Visualizing How School Districts Are Responding to COVID-19

In response to COVID-19 school closures, districts around the country have devised unique strategies for addressing school closures. This table aims to present an interactive database that communicates how each district has responded to this crisis.

The Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) developed a large database that reviews all district plans and summarizes them in a single database.

CRPE shares, “This database tracks over 100 districts that range in size and geography, and serve nearly 10 million students. It includes the 30 largest districts in the country, members of the Council of the Great City Schools, smaller districts that participate in CRPE’s rural studies, and at least one district from otherwise unrepresented states. Please note that this is not a representative sample.”

Back to School 2020 — COVID-19 District Responses was originally published in Peter Gault on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

About this Guide

This guide provides a series of 17 helpful tips for configuring an iPad to make it easier to use for an elderly person who is not familiar with new technology.

After our family purchased an iPad for our grandmother, she was having trouble using it due to some of the default settings of a new iPad. I spent a few hours configuring it to make it easier to use, and then she was able to comfortably use it.

She asked me to write this guide so she could share it with her friends, and I figured that it might be helpful to post this online in case anyone else would find this helpful. I’m writing this during the middle of the COVID-19 crisis when staying connected is more important than ever. Hopefully, this guide might help you stay better connected with loved ones.

Note: This guide is written for a person comfortable with technology who can figure out how to adjust all of the settings of the iPad. If you are trying to help a family member, I would strongly suggest that either the family member gives you the iPad to configure, you configure it, and then return it to them. (Make sure to disinfect it as well!)

Turn off Siri — Make it Easier to Open the iPad

One thing that makes an iPad difficult to use is that it’s really easy to accidentally start Siri by pressing on the home button. By default, tapping on the home button opens the iPad, but pressing on the button opens Siri. The dexterity required to tap rather than press can be challenging to learn, and rather than opening the iPad, your family member may inadvertently keep opening Siri.

If your family member is having issues opening the iPad, I would recommend just turning it off to make it easier to open the iPad. In the settings, you can disable “open Siri from lock screen,” and that way the button will just be used for opening the iPad.

Make Sure You Know or can Reset the Apple ID Password

This is the most critical item of all of the items on this list. Your family member may not have or know their Apple ID password, which can be a real problem. Without your Apple ID, you cannot install apps, and the iPad will keep pestering you constantly to sign in.

One or multiple family members should be set as backups on the account, where their email and phone numbers can be used to reset the Apple ID, and that password should be written down and stored safely. Make sure your family member is signed in with their Apple ID.

Install Email / Sync Account

If your family member has a Yahoo, Google, or AOL account, you can sign in with that account on the iPad to sync it with the email app. Sign in, and then test the email app to make sure that it is receiving new emails.

Test FaceTime to Make Sure it Works with the Family Member’s Email Address (their Apple ID).

If your family member doesn’t have an iPhone, you can’t call them using their cell phone number. I would suggest trying a FaceTime using both your family member’s iPad and your own phone or computer to make sure it is set up and working fine.

Help your Family Member bt Adding Contacts

If the iPad doesn’t have any contacts, you might want to consider importing contacts to make it easier for your family member to make FaceTime calls. Most phones have some type of contact export feature to get the contact info to import. If this isn’t available, I would recommend sitting down with your family member, asking them who they want to FaceTime with, and then plugging in that contact info for them.

Use Shortcuts to Trigger FaceTime Calls

There is a feature on iPads called Shortcuts where you can create an icon that launches a FaceTime call with a specific person. Go to shortcuts to program these FaceTime launches with family members. Once you create the shortcut, there is another step where you can then add the shortcut to the home screen. It’s a bit of a pain to figure this out initially, and you may need to click on a bunch of menus to find this option.

When you create the home screen button, you can select a photo of someone as the icon. In the photos app, find the family members you want to set up the FaceTime shortcuts, and then duplicate the images. You can then crop those images (using Apple Photos) to have a headshot you can use for the person’s face.

Set up a Shortcut for their Favorite Podcast

Shortcuts don’t have that many useful features, but one of them is that you can launch a podcast from the iPad. I’d suggest setting up the New York Times Daily Podcast to make it easy to instantly listen to the most recent episode.

Turn off the Pin Code

Disable the Pin code in the settings page, so that you don’t need to enter a four-digit number each time you want to use the iPad. This makes it much easier to use.

Note: it is a security risk to turn off the Pin code. You should tell your family member that to be safe, they shouldn’t turn off the Pin code if there is a risk of the iPad being stolen or if they plan to take the iPad out of the house. Also, they should use a Pin code if the plan to have any credit card info stored on the . It could be okay to disable the Pin though if you are just using the iPad for FaceTime calls.

Set the Default Lock Screen Time Out to 15 minutes

By default, the iPad will lock after 2 minutes of inactivity. This can be a pain if it locks constantly. I would recommend setting the default time out to 15 minutes.

Change the Background to the Blank Black Image

The default iPad background is a colorful image, and almost all of the other background screen options are also colorful. These images are not very good, as the app titles are rendered in a white font, which makes it difficult to read the app’s name on a colorful background. However, the iPad has one built-in image that is just a blank black background image. Change the default background to this black background to make it easy to read the names of the apps without the extra color.

Set the Default Lock Screen Image to a Fun Family photo

While the background when the iPad is unlocked should be black to make it easy to read the app names, the lock screen image can be a fun family photo. When you set the photo, take note that the clock will take up the top third of the screen, so when you choose the dimensions of the photo, center the photo on the bottom of the screen.

Increase the Home Screen Apps Size

There are two sizes for displaying apps on the home screen — medium and large. Medium is the default. You can set the apps to be larger to make them easier to read. Do this.

Increase the Default Font Size

In the accessibility menu, you can bump up the default font size. I would recommend setting this to large or extra large.

Move all of the Junk Apple Apps into a Folder or Off the Main Page

The iPad contains a lot of junk pre-installed apps. I would suggest moving all of the apps that your family member will never use into a random other folder and move this to the 3rd page of apps. On the second page, I would have the Apple apps that the person might use, but probably won’t use. On the home screen, try to keep it to just the apps that the person will really use, and the fewer apps the better in making those apps stand out. Ideally, you only have say 16 apps, a 4 x 4 grid, which makes it easy to see your apps.

Change the iPad Default Dock Apps to just Mail and possibly iMessages

There are about 6–8 default apps in the dock of the iPad. This can be a lot. I would recommend removing most of them so that it is just the email app, or email and iMessage. That makes it simpler and easy to use. I would also recommend going into settings and turning of “Show Recommended Apps” so that only shows the preset ones.

Install Netflix and Amazon Prime

Your family member might be interested in watching say The Crown or Mrs. Maisel. Download those apps, sign in to them (create a Netflix profile if you have a free slot). For Netflix, find the shows that that person would like, and save them as “My List” so that they come up easily when the person opens the app.

For Amazon Prime, it’s much harder to use as Prime doesn’t support different profiles (so your saved stuff will be mixed in with their stuff), and the interface is much harder to use because Prime shows you every season of a show as a separate search result. However, with Prime, you can download all of the episodes of a show, and the downloads button is much easier to find and use. I would suggest downloading the shows that the person wants to use, and then recommending that they just use the Download button.

Install Zoom or other Video Call Apps

While FaceTime is great for individual family members, you may want a more heavy-duty video calling app for a group video call. If so, download Zoom or whatever else you’d like to use now. Make sure to test it out — you might want to say register a Zoom account for your family member now, so that they are all set up and don’t need to set that up later. With Zoom, you can email people links, which makes it easy to use.

Practice with Them

Once you do all of this set up, your family member will likely still need some practice to get comfortable using the iPad. I would suggest setting up a phone call where they practice calling you over FaceTime so that they learn how to do this. Once you’ve practiced a few times with them, they should hopefully be all set! It’s all worth it when they start FaceTiming you out of the blue to chat.

Staying Connected — How to Make an iPad Grandparent Friendly was originally published in Peter Gault on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Better Vision Through Training

From Futurity.org:

Children with poor vision see vast improvement in their peripheral vision after only eight hours of training using kid-friendly video games. Most surprising, scientists say, is the range of visual gains the children made were quickly acquired and stable when tested a year later.

“Children who have profound visual deficits often expend a disproportionate amount of effort trying to see straight ahead, and as a consequence they neglect their peripheral vision,” says Duje Tadin, associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester.

“When we realized that the students achieved up to 50 percent improvement in visual tasks, we were blown away.”

“This is problematic because visual periphery — which plays a critical role in mobility and other key visual functions — is often less affected by visual impairments.”

“We know that action video games (AVG) can improve visual perception, so we isolated the AVG components that we thought would have the strongest effect on perception and devised a kid-friendly game that compels players to pay attention to the entire visual field, not just where their vision is most impaired,” says Tadin, who is also a professor in the Center for Visual Science. “As a result, we’ve seen up to 50 percent improvement in visual perception tasks.”

Successful AVG players distribute and switch their attention across a wide area, while at the same time they remain vigilant for unexpected moving targets to appear, all while ignoring irrelevant stimuli.

To Build a Better Ballot

Nicky Case has built an interactive visualization for how various voting mechanisms work in different countries to illustrate how different systems would effect outcomes. By creating an interactive visualization, Nicky takes a dry subject and turns it into an engaging experience. He writes:

Rebuilding trust is a complex problem with no easy solutions. But I think there is an easy first step. It’s a step that could get rid of our “lesser of two evils” problem, and give us citizens more choices, better choices. And yet, it won’t be as daunting as fixing campaign finance or gerrymandering or lack of proportional representation, no, it’d just require changing a piece of paper, and how we count those pieces of paper.

Fantastic Educational Technology was originally published in Peter Gault on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Fake news is a serious threat to a democratic society, as democracy depends upon an informed public. As George Orwell states in Freedom of the Park,

“Governments make laws, but whether they are carried out, and how the police behave, depends on the general temper in the country. If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.”

It is not a coincidence that the rise of democracy in the 19th century happened in parallel with the rise of newspapers. Democracies depend upon a free press to disseminate information and create a public opinion.

Facebook is now the dominant platform for disseminating news on the web, with 44% of U.S. adults getting their news through it. As a leading source of news information, Facebook now has a civic responsibility to ensure that people have access to accurate information. While there is not a single strategy that solve this problem, a number of strategies can be used to separate truths from falsehoods, and in this article I present five strategies.

If you are skeptical about the harm of fake news, please check out this Business Insider article, “This is what fake news actually looks like — we ranked 11 election stories that went viral on Facebook.”

1. Use a “Page Rank” algorithm to Detect Trustworthiness

Google uses the PageRank algorithm to determine how pages should be ordered in Google Search. Sites with a long-standing reputation, such as the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, are ranked higher, while sites with unknown reputation are ranked lower. When the Facebook Timeline decides how to sort posts on a user’s Timeline, it should penalize articles that come from sites with an unknown reputation by showing them below trust worthy sources.

2. Slow Down the Speed of Political Posts

Falsehoods can often travel faster than the news’ can respond to them. For example, the fake post, “FBI Agent Suspected In Hillary Leaks Found Dead In Apparent Murder-Suicide,” reached over 500,000 shares before it could be de-bunked. On the other hand, trustworthy news sites receive a small fraction of the number of shares.

To counteract this problem, Facebook can simply add a time delay for frequently re-shared articles. For example, if I share a post that has already been shared 20,000 times, Facebook could add a one hour time delay between the time when I posted the article and the time you see it on your timeline. If you then share the article, it takes another hour before a 3rd person sees it on their timeline. By introducing a time delay, people can still share news, but it does not travel as quickly.

By adding this time delay, blatantly false posts cannot spread as quickly, such as the fake FBI murder-suicide story that got 500,000 re-shares. If the article makes a valid point, people can still share it and see it. However, by slowing down the process, it gives journalists time to rectify these errors. Furthermore, Facebook could also exempt verified sources from this time delay. Sites like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal would not be penalized, while unknown sites with questionable reputations would be.

If Facebook implements a time delay program, they should also publish a public log of every post that has been delayed and the time it has been delayed by. This enables the public to know exactly how Facebook is moderating the conversation and ensures that Facebook is using its power to control our understanding of the world responsibility.

3. Label Falsehoods

Facebook is full of falsehoods. For example, while taking a screenshot for this article I found a fake article about Mike Pence. The article states that Pence participated in conversion therapy, and a quick search on Snopes reveals that this is false. While it can often be difficult to distinguish truths from falsehoods, there are blatantly false posts that are profiting from the ability to outrage. When Snopes labels an article as false, Facebook should use that information to either label the article as false or punish the website by not showing posts from it. While many news articles are not blatantly false, there are plenty that are.

4. Label Scientifically Unverified Information

There are many scientifically false beliefs, such as beliefs about vaccinations or climate change, which cannot be easily labelled as false. These beliefs, however, are extremely dangerous as ignorant parents are putting their children’s lives at risk.

Ideally, we could put a warning label on any anti-vaccine post. For example, the article from healthfreedoms.org, posted above, is a false article written by a homeopath. However, it is difficult for an algorithm to determine whether an article is a pro-vaccine article or an anti-vaccine article. National Geographic Article published an article called, “The Anti-Vaccine Generation,” which details the rise of anti-vaccination beliefs over the last decade. The language in this article is similar to the healthfreedoms.org post, and an algorithm could not reliably distinguish the falsehood from the truth.

However, we do know that the article is about vaccinations, and we could simply put a warning label on any article that mentions a controversial scientific topic. For example, in any post about vaccines, Facebook could display a message from the American Academy of Pediatrics that links back to their site. Likewise, for articles on global warming, Facebook can utilize messages from NASA or the United Nations. Professional societies could provide a series of warnings based on common misconceptions, and Facebook could attach these warnings to its posts.

5. Show Opposing Viewpoints

Zuckerberg explains why this is a hard problem in stating,

“This is an area where I believe we must proceed very carefully though. Identifying the truth is complicated. While some hoaxes can be completely debunked, a greater amount of content, including from mainstream sources, often gets the basic idea right but some details wrong or omitted. An even greater volume of stories express an opinion that many will disagree with and flag as incorrect even when factual. I am confident we can find ways for our community to tell us what content is most meaningful, but I believe we must be extremely cautious about becoming arbiters of truth ourselves.”

This is a fair point, and there are many areas of the truth where Facebook will not be able to make a judgement. In these cases, however, Facebook tends to reinforce pre-conceived beliefs by only showing news that reinforces those beliefs. One of the most dangerous components of Facebook is that Facebook never challenges its readers to viewpoints different from their own. By letting the user have complete control over what information the user sees, and by building a timeline from scratch, people naturally build an echo chamber that conforms to the beliefs they already hold.

This mechanism is dangerous because it prevents from us from seeing and understanding the perspectives of others. We no longer consider the other, because there is no room for the other in our hermeneutic world. To challenge this, Facebook could show opposing viewpoints side by side. Finding these articles likely requires human moderation, but can be done by a transparent system where people show opposing sides. For example, here’s a sample of a debate on the Electoral College:

This isn’t an easy problem to solve, but the wellbeing of our democracy depends on it.

Please share your ideas below or reach out to me at peter (-at-) quill (-dot-) org to share your ideas.

Five Strategies Facebook Should Use to Combat False Information was originally published in Peter Gault on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

AI experts believe that computers will write as well as humans within the next 15 years. This means that any student will be able to input a poorly-written essay into a software program, which will analyze the text and reconstruct it as well-written, grammatically correct text. Since we use calculators as an extension of our minds, shouldn’t we also use AI software to become better writers?

This is not a hypothetical question. Across the world, teams of computer scientists are racing at a breakneck speed to construct advanced artificial intelligence that can automate thinking and writing. Last month, AlphaGo, the artificial intelligence program created by Google, beat the world-champion Lee Sodel in Go, a game that is so complex that there are more choices available in a single game than there are atoms in the entire universe. Until only a couple of months ago, researchers thought that Go was so complicated that it would be another ten years before an AI could defeat a world champion. However, AlphaGo exists now, and it’s able to assess problems and create complex solutions. In the future, AI software will be able to analyze student work and construct better text.

As a community, we now face a critical question: How should artificial intelligence be used to enhance education?

I believe that artificial intelligence should be used to enable students to ask questions and articulate thinking, but it should not be used to do the thinking for students, much like how calculators are used today. We should determine the educational value of an artificial intelligence program by the complexity of thinking it enables in learners.

In writing education, my area of focus, the first wave of AI writing tools is appearing. These products, such as WriteLab, flag poorly constructed sentences and offer suggestions for better versions of a text. Once a student inputs the suggestion, the suggestion disappears and the student moves on. These products don’t necessarily teach students how to write, they simply tell students how to fix bad writing.

Matthew Ramirez, the CEO of WriteLab, states, “[WriteLab] will give you your own thoughts back to you, but it will give you a clearer, more concise version of your own thoughts… We are taking your prose and re-constructing it to make it more effective.” By automatically fixing the student’s writing, it will appear as if the student is a good writer. However, the artificial intelligence technology is masking the student’s poor writing skills.

If we look at how spellcheck impacts students’ writing, we can see how software can hamper learning. Multiple studies have found that students make more writing errors when they rely on spellcheck. Studies conducted in 2003 and 2005 asked students to proofread a passage either with or without spellcheck. Students found twice as many errors when spellcheck was turned off, as the students were required to pay more careful attention to their work. With spell check we no longer have to think about the spelling of words.

Students’ stunt their own abilities when they do not consider the spelling of words. Catherine Snow et al. write, “Spelling and reading build and rely on the same mental representation of a word. Knowing the spelling of a word makes the representation of it sturdy and accessible for fluent reading.” Knowledge to Support the Teaching of Reading: Preparing Teachers for a Changing World. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass). Imagine a 3rd grader typing a paragraph on his laptop — every time he spells a word wrong, he uses auto-correct to fix the word. While it seems as if the student knows how to spell words correctly, the student is not internalizing the correct spelling. Likewise, if we automatically fix student writing, students will no longer have to think about their work, limiting the development of their writing skills.

I’m not suggesting that spell check should be abandoned. Instead, imagine spelling a word incorrectly and then being taught how to spell that word. Instead of seeing the red squiggly line, you could listen to a pronunciation of it, say it out loud yourself, and use it properly in a sentence. By creating these types of learning experiences, we are creating thinking rather than automating thinking.

Another way in which we can create more thinking is by inviting students to ask questions. In these exercises, students break down complex problems into questions, and AI assess the quality of these questions. Timothy Shanahan, a previous Director of Reading at the Chicago Public Schools, presents on his blog an example of how this thinking process works. Students are provided with a complex, 44 word sentence and have to unpack the meaning of the sentence by splitting the sentence into a series of questions:

“The women of Montgomery, both young and older, would come in with their fancy holiday dresses that needed adjustments or their Sunday suits and blouses that needed just a touch — a flower or some velvet trimming or something to make the ladies look festive.”

Students can then unpack this sentence into the following questions:

Which women? The women of Montgomery.

How old? Both Young and Old.

Which dresses? Their fancy holiday dresses.

Which suits or blouses? Suits or blouses that needed just a touch-a flower or some velvet trimming.

Having students unpack complicated sentences is a cognitively demanding thinking task, and students need these thinking skills. According a 2011 Department of Education study, 76 percent of eighth grade students are not proficient writers, and these students struggle to articulate complicated thoughts in writing. We will soon enter a world in which students will be able to rely upon computer programs to synthesize their thoughts into writing. By automatically improving student writing, it will appear as if students are becoming better writers. However, by judging the final answer rather than the thinking process, we may end up depriving students of the chance to develop their own thinking.

Many thinking processes are now becoming automated. Twenty years ago, every person needed to know how to read a map. Now, only 20 percent of young people know how to read one. With Google Maps and Apple Maps leading the way, we no longer think through maps. Likewise, self-driving cars are now driving through Europe and the United States, and, according to a recent New York Times article, they may be commonplace within the next ten years. It’s reasonable to expect that some children born today won’t know how to drive a car. This isn’t to say this is a bad thing — 200 years ago, 90 percent lived and worked on a farm, and most of us do not think we are worse off for not knowing agriculture. However, there is a critical difference between the thinking skills we need as workers and the thinking skills we need as citizens — with writing, we express our voice as citizens, and we will always need to posses this skill. As we enter into a world where thinking becomes automated, we must define which thinking skills we should always hold on too, even if a computer could automate these skills.

Here’s a call to arms to create more writing and thinking. What’s an example of an experience where you’ve experienced or created a meaningful thinking experience? Write your examples in the comments. By articulating what thinking is, we enable students to read deeply and think critically about the world around them.

What Happens When AI Can Write Better Than We Can? was originally published in Peter Gault on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

View the Interactive Visualization

“Within the five boroughs of modern New York alone, archaeologists have identified about eighty Lenape habitation sites, more than two dozen planting fields, and the intricate network of paths and trails that laced them all together.”

“On Manhattan, the primary trail ran along the island’s hilly spine from what is now Battery Park in the south to Inwood in the north. Just north of City Hall Park it passed by an encampment near a sixty-foot-deep pond, fed by an underground spring, which together with adjacent meadow and marsh lands almost bisected the island. Farther north, where the trail passed Greenwich Village, a secondary path led west to Sapokanikan, a site of fishing and planting on the Hudson River near the foot of Gansevoort Street.”

“At about 98th Street and Park Avenue the trail ran by a campsite known as Konaande Kongh and, on the broad flats of Harlem just to the north, still more fishing camps and planting fields. (From an East River landing at about 119th Street, fishermen paddled out in tree-trunk canoes to net or spear striped bass.)”

“Its northern terminus was a cluster of three camps along the Harlem River, two of which now actually lie on the mainland, severed from Manhattan by the Harlem Ship Canal.”

View the Interactive Visualization

Sources

Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace (1999). Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. Oxford University Press.
Dr. Eric Sanderson (2007). Mannahatta 1609. Wildlife Conservation Society, The Welikia Project.
Matt Fox (2010). Clean Earth. Google Earth Library.

Visualizing the Lenape Habitation Sites was originally published in Peter Gault on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Delian League was an alliance of Greek states formed in the aftermath of the Persia’s invasion of Greece.

View the Visualization

Athens and Sparta vie for influence in Greece. 431 BC marks the start of the Peloponnesian War.

View the Visualization

Pella, the birth place of Alexander the Great and capital of Macedonia. Alexander begins his conquest of Greece by reclaiming Poitdaea and then invading Thessaly and sacking Larissa.

View the Visualization

In 431 BC the Delian League controlled the coast of Anatolia (Turkey). Here you can see Troy and the Dardanelles straits. Alexander the Great began his conquest of Anatolia by crossing the Dardanelles.

View the Visualization

View the Visualization

Visualizing the Delian League: 451–431 BC was originally published in Peter Gault on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Measure — Growth in cotton exportation to England over the 19th century.

Click to Open the Visualization

Drag the slider to change the year.

This map illustrates the quantity of cotton exported each year, between 1790 and 1880, from India, Egypt, Brazil and the United States to England. This interactive map is inspired by Joseph Minard’s map of cotton exportation.

Click to Open the Visualization

Drag the slider to change the year.

Minard’s Original Map

Sources

Brian Mitchell (2003). International historical statistics: Europe 1750–2000. Palgrave Macmillan.
Brian Mitchell (2003). International historical statistics: Africa, Asia & Oceania: 1750–2000. Palgrave Macmillan.
Brian Mitchell (2003). International historical statistics: The Americas: 1750–2000. Palgrave Macmillan.

“Image a map of the entire world, with all of the data from the world plotted on.”

Visualizing 19th Century Cotton Trade was originally published in Peter Gault on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Let’s create a generation engaged in a world of ideas. These young people are not merely discussing their own lives, but rather engaging with the pressing issues our generation faces. This post contains real questions that we should debate and discuss.

What expectations should pet owners be held to?

1. Daily: How many dog owners walk their dogs every day?
2. Distance: How long are they are walking their dogs each day?
3. Outdoors: How much time are dogs spending outdoors?
4. Nature: How long are dogs going on extended, 6-hour nature walks?

What are the biggest cases of unjust punishment?

1. Sentence Length: For the same crime, how long are people spending incarcerated across the country and the world?
2. Exceptions: What is a (human curated) list of the most unjust instances of punishment?
3. Time to Trial: Which people have been waiting for a trial for unusually long periods of time?

How should companies policy free speech?

1. Should Apple be able to remove any app from its system that violates its taste?
2. Should Apple be able to remove an app that contains a confederate flag in a historical context?
3. When disagreements about issues like this arise, what is the process that Apple employs to adjudicate the issue?
4. What input should the developer community have upon the standards of the store?
5. What forms of speech should be protected in the App Store?
6. What are the consequences on free speech in the web’s open nature vs. Apple’s walled garden for app access?

On the Free Speech in a Open Web vs. the Closed Web — The web was built to allow people to freely express their opinions. In Apple’s walled garden, controversial issues become a corporate liability. Open systems enable the difficult, discursive process necessary to protect liberty.

On Apple Removing an App Containing a Confederate Flag — Apple removed an app that featured a Confederate Flag in a historical context, an action that seems to whitewash history. Apple can indiscriminately remove any app from its system that it finds distasteful. This puts Apple in a position of being the ultimate arbiter of morality and truth.

When should a CEO have the power to censor information?

1. Should Ellen Pao have removed the heinous subreddit Fatpeoplehate?
2. What should the formal process for removing a subreddit?
3. Can the community collaboratively decide what is acceptable and unacceptable speech on their platform?

There is no democratic process by which the users can collaboratively establish the values of the community. For example, the community can collaboratively create an extremely long, detailed list of acceptable and non-acceptable instances of speech, and through this set of standards, moderators have the license to remove content according to those standards.

What safeguards do we need against virtual reality video games?

With the power of virtual of virtual reality, video games in the next 10–20 years could become so immersive that the virtual experience will become indistinguishable from reality. These imaginary worlds give enormous power the creator, who can shape the mental landscape of the individual through the experience created.

1. What are the neurological consequences of virtual reality?
2. Can the overwhelming sensations from virtual reality lead to psychosis?

How do we balance the digital world with the read world?

The digital abyss is created by the all-consuming vortex of apps exhausting our attention. How long are people spending in the raw, untamed wild?

How well are various countries supporting renewable energy?

1. How is solar power distributed across the globe?
2. How do taxes and subsidies impact the economics of solar?
3. Which states are supporting solar? Which ones are hindering it?

How do we build communities in our modern, fractured world?

1. How do we bring people together into meaningful communities?
2. How do we solve the feeling of isolation?
3. How do we give people meaningful ways of working together?
4. How can we create communities that are small enough (and last long enough) that meaningful connections can form?
5. How do we sort and filter groups so that people are paired with others who can push one another and bring out the most in each one?
6. How do you we reorganize homes, apartments, and common spaces so that groups of people can meaningfully interact with each other?
7. How does a designed community support the right balance of human interaction and personal alone time?

What would it look like to have communal ownership of the means of production?

1. How do we ensure that everyone owns a piece of the technological revolution?
2. In a closed source world, will a group of super-rich emerge, with the rest living in poverty?
3. Will open source technology give everyone the means to live a joyful life without work?
4. How can we ensure that everyone owns the means of production?
5. Will a basic income suffice, instead of actual ownership of the tools?

What will we do in a post-labor world?

1. Games?
2. Science?
3. Art?
4. Music?

What are the most important questions for our generation? was originally published in Peter Gault on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Action — Define a “Bill of Rights” of user privacy standards all people should have to.

Web applications are tools — we use these tools to improve our lives. However, when we buy a tool in the physical world we own that tool — we can do whatever we please with it — our actions are our own. When I purchase a hammer, I can hammer whatever I want with it, building a house or adding a nail for a picture frame, with no one peeking over my shoulder seeing what I am building. When I’m in a restaurant, I have a right to have a conversation with my friends without every word being recorded by the restaurant, by a microphone embed within the cushions.

This isn’t true on the web.

While my thoughts, feelings, and dreams can be translated into economic value, my human right, my right to autonomy, guarantees that only I alone can possess these private things. When I express these things on the web, I ought to retain complete and private control over these things, rather than letting corporations have privilege to these details.

When any two parties interact, whether it is employer — employee, parent — child, or customer — business, each party has a series of rights that protects that party from malicious actions by the other actor. This has not always been the case (slavery, child labor, etc.). The triumph of the progressive movement has been a triumph of establishing rights for disenfranchised parties. On the web the consumer is the disenfranchised party — the consumer is the cattle — being bought and sold by advertising firms.

Consumers don’t care, and they don’t care because we haven’t yet experienced a moment of reckoning yet — the moment where the whole system blows up in someone’s face (Though we see foreshadowing). However, gradually the power dynamic is changing, so that our behavior can be monitored, bought, and sold. In this world human behavior will be contorted to fit into desired corporate behavior.

This is not the world that we want to live in, and the solution is simple: pay for privacy. If we want to own these tools, and our experiences using them, then we need to pay market rate for these tools.

However, as a starting point, we need to codify what counts as privacy. There are three general approaches that go hand in hand here: certification, legislation, and conversation.

Certification

The notion of certification is one on of confirmation. A company can have its code base audited by multiple external companies, to ensure that the company has built its program in such a way that personal data remains private. There are many different ways of building an app, and technologically it is possible to live in a world where our data is wholly our own. The challenge is ensuring each party is actually being held to these standards. Certifying a code base enables consumers to reward companies that have met those certifications.

Legislation

The notion of legislation is one of taking care of low hanging fruit. Government legislation may not be able to handle every use case of privacy, but it can certainly legislate against malicious actions. In the future we will need a digital bill of rights, potentially codified into the constitution, that explicate what rights we have to shield our data from both corporations and governments.

Conversation

However, these two solutions alone are not enough to truly solve this problem. The only way to truly solve this problem is to have a global conversation where we audit each company and come to a consensus, on a case by case basis, about which actions we find to be acceptable and unacceptable. Companies will always have a right to know certain things, with a line drawn somewhere.

For example, a company can have a camera set up at its entrance to prevent shoplifters from stealing items. However, that same camera company can’t use that camera + facial recognition technology to identify each consumer as they walk in, and then offer special prices based on that person’s profile. We have draw a line at every point at which we measure the world.

What examples can you think of permissible & impermissible tracking?

[Text input field here where the reader inputs an example to continue].

(However, we also recognize that camera can be a force for good. In violent urban areas people want to cameras because they help police capture criminals and prevent crime. A tool like a camera is not inherently good or bad. However, there is a fine line between what ought to be captured and what should be remain dark. There is always a balance, always a line that must be drawn and re-drawn. Justice for Walter Scott is achieved with the camera.)

Let’s get into the brass tacks. The generalized rule of thumb here ought to be that companies can track users anonymously, and they may personally identity them when specific situations (violence, theft) warrant intervention. However, companies do not have a right to track users in a personally identifiable manner in which a single individuals actions are harnessed and made available publicly — my conversations, my behavior, my work created, they are all my own. In this manner digital tools will empower individuals, rather than corral them into pens created by their corporations.

That I propose a generalized rule doesn’t mean that it is always clear what the rule should be. Rather there needs to be a discussion about each app, each tool, each company, where each of their practices are mapped out.

Questions

1. The Records: Exactly what information is being recorded & what information is not being recorded?
2. Time: How long is it being stored in the database?
3. Retention: Does the database wipe the information after a period of time?
4. Advertiser Access: Should Facebook sell your personal interests to advertisers?
5. Cookies: Should apps be able to drop cookies that report your browsing history?
6. Google Search Retention: How long should google store your search queries on its servers? Does it have a right to permanently store this information?
7. Right of Deletion: Can you browse with your history being permanently deleted?
8. Identity Recognition: Does a company have the right to employ facial recognition technology to identify its customers?
9. Encryption: Should Snapchat encrypt and then permanently delete the files that pass through its systems, so that a government request for info would be impossible to fulfill?
10. Fulfilling Law Enforcement Requests: Under what circumstances should be a website be able to share its information with law enforcement?

These questions scratch the tip of the iceberg. We are now entering a new era of humanity, and this problem will only be solved by large scale discussions among groups of people. These discussions are codified into standards that companies are then held accountable to.

In this way the human rights that we each hold dear — the rights that empower each individual to live a meaningful, independent life — will extend into the digital realm. We face a new digital feature which we must define our rights together. We will question which rights we have, measure which rights we are given, and impact by creating new norms.

Building Privacy on the Web was originally published in Peter Gault on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.