Author: Mr. Lakhaney

TOK Teacher

Radiolab Podcasat: The Trust Engineers

February 11, 2015

“When we talk online, things can go south fast. But they don’t have to. Today, we meet a group of social engineers who are convinced that tiny changes in wording can make the online world a kinder, gentler place. So long as we agree to be their lab rats.

Ok, yeah, we’re talking about Facebook. Because Facebook, or something like it, is more and more the way we share and like, and gossip and gripe. And because it’s so big, Facebook has a created a laboratory of human behavior the likes of which we’ve never seen. We peek into the work of Arturo Bejar and a team of researchers who are tweaking our online experience, bit by bit, to try to make the world a better place. And along the way we can’t help but wonder whether that’s possible, or even a good idea.”

http://www.radiolab.org/story/trust-engineers/

Ethics of social experiments on Facebook

February 11, 2015

In late 2014, there was an uproar about revelation that facebook was conducting social experiments on its users by changing (or manipulating) users’ newsfeeds to see the effect of more positive stories vs. more negative ones for example. This issue brought up questions around the ethics of experimenting on subjects without their knowledge or consent.

With over a billion users on facebook from all races, social classes, and nations including every possible cross section of the human race, this platform allows for experimentation on a scale never before possible. Social science experiments require large samples to increase the validity of their findings and facebook offers just that.

What if asking people for consent somehow changed the validity of the results? What if people chose not to participate and our ability to use this potentially revolutionary tool (facebook) was now limited?

These are some of the many issues to consider. Below are a few of articles about the issue.

1. Facebook sorry – almost – for secret psychological experiment on users

“Facebook published the results of a 2012 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Unbeknown to users, Facebook had tampered with the news feeds of nearly 700,000 people, showing them an abnormally low number of either positive or negative posts. The experiment aimed to determine whether the company could alter the emotional state of its users.”

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/02/facebook-sorry-secret-psychological-experiment-users

2.Furor Erupts Over Facebook’s Experiment on Users

“A social-network furor has erupted over news that Facebook Inc., in 2012, conducted a massive psychological experiment on nearly 700,000 unwitting users.”

http://www.wsj.com/articles/furor-erupts-over-facebook-experiment-on-users-1404085840

3. Facebook Experiments Had Few Limits

“Thousands of Facebook Inc. users received an unsettling message two years ago: They were being locked out of the social network because Facebook believed they were robots or using fake names. To get back in, the users had to prove they were real.”

http://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-experiments-had-few-limits-1404344378

4.On the ethics of Facebook experiments

“Facebook found itself in the hot seat once again this week following the publication of a study that experimentally manipulated the content of more than 600,000 users’ newsfeeds. The study finds that increasing positive content in users’ newsfeeds makes them post more positive content themselves. Likewise, increasing the amount of negative content a user sees increases the number of negative posts.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/07/03/on-the-ethics-of-facebook-experiments/

5.Facebook emotion study breached ethical guidelines, researchers say

“Researchers have roundly condemned Facebook’s experiment in which it manipulated nearly 700,000 users’ news feeds to see whether it would affect their emotions, saying it breaches ethical guidelines for “informed consent”.”

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/30/facebook-emotion-study-breached-ethical-guidelines-researchers-say

Once Upon a Time, There Was a Big Bang Theory

February 10, 2015

“THE idea once seemed so elegant and simple: The universe began with a bang. Wherever astronomers pointed their telescopes, the distant galaxies were shooting away like stellar shrapnel. And permeating the space in between was a uniform glow of radiation — surely the afterflash of an ancient explosion.

But the theoretical paradise was not to last.”

http://www.nytimes.com/1998/03/08/weekinreview/ideas-trends-once-upon-a-time-there-was-a-big-bang-theory.html

THE PARADIGM SHIFTS

February 10, 2015

“If you yourself have used the word without being exactly sure what it means, you are in good company. One of Kuhn’s critics (he had many) claimed to have isolated 22 distinct meanings for paradigm in the book, and Kuhn confessed to a certain elasticity in his use of the term. Nonetheless, it is a genuine and powerful notion, its presence in our language well deserved.”

http://www.nytimes.com/1996/12/29/magazine/the-paradigm-shifts.html

Tomorrow Never Knows: The Challenge of Making Predictions

February 10, 2015

How then to assess the accuracy of predictions of things to come? Any serious assessment of P.C. (prediction correctness) ought to look at the record of the past, which is what we did, beginning with science, a domain where logic, experimentation and empirical evidence prevail. An exemplar in this field was William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, the celebrated British physicist, inventor and president of the Royal Society at the end of the 19th century. In 1895 Lord Kelvin observed that ”heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.” In 1897 he found that ”radio has no future” and in 1900 he assured his scientific colleagues that ”X-rays are a hoax.”

Japan rejects calls to change history textbooks

February 10, 2015

China and South Korea contend that Japanese history textbooks misrepresent Japan’s wartime activities and colonization of the early 20th century and should be revised. But Japan’s new leader has stated firmly that there will be no changes. Officials within Japan’s education ministry said revisions would occur only if books contain factual errors.

http://www.internationalschooltoulouse.net/ibhistory/tok/Japan%20rejects%20calls%20to%20change%20history%20textbooks.htm

Arguing That Historians Can Be Scientists, Too

February 10, 2015

“In recent decades new challenges have been mounted to the supposedly objective study of the past. Most conspicuously, perhaps, postmodernist theory has raised its ultra-skeptical head to allege that objectivity being impossible, there is no truth. Or to apply the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to this matter, history is like a rabbit in the garden at night, running away as soon as it is caught in a beam of light. If that is the case, isn’t the task of trying to determine objectively, scientifically even, what happened in the past an act of arrogant futility?”

Was Brian Williams a Victim of False Memory?

February 10, 2015

“How reliable is human memory? Most of us believe that our memory is like a video camera, capturing an accurate record that can be reviewed at a later date.

But the truth is our memories can deceive us — and they often do.

Numerous scientific studies show that memories can fade, shift and distort over time.”

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/09/was-brian-williams-a-victim-of-false-memory/?&assetType=nyt_now