Courses, Tours, and Books Online–Many Free

by John Rudy

For the next couple of months,  we will all be spending a lot more time at home which gives us an opportunity to do things you might have thought about but not tried.  This post is certainly not complete, but it provides some thoughts.

Courses: About 10 years ago, I heard that there was going to be an online course on artificial intelligence taught by two Stanford Professors.   Course “chapters” would come out weekly, and the entire course would stay up for some number of months.  It was free, and you could watch at any time or even multiple times.  There were quizzes (computer graded) and, as I recall, a test at the end.  My memory is foggy, but something like 100,000 people signed up to take the course.  It was very difficult and heavily mathematical and wasn’t really what I wanted, so I skimmed the last half.  About 5000 people finished.  Some viewed that as a failure; I thought that 5000 finishing a course was fantastic.

At about the same time, MIT, Harvard, and Berkeley formed a company called EDX and started producing online courseware.  https://www.edx.org/   There are now something like 2500 courses available from EDX generated by around 140 universities.  Quality varies considerably as does technical depth.  Coursera https://www.coursera.org/  is a competitor with, I think, a similarly sized catalog.  UDEMY is another competitor.  Here is an article that contrasts all three.   https://medium.com/@EADCourses/udemy-vs-coursera-vs-udacity-vs-edx-online-courses-176b13f4bb68

In the last few years, some MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) have a charging option where a professor grades papers, and some places (I think Carnegie Mellon is one) even use them within a degree program.

I have taken maybe 20 MOOC courses.  Among them, I’ve taken The Science of Cooking from Harvard; Basic Genetics from MIT; Michael Sandel’s Harvard course on Justice;  three courses on the Civil War. One nice feature is that you can take just as much as you want.  If you know nothing about a subject, you might do the first half a dozen lectures and decide that the itch has been scratched.

TED Talks. www.Ted.com  I have listened to dozens of TED talks.  They are generally about 15 minutes long and you can easily look for those in a specific category, those put up most recently, or those that are the most popular.  The most popular ones have had millions of views.  I won’t list my favorites.

MUSEUM Tours.  Most museums and other cultural attractions are closed, but a phenomenon of the last few years has been the development of virtual tours.  They vary greatly in quality and in the amount of verbiage provided (written or aural).  Just start poking around.  Travel and Leisure has identified a dozen at https://www.travelandleisure.com/attractions/museums-galleries/museums-with-virtual-tours

Books.  There are lots of ways to get books as all of you know, and virtually everything is available through Kindle or a similar system.  There are many books that are available free, particularly those who have outlived the copyright.  That, of course, includes the “classics”.  My friend Steve Isenberg has compiled a rather long list of sites through which one can obtain free on-line books.  He has agreed to let me share it: https://wiki.toku.us/doku.php?id=free_ebooks

Let’s keep each other posted on good online activities for us to consider during these days at home.

A long-time technology expert and guide, John provides his helpful hints in this BOLLI Matters feature.  In the comment box below, provide him with questions,  comments, or suggestions about future tech items to cover. 

SOCIAL MEDIA MODERATORS:  NOT AN EASY JOB

by John Rudy

Ever since the last presidential election, there has been considerable discussion about what limits should be placed on content made available through Facebook, YouTube, and other social media platforms.   Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and others have been castigated for not doing enough to delete inappropriate content.  Of course, the word “inappropriate” is not viewed identically by everyone.  And, of course, there is the fact that we do take pride in our right of free speech.  The murders in New Zealand a few months ago added another dimension to this discussion as the government insisted that all video of the murders be instantly deleted.

What has not been discussed is the role that thousands of lowly paid employees perform in order to help these social media platforms to monitor or self regulate the nature of their content.   This article helps us to better understand what these social media moderators must do on a daily basis.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona

As everyone knows, it is very easy to post material to any of the social media sites. https://www.internetlivestats.com/twitter-statistics/ says that there are over 500 million Twitter posts per day.  https://blog.microfocus.com/how-much-data-is-created-on-the-internet-each-day/ says that “more than 4 million hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every day, with users watching as many as 5.97 billion hours of those videos on a daily basis.”  In addition, 67,305,600 Instagram posts are uploaded each day.  And over 2 billion people, monthly, become active Facebook users.

It is impossible, at this point, for social media moderators to view all of that material for “inappropriate” content.

Just thought you’d want to know as you think about how this might be constrained.

A long-time technology expert and guide, John provides his helpful hints in this monthly BOLLI Matters feature.  In the comment box below, provide John with questions,  comments, or suggestions for future tech items to cover. 

john.rudy@alum.mit.edu (781-861-0402)

ARE CELL PHONES SAFE?

by John Rudy

No.  Cell phones are not safe.

Ever since they were invented, we have heard from supposed “experts” that, because they emit radiation, cell phone use causes cancer, brain damage, or any number of other calamitous conditions.   But that is simply not true.  The FCC has summarized a host of reputable studies which make it clear that there is no conclusive connection between these conditions and mobile phone use.   And when it comes to radiation, what cell phones emit is non-ionizing and low frequency.  Even with the future advent of 5G,  this will still be true.

For those who would like to see material about cell phone emissions, the following two articles are very good.

https://www.broadcastingcable.com/news/fcc-ok-with-current-cell-phone-emission-levels and

https://www.fcc.gov/general/specific-absorption-rate-sar-cellular-telephones

No, the safety issues connected with cell phone use have to do with the fact that people continue to use them when walking, crossing the street, biking, driving, sitting in waiting rooms, or even having dinner with friends and family.

A long-time technology expert and guide, John provides his helpful hints in this monthly BOLLI Matters feature.  In the comment box below, provide John with questions,  comments, or suggestions for future tech items to cover. 

john.rudy@alum.mit.edu (781-861-0402)

Your Digital Data:  Thinking and Planning for Incapacity or Death

All of us have a lot of personal digital data available to us that may not be available to others .  Let’s start with a sample of the various categories:

• You have files on your home computer, tablet, or smart phone. These may be photos, tax returns, passwords, etc.  In general, nothing will happen to these if you die and (1) IF SOMEONE HAS THE APPROPRIATE PASSWORDS TO ENTER THESE DEVICES and (2) knows the names of the important files.  You probably have thousands of files, and you might not have set up a file structure or named them in a way that is obvious to your heirs.
• Professionals such as stock brokers, bankers, accountants, and lawyers have your files, and their protection systems are probably robust. In most cases, I suspect that you do not duplicate on your systems the data that they have on theirs, relying on your ability to log into their systems.  But can this data be shared?
• You might have data with social media environments that your family doesn’t want to lose. Let’s limit ourselves to Facebook for now, but that, of course, is not the only social media platform out there.
• You have email IDs that could be closed down.

Discussing all these areas in detail is complicated, and you not only have to be proactive, but you also have to understand any pertinent US or state laws that protect this data.  I’m going to provide my thoughts on a number of these issues, but I do not claim to understand all the laws that are in effect.  And some of these laws might differ by locale.

1. Try to set up your computer folders so they are readable. At the top level. have something called PICTURES or PHOTOS and store all your photos in sub-files under this.  Have a file called TAXES and do a similar thing.  Then document what you have done and ensure that your heirs have a copies.
2. Have a Password file, with all your passwords. It is best that you use a password manager, but, if not, set up an Excel list.  Keep it hidden, but be sure that your heirs have copies.  If you are sick or die, others may need to get into these accounts.
3. If you die, some applications will become aware of it. Here is an example that affects me.  MIT provides me with an email address which I can link to whatever normal email I am currently using.  MIT also has a web crawler that looks across the Internet for obits of their graduates.  Six months after I die, MIT will cancel this forwarding service, and my heirs will be unaware that any messages sent to that address will bounce back.  That means that I better make sure that my heirs pay proper attention to all incoming messages for 6 months so that they can inform folks of the proper email address to use in the future.
4. Companies like Facebook say that they close your page when you die. Is that what you want?  Here is an interesting article on the Facebook situation:  https://www.lifewire.com/facebook-account-after-you-die-4103721 There is even a Facebook app you can download, called “If I die,” that you can set up at any point before your death to control what happens.
5. Do you want your spouse to have access to your calendar if something happens to you? This might be useful if you would want appointments cancelled or colleagues informed.  Of course, you should be sure that your spouse has access to your address book.
6. I recently read the following in a newsletter: “Merely scribbling down your passwords on a sheet of paper isn’t always enough. In many cases, your relatives are still legally prohibited from accessing your account without express permission. Thankfully, 41 states have adopted laws that allow you to declare who has access to what data—as long as you include a provision in your will or revocable trust and your power of attorney specifies that they can have access”   Who would think of that?

I am not a lawyer, so I do not know what the legalities are (and they might be different for different states) for allowing your broker or bank or attorney to share data with a designated person.  I have personally addressed this problem by making my heirs trustees for my accounts.  You might ask whether a letter from you is sufficient to provide access (and whether it is effective for both death and disability).

While you are thinking about your digital assets, it might be appropriate to include your heirs’ names on a checking account and on the checks, so that they can pay bills on your behalf if you are incapacitated or die.  Obviously, you must think carefully about who you provide any of this linkage/access to.

And lastly, this is not a one-time endeavor. You should periodically review your approach and attempt to see whether the environment within which you operate has changed.

A long-time technology expert and guide, John provides his helpful hints in this monthly BOLLI Matters feature.  In the comment box below, provide John with questions,  comments, or suggestions future tech items to cover. 

john.rudy@alum.mit.edu (781-861-0402)