citizen Lab director Ron Deibert revealed in a blog post on Tuesday, Netsweeper sued the university and Deibert for defamation. Netsweeper discontinued its lawsuit in its entirety in April.

 

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2014.7.1

The lack of teaching skills means we are supporting institutions that not only don’t do what we idealize them to do, they don’t value and professionalize the things that we expect them to do well. In fact, we have gone to extremes to prevent the job of university teaching from becoming a profession. The most obvious example is hiring adjunct professors. These are people who are hired for about the same wage as a fast food server, and are expected to teach physics or philosophy to 18 year olds. They don’t get benefits or even long-term contracts. So, in effect, they never get the chance to develop into highly skilled teaching professionals. Instead, they spend most of their time worrying about heating bills and whether they can afford to go to the doctor.

Now, of course, universities will argue that they are research organizations. And that is true. Universities do value research over teaching. Meaning that tenured and tenure-track professors, even if they love teaching, cannot prioritize it, because their administration requires them to be good researchers. Indeed, if you admit that you are a middling to average researcher and want to focus on teaching, you become viewed a burden by your department.

Yet, for the great majority of people, their only interaction with a university is through the people doing the teaching. It’s as if a major corporation, say General Motors, decided that their public face would not be their most visible product—hello Chevy Volt—and instead decides to place the janitorial service front and center. Then, just to top it off, decided not to train the janitors.

Chris Lee, “Universities can’t fulfil the myth, but they can’t become a vocational school either”
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The Murky State of Canadian Telecommunications Surveillance – The Citizen Lab

On January 20, 2014 the Citizen Lab along with leading Canadian academics and civil liberties groups asked Canadian telecommunications companies to reveal the extent to which they disclose information to state authorities. This post summarizes and analyzes the responses from the companies, and argues that the companies have done little to ultimately clarify their disclosure policies. We conclude by indicating the subsequent steps in this research project.

The most recent posting about our ongoing research into how, why, and how often Canadian ISPs disclose information to state agencies.

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2013.3.1

A few years ago, he [Ken Anderson, Intel ethnographer] conducted an ethnographic study of “temporality,” about the perception of the passage and scarcity of time—noting how Americans he studied had come to perceive busy-ness and lack of time as a marker of well-being. “We found that in social interaction, virtually everyone would claim to be ‘busy,’ and that everyone close to them would be ‘busy’ too,” he told me. But in fact, coordinated studies of how these people used technology suggested that when they used their computers, they tended to do work only in short bursts of a few minutes at a time, with the rest of the time devoted to something other than what we might identify as work. “We were designing computers, and the spec at the time was to use the computer to the max for two hours,” Anderson says. “We had to make chips that would perform at that level. You don’t want them to overheat. But when we came back, we figured that we needed to rethink this, because people’s time is not quite what we imagine.” For a company that makes microchip processors, this discovery has had important consequences for how to engineer products—not only for users who constantly need high-powered computing for long durations, but for people who just think they do.

Graeme Wood, Anthropology Inc.

Speaks volumes about why social sciences are so important to development and engineering processes.

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There’s A Yawning Need for Boring Professors

While such research is done in a number of countries, Canada seems to be a hotbed of boredom studies. James Danckert, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Waterloo, in Canada, recently conducted a study to compare the physiological effects of boredom and sadness.

To induce sadness in the lab, he used video clips from the 1979 tear-jerker, “The Champ,” a widely accepted practice among psychologists.

But finding a clip to induce boredom was a trickier task. Dr. Danckert first tried a YouTube video of a man mowing a lawn, but subjects found it funny, not boring. A clip of parliamentary proceedings was too risky. “There’s always the off chance you get someone who is interested in that,” he says.

Rachel Emma Silverman, “Interesting Fact: There’s a Yawning Need for Boring Professors”

I found the third paragraph particularly amusing as someone who often finds watching parliament interesting. I guess I’d be one of the ‘problem’ participants!

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User vs Corporate Understandings of ‘Security’

A really interesting paper on social authentication has just been released that looks at how facial identification ‘works’ to secure social networks from unauthorized access to profiles/records. The authors note that users of social networks are most concerned in keeping their interactions private from those who know the users. Specifically, from the abstract:

Most people want privacy only from those close to them; if you’re having an affair then you want your partner to not find out but you don’t care if someone in Mongolia learns about it. And if your partner finds out and becomes your ex, then you don’t want them to be able to cause havoc on your account. Celebrities are similar, except that everyone is their friend (and potentially their enemy).

Moreover, a targeted effort to identify a users’ friends on a social network – and examine their photos – will let an attacker penetrate the social authentication mechanisms. While many users would consider this a design flaw Facebook, which uses this system, doesn’t necessarily agree because:

[Facebook] told us that the social captcha mechanism was used to solve the problem of large-scale phishing attacks. They knew it was not very effective against friends, and especially not against a jilted former lover. For that, they maintain that the local police and courts are an effective solution. They also claim that although small-scale face recognition is doable, their scraping protection prevents it being used at large scales.

What Facebook is doing isn’t wrong: they simply has a particular attacker-type in mind with regards to social authentication and have deployed a defence mechanism to combat that attacker. Most users, however, are unlikely to consider that the company has a different attack scenario in mind than its end-users, leading to anger and concern when the defence for wide-scale attacks fails to protect against targeted attackers. While I don’t see this as a security or policy failure, it is suggestive that companies would be well advised to explain to their users how different security inconveniences actually interact with different hack/attack scenarios. Beyond educating users as to what they can expect from the various defence mechanisms, it might serve to raise some awareness about the different kinds of attackers that companies have to defend against. In an ideal world, this might serve as a beginning point in educating users to become more critical of the security models that are imposed upon them by corporations, governments, and other parties they deal with.