At Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy (citp.princeton.edu) we're hiring our first ever communications manager. Public engagement is a first-rate goal for us, so we are looking for someone to work with us to maximize the public impact of our scholarship.
To explain how CITP differs from most academic groups, I'm happy to share a new case study of our (ongoing) research on dark patterns. It includes many lessons learned about conducting and communicating tech policy research effectively, and how CITP helps. cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publi…
The communications manager is a hybrid role. This includes familiar tasks such as managing a website and social media, but also close collaboration with researchers on tasks such as co-authoring an op-ed or figuring out the right analogy to explain a tricky concept.
Communication is a two-way street. I’m particularly excited for the work the new hire will do to translate emerging areas of public concern into research questions. In short, the new hire will help us shorten both arcs of the feedback loop between research and social impact.
What skills are we looking for? Writing and editorial skills are of course important, but even more important is some knowledge and curiosity about our research domain. We commit to working with you to help you deepen your domain expertise. Apply here: main-princeton.icims.com/jobs/12557/com…

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Arvind Narayanan

Arvind Narayanan Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @random_walker

17 Feb
Were you told that successful researchers must constantly "keep up" with research in their fields? In my experience, that's both stressful and inefficient to the point of being useless. New papers may be released every day but actual knowledge doesn't accumulate at that rate.
Paying too much attention to the so-called cutting edge of research leads to a loss of perspective and results in incremental work more often than not. If you want to do foundational research, it probably doesn't rely on a preprint that was released last week.
Here's the process I've used for about 10 years. When I see a new paper, I put it in a big list organized by topic. I don't read it right away. Once in a while, I notice that a collection of papers on a topic have resulted in meaningful progress, and I read the papers together.
Read 4 tweets
12 Jan
There are no unmoderated speech platforms. Email may be the closest, but even email at a large scale is complex enough that you have to use intermediaries. (The Princeton Election Emails Corpus confirms no Trump emails since Jan 6 electionemails2020.org/entity/59a162d…)
Of course, relatively unmoderated platforms like Parler are themselves subject to the standards of other intermediaries. It's platforms all the way down.
Some people want social media platforms to be neutral and apolitical. But a major value proposition of speech platforms is their recommender algos and moderation policies that amplify some voices and suppress others. They can’t make those decisions in a politically neutral way.
Read 4 tweets
11 Jan
Professors at top universities are lottery winners, but rarely acknowledge the role of luck in their success. Be skeptical when they give you advice suggesting that the path they took is a repeatable one. If you aspire to an academic research career, have a backup plan.
Deciding to go into academia because all your professors said it worked out pretty well for them is also known as the statistical fallacy of sampling on the dependent variable.
I'm reviewing pre-doctoral, doctoral, post-doctoral, and faculty applications. I'm amazed by how much more these candidates have accomplished than I had at the corresponding stage of my career, and how many more qualified candidates there are compared to available positions.
Read 4 tweets
4 Jan
There are many answers to the so-called privacy paradox but the simplest is the analogy to the environment. Why do people say they care but then not do much? Because they understand what many experts don't: individual action feels overwhelming and collective action is needed.
When given the opportunity for collective action on privacy, people are eager to take it. The latest example is the California Privacy Rights Act. brookings.edu/blog/techtank/…
How long would it take to make informed privacy decisions about all the apps we use? More time than we spend using those apps. This has been well known for a long time, yet some scholars insist that people's refusal to waste their time is a "paradox". npr.org/sections/allte…
Read 6 tweets
2 Jan
Venture capitalists benefit from giving toxic and dangerous advice to startups. That's because the risk to the VC is bounded — the amount invested ⁠— whereas the costs to founders and workers' health, to society, to democracy, and to the environment are unbounded.
Early-stage and seed VCs externalize more of these costs and hence have an even greater incentive to give harmful advice.
Of course, advice from venture capitalists isn't just advice. I can't think of another group with a bigger gap between power and accountability.
Read 5 tweets
16 Dec 20
Many online education platforms track and profit from student data, but universities are able to use their power to negotiate contracts with vendors to get much better privacy. That’s one of the findings in our new paper “Virtual Classrooms and Real Harms” arxiv.org/abs/2012.05867
We analyzed 23 popular tools used for online learning—their code, their privacy policies, and 50 “Data Protection Addenda” that they negotiated with universities. We studied 129 (!) U.S. state privacy laws that impact ed tech. We also surveyed 105 educators and 10 administrators.
A major reason for poor privacy by default is that the regulations around traditional educational records aren’t well suited to the ‘data exhaust’ of online communication, echoing arguments by @elanazeide & @HNissenbaum here: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
Read 7 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!