Pseudo-anonymity: Defense

type='html'>Back to our FIFO queue! Today we have...

pop(Pika):

The other day I made a mistake and left a comment on someone's blog under my own first name instead of the pseudonym. I deleted it as soon as I noticed, but then I got a bit paranoid if anyone could see who I am just from that one single comment. So I googled my first name.

And got the shock of my life.

I am there, my workpage pops up immediately, right on the first page of results... 

How googleable are you? 

I meant to post about this topic months ago, but found myself struggling with how to appropriately discuss it. The problem with me writing a post like this is I could give hints on how to 'out' someone who is blogging/internetting pseudo anonymously, and I don't really want to do that for obvious reasons. The good news is that most of the techniques to de-anonymize bloggers remain firmly in the realm of researchware, but I wouldn't bank on that being the case for too much longer.

Instead, I'd like to suggest a few defensive things pseudo anonymous netizens can do to help maintain their anonymity. Some of these suggestions are social, some are technical, but nearly all are grounded in the privacy literature.

1) Don't tell anyone you know in your open (non-anon) life about your pesudo-anonymous identity/blog. Someone will tell someone, and the next thing you know someone posts something somewhere revealing your real name. People are awful at keeping secrets, and if you ever become a famous (or controversial) blogger you run the risk of someone accidentally (or purposely) outing you.

2) Don't write things that would be devastatingly embarrassing for you if you were outted. As I said, right now it's easy to be a little bit anonymous online, but I would not at all bet on that trend continuing. I saw a paper presented at a conference recently that scared the crap out of me, so do take heed.

3) If you blog, turn on the comment approval settings. If you use facebook or other social networks, even if it's under your pseudonym, turn on the settings to approve your wall posts / picture sharing / etc. Seriously, lock that puppy down. Better to introduce a delay then suffer the consequences of someone commenting, "Great post, Imelda D! See you at lunch tomorrow."

4) Never forget: once it's out there, it's out there. There are no takebacks in the era of RSS feeds and google. There is no ephemerality. Be extra careful when you post something not to sign your real name, discuss something specific about your location, etc. You have absolutely no idea who is subscribed to get a blog's comments, and once their RSS reader grabs it, there's nothing you can do.

5) There is a lot of literature on how people can infer your identity based on your interests, social network friends, etc. (See references in this post). Some people who work in the security/privacy fields make their name on this kind of thing, no pun intended. Again, this supports my first suggestion to keep your pseudo-anonymous life and your non-anonymous life as separate as possible. If you need to share something personal, change some details here and there. You know, say you love dogs instead of cats.

6) Use Tor, or another anoymizer web browsing service when visiting other people's blogs/websites. Definitely anonymize your IP when commenting elsewhere under your pseudonym. While Google Analytics provides a slight layer of anonymity and lets your individuality get lost in the noise, not all trackers are so gracious. Remember, every time you hit a webserver, your IP address is logged. It is trivial to deduce who you are based on your IP. So you are completely relying on the good graces of the website/blog owner not to out you. By using an anonymizer, you can at least protect yourself a bit better.

I think that's it for now. Happy pseudo-anonymous blogging!

Credited to the Author

My student is so good you can't have them

type='html'>It's been positively fascinating reading recommendation letters for prospective graduate students. The majority are fairly normal, but a few are kind of clingy.

"Ms. Hopper is awesome and will do great at your university, except I really don't want her to go there, I want her to stay with meeeeeeeee."

Sometimes, the clingy professors will trash the student too, sort of like in the way I tell people, "this chocolate cake is TERRIBLE, you definitely don't want any."

While it's true good students are hard to find, and showing some level of adoration and commitment toward them is a good idea, clinging too tightly is bad practice professionally and managerially. And in fact, I've heard some stories of clingy advisors that cross me as borderline abusive.

Maybe in other fields this sort of thing is tolerable, but a graduate student in CS, even a bad one, can get a job anywhere, and make 5 times as much as they would as a PhD student. So it doesn't cross me as particularly clever to treat them poorly.

Credited to the Author

Agent's Smith Registry

type='html'>I have just discovered the joy that is comixed.com. This one is probably my favorite so far:

Image Description*: Panel 1: Neo says, "So you just keep duplicating
your program over and over? Aren't you afraid of registry errors?"
Panel 2: Agent Smith says, "Mr. Anderson...Do you honestly think that I would allow
there to be any errors in my system's regist.."
Panel 3: Hugo Weaving in drag with an outlandish orange and yellow costume.
Panel 4: Agent Smith (I think?) with white light coming out of his eyes.

While we're talking about The Matrix, I just stumbled across this video of a recreation of a scene from the film in Lego. I somehow missed it the first time around when it came out in 2009, so in case you did too here it is:

You can also watch the side-by-side with the original film. It's amazing. 

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* From now on I'm going to try to make my captions more accessible to readers who are blind and/or visually impaired. Please call me on it if I forget!

Credited to the Author

Be your own princess charming

type='html'>I recently came across this lovely series of photographs from photographer Jaime Moore in Austin. She wanted to take photos of her 5-year-old daughter, Emma, on her birthday. While looking for inspiration on the net, all she could find was how to dress one's daughter like a Disney Princess. So she took matters into her own hands -

It started me thinking about all the REAL women for my daughter to know about and look up too, REAL women who without ever meeting Emma have changed her life for the better. My daughter wasn’t born into royalty, but she was born into a country where she can now vote, become a doctor, a pilot, an astronaut, or even President if she wants and that’s what REALLY matters. I wanted her to know the value of these amazing women who had gone against everything so she can now have everything. We chose 5 women (five amazing and strong women), as it was her 5th birthday but there are thousands of unbelievable women (and girls) who have beat the odds and fought (and still fight) for their equal rights all over the world……..so let’s set aside the Barbie Dolls and the Disney Princesses for just a moment, and let’s show our girls the REAL women they can be.

Here are a few of these remarkable photos:

The rest of the photos are here: http://www.jaimemoorephotography.com/2013/05/09/not-just-a-girl/

I would love to see the marketing industry, toy industry, and Hollywood follow Jaime Moore's lead. K-12 STEM outreach is great and all, but if we want to make a significant impact we need to get ImagesOfGreatness (beyond beauty) into the minds of young women on a daily basis.

Credited to the Author

New adventures in publishing metrics

type='html'>In case you haven't heard, Google Scholar Citations recently opened its doors, allowing academics to set up Google Scholar profiles, track their citations, h-index and i10-index, and see pretty graphs.

At first I thought: Yay! Especially since, for Computer Science, this was right on the heels of Cite Scholar's beta release, which is all about highlighting the fact that in CS we're all about the top tier conferences and journals don't matter much for us.

Then I thought: Boo! Now it's easier for the bean counters to count beans. Also, I sense there's this "who's searched for me" button coming, which creeps me out. This is actually why I don't ever click on academia.edu pages.

After a few weeks of reflection I am still on the fence. While I can't speak for other fields, in CS number of citations doesn't necessarily mean anything about quality or impact of work. I can think of several lackluster papers that have hundreds of citations, whereas others are incredible and barely hardly any. Also, sometimes an insane number of citations simply means you forced encouraged people to cite you by releasing some software or data.

On the other hand, I find these new graphs seem to ignite my "MUST WRITE MORE" instinct, just as the darling tune my new washing machine plays encourages me to do more laundry.

Credited to the Author

Not your grandma's Tufte

type='html'>I really appreciate good data visualization because I think it's one of the best ways to communicate ideas. It's hard to know how to do it well, though, if you're not trained in design. For some reason I always stress over little details - fonts, colors, margins. But that happens when I cook, too, so maybe that's more a reflection of my personality than anything else.

Image from Understanding Graphics

I once met Ben Fry, who if you don't know is the co-creator of the Processing programming language, and (also) made a name for himself doing some gorgeous visualizations for SEED magazine. I had just seen a fantastic design of his, and asked him how he went about choosing its colors and fonts. He gave me some advice I still follow today: start with black helvetica and go from there.

As well as this advice has served me, I feel ready to move into serif fonts and at least dual-colored bar charts. So lately I've enjoyed reading the blog posts from Shawn Allen's Data Visualization Course. He starts with a history of data visualization (remember Florence Nightingale?) and builds up from there. It's excellent and I highly recommend checking it out.

Credited to the Author

Women in CS: It's not nature, it's culture

To convince people to stop throwing up their hands and saying women are just not interested in Computer Science, and instead do something about it. 

Whenever someone says this, the implication is, "It's not our fault. We're not doing anything wrong." Instead of saying, "How can we retain/attract women?" they simply assume that we are:

• Not interested


• Biologically deficient at math/logical thinking


• Don't have what it takes to be a "code cowboy"¹

These assumptions are not correct. In some parts of the world we see equal numbers of women and men studying computer science and engineering and being employed in the tech sector. For example, in Malaysia women comprise 50-60% of jobs in the tech sector. This is entirely due to culture - turns out, men who work indoors are seen as less masculine than those that work outdoors, and women who work outdoors are seen as lower class [1]. It's funny, we actually have sexism working in reverse - leading to an increase in women working in technology. 

The data ain't pretty, though 1982 sure looked nice.

Source: NYTimes

We see similar trends in other parts of Asia. I don't have recent data, but around 2003 women were earning 59% of science and engineering degrees in China, 46% in South Korea, and 66% in Japan. (Compared with 33% in the US). [2]

As for the biology argument, if you're still not convinced, read Terri Oda's excellent piece, "How does biology explain the low numbers of women in computer science? Hint: it doesn't."

So for the non-Asian world that is still struggling with underrepresentation [2], I think we need to change our culture. We need to eliminate the geek mythology (that to be successful you must eat/sleep/breathe code and nothing else) [3], we need to ensure we illustrate the purpose and value of computing [4], we need to be proactive in recruiting women [5], we need to provide plenty of other women as peers and role models [6], and we probably should de-masculinize the workplace [7]. These approaches are all shown to make a big difference in attracting and retaining women in CS.

If you do these things at your institution, I guarantee you that in addition to helping attract women, you will also attract men. And probably also people of different races, cultures, ethnicities, and socio-economic statuses. Which given the recent yo-yo enrollment trends over the last decade is not a bad thing at all. We really don't want computer science departments going the way of the way of the dinosaur².

So, please - stop mansplaining and start doing.

Notes
¹ It's worth mentioning since it's a common misunderstanding: coding != computer science, coding ? computer science. It's like how doing an assay is not molecular biology research. Assays are an aspect of the field of molecular biology, coding is an aspect of the field of computer science.
² No disrespect to anyone who works in Paleontology (I am truly saddened to hear of your suffering), but I just couldn't resist the pun.

References

[1] Mellstrom, U. Masculinity, Power and Technology: A Malaysian Ethnography. Ashgate, 2003.
[2] Simard, C. "The State of Women and Technology Fields Around The World". Anita Borg Institute. 2007.
[3] Margolis, J. and Fisher, A. "Geek Mythology and Attracting Undergraduate Women to Computer Science" Impacting Change Through Collaboration, proceedings of the Joint National Conference of the Women in Engineering Program Advocates Network and the National Association of Minority Engineering Program Administrators, March, 1997.

[4] Margolis, J., Fisher, A., and Miller, F. "Caring About Connections: Gender and Computing". IEEE Technology and Society, December, 1999.
[5] Cohoon, J. M. 2002. Recruiting and retaining women in undergraduate computing majors. SIGCSE Bull. 34, 2 (Jun. 2002), 48-52.
[6] Lagesen, V. The Strength of Numbers: Strategies to Include Women into Computer Science. Social Studies of Science February 2007 vol. 37 no. 1 67-92.
[7] Cheryan, S., Plaut, V.C., Davies, P.G., Steele, C.M. "Ambient belonging: How stereotypical cues impact gender participation in computer science." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 97, No. 6. (December 2009), pp. 1045-1060.

Credited to the Author