This account will now be inactive. Thanks for all the fun new things. Please find me on The Good Place now https://t.co/Ba2gxAp5ge
Dec 15, 2020 ā¢ 16 tweets ā¢ 3 min read
Aaargh! I hate being āReviewer 2ā but once, just once would I like to peer review a well-written, well-structured article that isnāt clearly just a chapter of someoneās PhD with no further consideration given to how to turn it into its own, fully-fledged and coherent narrative.
Even if I agree with all your good intentions and nearly all of your arguments, if you donāt spend some time kicking this thing into shape before submission, there is very little a reviewer can do to get you published. Hereās a few tips:
Dec 15, 2020 ā¢ 6 tweets ā¢ 2 min read
Normal people I know of have just arranged a three-household birthday party next Sat because itās a week before Christmas and āwhat does it matter, if weād be allowed to do it then anyway?ā. The governmentās wooly messaging on this issue is causing harm going far beyond Christmas
Am I furious with those people? Yes I am. Every single one of them. And not just because I have just decided not to go home even though my mum is really unwell because I donāt want to put her at further risk, and a vaccine is coming and Iām not going to fall at the last hurdle.
Sep 29, 2020 ā¢ 7 tweets ā¢ 2 min read
Dear @Jeremy_Hunt , who just said on @Channel4News that ānobody could have predicted the current situation at Universitiesā, I will happily grant you access to my inbox so you can read the many email exchanges where my academic colleagues and I, you guessed it, predicted this.
Sadly we were ignored. We were ignored because your government does not view higher education as a public good, refused to provide financial support to Universities and thus forced them to lie to students that we could provide a ānormalā student experience...
Sep 26, 2020 ā¢ 15 tweets ā¢ 2 min read
What a pile of crock! A thread. theguardian.com/education/2020ā¦
āIt is crucial that gender stereotyping is addressed in schools and discussed in age-appropriate ways with children and young people: it is also crucial that young people questioning their gender identities are supported and listened to without judgment...
Sep 12, 2020 ā¢ 12 tweets ā¢ 2 min read
In DP terms, I think loss of control is most closely linked to violations of the purpose limitation principle.
Like @mireillemoret said, this is then also connected to a lack of transparency and, I would argue, fairness (in the Art. 5 sense). But as far as algorithmic decision-making is concerned, purpose limitation is clearly where its at.
Sep 11, 2020 ā¢ 19 tweets ā¢ 3 min read
Ok. Iāve done it. For the first time in my life I joined a trade union today.
What finally pushed me over the edge? My employer asking us to ensure that any video footage we record is sub-titled to comply with new disability legislation.
To be clear, I am not disputing that the University should do this. If we are using video recordings, sub-titling is imperative to ensure equality of opportunity not just for students with hearing issues but also for those whose first language is not English.
Aug 26, 2020 ā¢ 25 tweets ā¢ 5 min read
So this article is interesting from an āf2f teachingā perspective mostly because it acknowledges that some of the variables remain undefined and require further research.
Those variables include what counts as āprolonged exposureā that increases risk, and where the low/high occupancy threshhold is, particularly indoors. Those seem to me the two most important ones, although level of ventilation and airflows come a close second.
Aug 24, 2020 ā¢ 8 tweets ā¢ 2 min read
Yet another reason, though, why the reopening of universities presents very different problems from schools.
Schools are where a relatively homogeneous local population exacerbates a local hotspot. Unis will be where people deriving from different local hotspots come to party.
āLimiting community transmissionā just wonāt cut it in a situation where the virus may be transmitted INTO local communities that may have had low infection rates before.
Aug 21, 2020 ā¢ 4 tweets ā¢ 1 min read
That too. But unfortunately Recital 47 gives effect to a lot of DPAās previous interpretation that ādirect marketingā IS a legitimate interest. And thatās why they are presumably still using it. While also stretching the concept of ādirect marketingā to within an inch of its life
And the userās counter interest is mostly intangible, which, when carrying out the balancing exercise, makes it easier to argue that they suffer no harm. Because things like discrimination, loss of autonomy are remote while collective and societal harms donāt even come into it.
Aug 21, 2020 ā¢ 25 tweets ā¢ 9 min read
Sooo, I just clicked through the link to this article on MPs slamming @ICOnews for not enforcing the GDPR against the UK government.
It IS a problem, @ICOnews and other DPAs not doing their job.
A few years ago, Mrs Matron workedin a care home housing unaccompanied refugee children. There were 11 of them and each and every one of them had a story that would make the papers and guaranteed them years of counselling and support, had they been Western children.
Their experiences had been horrendous. From seeing friends and family killed to spending time in refugee camps and even prisons while they made their way here.
Aug 10, 2020 ā¢ 14 tweets ā¢ 2 min read
Iām as pro-mask as they get but, folks, cheering on discretionary private policing of important behavioral norms without basis in law or due process may come back to haunt us.
āIn entering into agreements (read: contracts) with airline carriers (by purchasing a ticket), you're required to adhere to their policies. And that pretty much ends the matter.ā
Aug 5, 2020 ā¢ 14 tweets ā¢ 3 min read
In the UK, breach of data protection rights is essentially a statutory tort/breach of statutory duty liable to damages, see Art. 82GDPR/s. 168 DPA2018 as a cause of action. Arguably, you could then apply rules of c and v liability.
But my guess would be that app stores do not meet the conditions for that. For a start, Iām nor sure how easy it would be to establish a duty of care towards the customer for app provider behaviour while we still protect the idea of nigh on unrestricted intermediary immunity.
I think the thing that gets me about the current āgo back to normalā drive at Unis is the dishonesty. Weāre so much in customer service mode now that weāre promising something that we all know we canāt deliver. But weāre all pretending.
Jul 28, 2020 ā¢ 25 tweets ā¢ 5 min read
I think thereās a much easier Venn overlap. All three groups do not care if, in protecting their own rights, they infringe the rights of non-group members. Thereās no social solidarity beyond their own group. Thatās what makes them different from other groups.
And thatās also why liberal-baiting (or self-reflecting) thought experiments like āthink of something you believe that is objectively wrongā fall short of the full picture and create a sense of false equivalence. Because they ignore the importance of social relations and impact.
Jul 16, 2020 ā¢ 5 tweets ā¢ 1 min read
There are several cases on that pending before the CJEU, one before the ECHR and national Constitutional Courts like the US Supreme Court have repeatedly ruled certain forms of bulk surveillance unconstitutional.
Letās not pretend that this isnāt going to be an everlasting game of pingpong, whatever jurisdiction weāre looking at.
Jul 16, 2020 ā¢ 6 tweets ā¢ 1 min read
On the Brexit front, the CJEU judgment should now certainly make the Commission pause with regard to granting the UK adequacy.
But I wonder, if it also makes it significantly more unlikely that the EU will back down from its demands that any law enforcement data exchange with the UK must be tied to UK ECHR membership.
Jul 15, 2020 ā¢ 12 tweets ā¢ 3 min read
This is a horrendous story about a black teenager with ADHD in Michigan.
My (white) friendās son in neighbouring Ohio also has ADHD. He is super intelligent, one of those kids whose brain just feasts on information. Keeping that brain adequately fed is a struggle on a good day.
When youāre with him you feel like he lives in two (or more) different realities. One that he shares with the rest of us and others that only he inhabits. Heās always had trouble with ānormalā schooling because his teachers found it difficult to keep up with that.
Jul 12, 2020 ā¢ 4 tweets ā¢ 1 min read
1) Speech *can* be violence. Just because I have not been the target of that violence, doesnāt mean that you havenāt been.
Itās important to discuss where the margins are and what we do when we identify them.
1) I use different social media under different pseudonyms for different purposes with different audiences. This considerably reduces the attack surface for any troll.
Jul 8, 2020 ā¢ 4 tweets ā¢ 1 min read
I know the idea is to convince the not quite fascist part of the GOP to oust Trump so that the country and the people in it can survive. But as someone, who lived through the Reagan and Bush years, the current sanctification of both makes me supremely uncomfortable.
Reagan was not the ābetter versionā of the GOP. Reagan was how it started. If you have to resort to Reagan to convince people not to vote for Trump, all you will get is more Reagans in the future. And if youāre poor, or black, or gay or disabled, thatās nothing to look forward to
