Konrad Kollnig
Even before the current movement, Iāve often asked myself what my country of origin, Germany, has learned from the Third Reich. Has the past given us some level of immunity for the future? Iāve got my doubts, but also think thereās hope.
Tracking, the collection of data about user behaviour, is widespread on the web. For this reason, the idea of a āDo-Not-Trackā (DNT) setting emerged a little more than a decade ago, in 2009.
This system gives users a simple choice to reject and accept online tracking. Unfortunately, DNT failed, and tracking continues.
I explore the reasons for this failure, but also how DNT has managed to change user privacy for the better, on the blog of the HCC group at the University of Oxford.
YouTube plays an increasingly important role as a political medium. Yet, the implications are to-date not well understood and difficult to analyse, since access to YouTubeās statistics is limited.
To address this gap, my friend Yury Kolotaev and I surveyed 124 people about their views and experiences around YouTubeās political influence.
Our results reveal diverse, sometimes conflicting views on YouTubeās growing political role, and highlight the need for more research, discussion and possibly regulation.
Read our full account on Medium.
Today, itās my birthday and Iām spending it by myself, self-isolating. And thatās alright. In fact, I love it.
The whole world out there seems to be going crazy these days. But, time will come. Things will work out again.
Itās interesting to take the crisis as an opportunity. It shows us how fragile and endless life is. What does really matter?
Living abroad, I donāt usually spent much time with my friends and friend from home. So, I wanted to make my birthday a special occasion and have a proper get together for my birthday, my first birthday party in 4 years.
I didnāt have a party, but itās been special notwithstanding.
My family reached out to me on FaceTime, and so did many of my friends.
Whilst spatially apart, Iāve never felt this emotionally to my loved ones.
Weāre finally taking time for another again, rather than always chasing something, prestige, success, whatever..
But, in times of crisis, this all doesnāt seem to matter anymore. What matters is the foundation of our existence.
I am full of hope that the crisis will end up changing society for the better.
This hope is likewise fear. Once the wind has settled, many things will quickly return to normality.
Letās stay foolish.
This week, I started off learning about RMarkdown. RMarkdown allows you to combine code and text. Pretty cool! You can analyse data in R or Python, and then use the results as variables in your text. This text can easily be compiled to various formats, including pdf, docx, and html. Hence, this article, too, was written in RMarkdown. I could upload it with ease. Find the pdf version here:
Probabilistic topic modelling is a method to categorise a given set of documents, that is a collection of texts. Such a set of documents could be a collection of news articles. Every news article would then be assigned a topic. A topic is a group of documents that use similar words. An example of a topic could be āparliamentā, āgovernmentā, āspendingā, so a politics topic.