Ever wondered how fast the rivers are flowing in the UK? Me neither, but it’s an interesting presentation from Matt Gluf, reminiscent of Cameron Beccario’s visualisation of the globe’s wind speeds and ocean currents.
Tag: data
Facebook’s leaky data problem
Vice have seen a leaked document written by Facebook privacy engineers which sounds the alarm on how they deal with users’ data.
Facebook doesn’t know what it does with your data, or where it goes: Leaked document – Vice
“We’ve built systems with open borders. The result of these open systems and open culture is well described with an analogy: Imagine you hold a bottle of ink in your hand. This bottle of ink is a mixture of all kinds of user data (3PD, 1PD, SCD, Europe, etc.) You pour that ink into a lake of water (our open data systems; our open culture) … and it flows … everywhere,” the document read. “How do you put that ink back in the bottle? How do you organize it again, such that it only flows to the allowed places in the lake?”
An interesting analogy. Stop polluting the lake?
Photo by Jenn Wood
Another Monday, another coffee
The start of another week. But what is a week, really? Here’s an essay on how we came to depend on the week despite its artificiality.
How we became weekly – Aeon
Weeks serve as powerful mnemonic anchors because they are fundamentally artificial. Unlike days, months and years, all of which track, approximate, mimic or at least allude to some natural process (with hours, minutes and seconds representing neat fractions of those larger units), the week finds its foundation entirely in history. To say ‘today is Tuesday’ is to make a claim about the past rather than about the stars or the tides or the weather. We are asserting that a certain number of days, reckoned by uninterrupted counts of seven, separate today from some earlier moment. And because those counts have no prospect of astronomical confirmation or alignment, weeks depend in some sense on meticulous historical recordkeeping. But practically speaking, weekly counts are reinforced by the habits and rituals of other people. When those habits and rituals were radically obscured or altered in 2020, the week itself seemed to unravel.
History professor David Henkin explores the background of this man-made construction and highlights the impact the pandemic has had on our experience of it. Though it’s mainly from a US perspective, they’ve chosen to head up the article with a glorious photo from my own county in the north of England.
Wherever the week has come from, it starts with coffee for most of us. But how many, that’s the question. Let Judit Bekker and David Lynch answer that for you.
Live-blogging a new project – Data muggle
I might sound like a broken record, but this year I got super crazy about Twin Peaks, and I can only viz about the things that interest me. So here it is: I’m gonna count all the damn fine coffees that were drunk in all 3 series. It’s 50+ hours of content, so my mind might just go to the Black Lodge by the time I finish. But there are not that many Twin Peaks data sets lurking around to be downloaded from the internet.
And here’s the final data visualisation of the 258 damn fine coffees she saw being enjoyed in Twin Peaks, which you can also see and interact with on Tableau Public.
Lucy in the sky with asteroids
Well done to the data team at The Economist, having to visualise a 12-year journey of a space probe as it makes a flying visit to eight different asteroids. They’ve made a very complicated journey look quite straightforward and elegant.
A probe intended to study the Trojan asteroids takes off – The Economist
Lucy, as this planetary-ancestor-investigating mission is dubbed, after a well-known specimen of Australopithecus, an early hominid, blasted off from Cape Canaveral, in Florida, and will now follow one of the most complex paths around the solar system yet devised by NASA’s orbital navigators. The diagram which shows Lucy’s journey, indicates how the craft will first pick up speed using two velocity-boosting fly-bys of Earth. It will then head for the Greek camp, passing, for a practice run at observation, by way of a convenient main-belt asteroid that the mission’s scientists have named Donaldjohanson, in honour of the discoverer of Lucy the Australopithecine. When it arrives at L4 in 2027, it will encounter five bodies: Eurybates and its tiny satellite Queta, Polymele, Leucus and Orus. Having examined each of these, it will leave the Greek camp in 2028 and cross, via another velocity-boosting fly-by of Earth, to the Trojan camp at L5. Its final planned encounter, when it reaches L5 in 2033, is with Patroclus and Menoetius.
Fortunately, they were able to call on the team at NASA’s Scientific Visualisation Studio for help.
Lucy mission trajectory – NASA Scientific Visualization Studio
Lucy will launch in October 2021 and, with boosts from Earth’s gravity, will complete a twelve-year journey to eight different asteroids — a Main Belt asteroid and seven Jupiter Trojans, the last two members of a “two-for-the-price-of-one” binary system. Lucy’s complex path will take it to both clusters of Trojans and give us our first close-up view of all three major types of bodies in the swarms (so-called C-, P- and D-types).
Sending a message to WhatsApp
WhatsApp fined $267 million for breaching EU privacy law – The Verge
Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) announced the decision in an 89-page summary (PDF), noting that WhatsApp did not properly inform EU citizens how it handles their personal data, including how it shares that information with its parent company.
WhatsApp hit with €225M privacy fine – Politico
Ireland’s data regulator on Thursday fined WhatsApp €225 million for violating Europe’s privacy rules — a more than four-fold increase in the penalty compared to what the watchdog had initially proposed.
Ireland watchdog fines WhatsApp record sum for flouting EU data rules – The Guardian
Four “very serious” infringements violated the core of GDPR, said Dixon. “They go to the heart of the general principle of transparency and the fundamental right of the individual to protection of his/her personal data which stems from the free will and autonomy of the individual to share his/her personal data in a voluntary situation such as this.” The violations affected an “extremely high” number of people, said the watchdog.
Adrian Weckler explains WhatsApp’s €225m fine – Independent.ie: YouTube
The Irish Data Protection Commissioner has imposed a €225m fine on Facebook-owned Whatsapp, Europe’s second largest penalty so far under GDPR privacy laws. However, it did so only after being ordered to raise the amount by an EU data oversight board.
WhatsApp fined €225m for not telling users how it shared data with Facebook – Financial Times
The WhatsApp ruling came after Luxembourg fined Amazon a record €746m in July for breaching GDPR and Ireland fined Twitter €450m in December for not informing regulators about a data leak within 72 hours. The Irish Data Protection Commission has more than two dozen ongoing investigations into big tech companies. Amazon has said it will appeal against its fine.
Facebook: Let us tell you WhatsApp – we don’t want to pay that €225m GDPR fine – The Register
It’s reported to be the heftiest fine ever issued by the DPC and the second-largest handed out under EU data protection laws. It’s also small change for WhatsApp’s parent Facebook, which made a $30bn profit in its latest financial year. The fine is about one per cent of the social network’s annual net income. […]
As well as the fine, the DPC has also ordered WhatsApp to take “a range of specified remedial actions” which some sources claim could make privacy policies even less user friendly.
The past, present and future of data analysis
Some interesting reads, courtesy of The Economist’s data analysis newsletter, Off The Charts. Let’s start with this question — are glasses-wearers really less conscientiousness than those who wear a headscarf?
Objective or Biased: On the questionable use of Artificial Intelligence for job applications – BR24
Software programs promise to identify the personality traits of job candidates based on short videos. With the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI) they are supposed to make the selection process of candidates more objective and faster. An exclusive data analysis shows that an AI scrutinized by BR (Bavarian Broadcasting) journalists can be swayed by appearances. This might perpetuate stereotypes while potentially costing candidates the job.
Here, Stephanie Evergreen makes a solid, essential case for broadening our view of data visualisation and its history. I’ve mentioned khipus here before, but not within this context.
Decolonizing Data Viz – Evergreen Data
When we talked about these khipu and other forms of indigenous data visualization in a recent panel (with January O’Connor (Tlingit, Kake, Alaska), Mark Parman (Cherokee), & Nicky Bowman (Lunaape/Mohican)), someone in the audience commented, “It made me reflect on traditional Hmong clothing and how my ancestors have embroidered certain motifs on traditional clothing to communicate one’s clanship, what dialect of Hmong one spoke, marital status, everyday life, etc.” And this is one reason why it is so critically important to decolonize data visualization. When white men decide what counts (and doesn’t count) in terms of data, and what counts (and doesn’t count) as data visualization, and what counts (and doesn’t count) as data visualization history, they are actively gaslighting Black and Brown people about their legacy as data visualizers. When we shine a light on indigenous data visualization, we are intentionally saying the circle is much much wider and, as Nicky Bowman said, “There’s room for everyone in the lodge.”
After reconciling the past, let’s look to the future.
Who will shape the future of data visualization? Today’s kids! – Nightingale
Graphs are everywhere. So, with the proper instruction, I’d expect today’s kids to become adults that are more proficient at visualizing and interpreting data than today’s adults. Besides parents, teachers, or friends, news organizations also play a role in shaping today’s kids. As Jon pointed out, news organizations can do a great job explaining to us how to read more advanced graphs.
On the other hand, as Sharon and Michael mentioned, because graphs are everywhere, there’s a danger for kids to start thinking that graphs are objective. So it is important for adults to start teaching kids how to think critically, to not necessarily accept the graph and the data at face value. In other words, it’s essential for kids to develop a toolbox. This is good for them and good for democracy — eventually, today’s kids will become more informed citizens.
Something I’m sure Jonathan Schwabish would agree with.
Oops! I did it again
Whilst MI5 gets accused of unlawfully handling their data, the police just lose theirs.
Home Office urged to explain 150,000 arrest records wiped in tech blunder – The Times
Priti Patel has been urged to explain an “extraordinarily serious security breach” after The Times revealed a technology blunder wiped more than 150,000 fingerprint, DNA and arrest history records off police databases. The error may allow offenders to go free because biometric evidence left at crime scenes will not be flagged up on the Police National Computer (PNC).
Priti Patel under fire as 150,000 police records accidentally lost – The Guardian
The Home Office released a statement from the policing minister, Kit Malthouse, but the shadow home secretary, Nick Thomas-Symonds, said this was not good enough and called on Patel to provide an urgent statement.
Don’t worry about it, though. They’ll have that deleted data back in no time.
Police scrambling to recover more than 150,000 records wiped from UK database – The Independent
The policing minister, Kit Malthouse, said Home Office and law enforcement officials were working “at pace to recover the data”. “While the loss relates to individuals who were arrested and then released with no further action, I have asked officials and the police to confirm their initial assessment that there is no threat to public safety,” he added. “A fast time review has identified the problem and corrected the process so it cannot happen again.”
Dratted ‘housekeeping’, eh? 150k+ records deleted off UK’s Police National Computer database – The Register
It is reported that Home Office staff are trying to get some of the deleted information back. This implies, strongly, that they cannot simply restore the deleted information from backup files.
Well, as has been pointed out on Twitter, accidents happen.
Britain destroyed records of colonial crimes – The Guardian
Review finds thousands of papers detailing shameful acts were culled, while others were kept secret illegally.
And happen.
114 child sex files linked to MPs have ‘vanished’ – Express
A total of 114 files linked to allegations of paedophile activity in Westminster may have been destroyed, MPs were told yesterday.
And happen.
Grenfell files ‘lost forever’ after laptop wiped, inquiry hears – ITV News
Some emails, documents and design drawings relating to the Grenfell Tower refurbishment appear to have been lost forever after being wiped from a laptop, the inquiry into the fire has heard.
And happen.
Home Office destroyed Windrush landing cards, says ex-staffer – The Guardian
Evidence of UK arrivals discarded despite case worker protests, says former employee.
Update – 16/01/2021
A day later and that initial total is now seen as a little on the low side.
Starmer urges home secretary to ‘take responsibility’ as it emerges 400,000 police records deleted in ‘human error’ – Sky News
Home Secretary Priti Patel has come under fire since it was first reported by The Times that 150,000 records were lost, although it is now understood the figure is much higher. Some 213,000 offence records were wiped from the Police National Computer, along with 175,000 arrest records and 15,000 person records.
Police probes compromised after computer records deleted – BBC News
[The letter from the National Police Chiefs’ Council] says that some of the records had been marked for indefinite retention following earlier convictions for serious offences. And it reveals that a “weeding system”, developed and deployed by a Home Office PNC team, started to delete records wrongly last November. The process was only brought to a halt at the start of this week. […]
It comes after about 40,000 alerts relating to European criminals were removed from the PNC following the UK’s post-Brexit security deal with the EU.
BA bargains
A year ago I shared an article about British Airways being fined a record £183,000,000 by the ICO for a data breach in 2018. Here’s an update to that story.
BA fined record £20m for customer data breach – The Guardian
The fine is the biggest ever issued by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), but a fraction of the £183m fine initially announced last year. This was reduced after investigators accepted BA’s representations about the circumstances of the attack; and was reduced further to take into account the dire financial position of BA since the onset of Covid-19.
They’re not having an easy time, to say the least. I wonder how successful this auction was for them.
Hit hard by travel disruptions, British Airways will sell a $1 million Bridget Riley painting and 16 other works at Sotheby’s this month – ArtNet News
The painting, titled Cool Edge, carries no guarantee and is estimated to bring in between £800,000 and £1.2 million ($1 million to $1.5 million) at the July 28 “Rembrandt to Richter” evening sale. It was previously on view in a luxury lounge at Heathrow airport in London. […]With the exception of Terry Frost’s 1997 painting Colour Down the Side 1968, which is expected to go for £20,000 to £30,000 ($25,000 to $37,000), each work in the online sale is estimated below £15,000 ($19,000).
Well, that Bridget Riley looks to have sold for £1,875,000. That would have helped towards that ICO fine…
Photo Sotherby’s
You can count on them to help
Meet the Excel warriors saving the world from spreadsheet disaster – Wired UK
Research suggests more than 90 per cent of spreadsheets have errors, and half of spreadsheet models used in large businesses have “material defects”. Given some 750 million people use Excel globally, there are plenty of errors needing attention. One prominent researcher calls spreadsheets the dark matter of corporate IT. And that’s why people like Lyford-Smith have become defenders of the spreadsheet, mitigating the risks by fixing everyone else’s mistakes.
And off we go
The US Presidential election is just around the corner, and here, via FlowingData, are a couple of links to get us started.
FiveThirtyEight launches 2020 election forecast – FlowingData
The election is coming. FiveThirtyEight just launched their forecast with a look at the numbers from several angles. Maps, histograms, beeswarms, and line charts, oh my.Who can vote by mail – FlowingData
There’s going to be a lot more voting by mail this year. The New York Times shows what each state is doing. It’s a cartogram. So it must be election season.
Flying high with stolen data
The last post I shared about data theft was back in October (that seems like years ago now), but the subject’s not gone away, of course.
EasyJet says hackers stole data of 9 million customers – Bloomberg
Cyber-attacks against businesses and their employees have surged this year as hackers take advantage of the disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic. While the EasyJet breach was discovered in late January, predating the disease’s flare-up across Europe, the company is alerting those whose exposure was limited to email and travel details to guard against a rising number of so-called phishing attempts, a person familiar with the situation said.
It wasn’t just a few credit cards: Entire travel itineraries were stolen by hackers, Easyjet now tells victims – The Register
It also warned victims to be on their guard against phishing attacks by miscreants using the stolen records, especially if any “unsolicited communications” arrived appearing to be from Easyjet or its package holidays arm.
You’d think the Information Commissioner’s Office would be busier than ever.
It looks like the UK’s data regulator has given up, blaming coronavirus – Wired UK
In April, the ICO said it would focus on the most serious cases during the pandemic and consider the impact of the wider situation on companies under investigation, but called for organisations to continue to report breaches as it was still operating. But in reality, observers claim, it has almost completely stopped operating.
But it’s worth noting that that article was subsequently updated to, in effect, completely contradict its own headline.
[F]ollowing the publication of this story, an ICO spokesperson said it “is not true” that the body has stopped work on complaints and investigations. “Since the Covid-19 pandemic started, we have only paused under ten per cent of cases and investigations,” the spokesperson said. “These are specific cases where progressing regulatory activity may not be possible or appropriate during a global public health emergency.” The spokesperson added that it continues to “look into” all complaints and data breach reports it receives. It is “focusing on the information rights issues that are likely to cause the most harm or distress to people and organisations”.
Don’t hit them when they’re down
I know that the coronavirus has dominated articles I’ve shared on this blog recently, but that’s pretty much all I can find to read. I’ve not posted anything about data protection in a while, so here’s something from the USA—albeit still about that virus. (via Boing Boing)
Small businesses seeking loans may have had personal data exposed – CNBC
The SBA notified nearly 8,000 business owners of the potential inadvertent disclosure of information, which included names, Social Security numbers, tax identification numbers, addresses, dates of birth, email, phone numbers, marital and citizenship status, household size, income, disclosure inquiry and financial and insurance information, according to a letter sent to business owners, which CNBC obtained. […]If the user attempted to hit the page back button, he or she may have seen information that belonged to another business owner, not their own. The official said that 4 million small business owners applied for $383 billion in aid via the EIDL program and emergency grants. The two programs are funded for just $17 billion.
The affected businesses have been offered identity theft protection services for a year.
Visualising change
Who knows how all this will end, it’s all guesswork. Will the final figures for the UK be between 7,000 and 20,000? Perhaps as high as 66,000? Depends on your model. Can we at least say for certain that this will end at some point? Are things already slowing down?
Three graphs that show a global slowdown in COVID-19 deaths – The Conversation
Other published graphs have shown the number of deaths reported each day for various countries. These are more useful, but the reader is still left trying to discern the extent to which the rise from one day to the next is larger or smaller. The graph below is different. It shows both the number of deaths each day and the rate of change in that number. Most importantly, it uses smoothed data – a moving average from the day before to the day after each date shown.
OK. I think I follow that.
Here’s something simpler that caught my eye, a way of looking at one of the (positive?) effects of this pandemic.
Traffic data shows how rush hour has all but disappeared in major cities in Britain (and ROW) – Reddit
No more rush hour. Declining vehicle usage in cities across the world means journeys at rush hour are almost as quick as those in the middle of the night.
Get your point across by flattening it
As an example of the power of effective data visualisation, it’s hard to beat. Here’s a little background on the diagram that’s all over the internet.
The story behind the coronavirus ‘flatten the curve’ chart – Fast Company
The first instance of Flatten the Curve can be found in a paper called Interim pre-pandemic planning guidance: community strategy for pandemic influenza mitigation in the United States: early, targeted, layered use of nonpharmaceutical interventions, and no, it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. Published in 2007 by the CDC, the paper was a preview to a pandemic like COVID-19, and it suggested simple interventions like social distancing and keeping kids home from school in order to slow the spread of a disease so that the healthcare system could keep up. […]
Pearce breathed new life into the CDC graphic. Then Harris added an anchor, a single line, that articulated its significance. But it was Dr. Siouxsie Wiles who took the final step: She demonstrated the possibility that everyday people really could make a meaningful difference in slowing the spread of COVID-19. To do this, she transformed the graphic into two futures, each caused by a mentality: ignore it or take precautions. Wiles transformed the graphic into the perfect response to the polarized nature of COVID-19 across social media, in which people were either in full prep mode or far too skeptical that the pandemic was even real.
It’s not the first of its kind, though.
This chart of the 1918 Spanish flu shows why social distancing works – Quartz
The extreme measures—now known as social distancing, which is being called for by global health agencies to mitigate the spread of the novel coronavirus—kept per capita flu-related deaths in St. Louis to less than half of those in Philadelphia, according to a 2007 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Putting Covid-19 into perspective
Here’s another way of visualising the numbers connected with the coronavirus.
Just how contagious is COVID-19? This chart puts it in perspective – Popular Science
One quantity scientists use to measure how a disease spreads through a population is the “basic reproduction number,” otherwise known as R0 (pronounced “R naught,” or, if you hate pirates, “arr not”). This number tells us how many people, on average, each infected person will in turn infect. While it doesn’t tell us how deadly an epidemic is, R0 is a measure of how infectious a new disease is, and helps guide epidemic control strategies implemented by governments and health organizations.If R0 is less than 1, the disease will typically die out: Each infected person has a low chance of passing the infection along to even one additional individual. An R0 larger than 1 means each sick person infects at least one other person on average, who then could infect others, until the disease spreads through the population. For instance, a typical seasonal flu strain has an R0 of around 1.2, which means for every five infected people, the disease will spread to six new people on average, who pass it along to others.
Here’s more on that.
What is the coronavirus’s R0 and why does it matter? – Life Hacker
R0 is one of the numbers epidemiologists use to describe how an infectious agent spreads through a population. But it’s important to remember that it’s simply a statistic that describes some of the numbers we see. It’s not a rating of how scary a virus is, nor does it dictate how deadly a disease is or how difficult it might be to contain. We need more information for that.
And another way of comparing such things, from 2014.
Visualised: how Ebola compares to other infectious diseases – The Guardian
Every disease has a basic reproduction number but the numbers are scattered across the literature. We’ve web-crawled and gathered them all here in one graphic, plotting them against the average case fatality rate – the % of infectees who die. This hopefully gives us a data-centric way to understand the most infectious and deadly diseases and contextualise current events.
Visualising our plastic problem
I’m sure I’m not the only one who has difficulty visualising large numbers. It can make the significance of some news stories hard to grasp, especially environmental ones.
By comparing the number of plastic bottles sold around the world to such things as a rubbish truck, the Eiffel Tower, and even Manhattan, Reuters have published a very effective way of getting across ridiculous statistics like 54,900,000 bottles sold every hour, 1,300,000,000 sold every day, and 481,600,000,000 sold every year. (via Cool Infographics)
Drowning in plastic: Visualising the world’s addiction to plastic bottles – Reuters
Around the world, almost 1 million plastic bottles are purchased every minute. As the environmental impact of that tide of plastic becomes a growing political issue, major packaged goods sellers and retailers are under pressure to cut the flow of the single-use bottles and containers that are clogging the world’s waterways.
Leave us alone
Hot on the heels of Robot Day is Data Protection Day, initiated by the Council of Europe in 2007.
Data Protection Day – Council of Europe
The Council of Europe is celebrating this year the 14th edition of Data Protection Day. This initiative aims to raise the individuals awareness about good practices in this field, informing them about their rights and how to exercise them.Joint statement by Vice-President Jourová and Commissioner Reynders ahead of Data Protection Day – European Commission
Data is becoming increasingly important for our economy and for our daily lives. With the roll-out of 5G and uptake of the Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things technologies, personal data will be in abundance and with potential uses we probably can’t imagine. While this offers amazing opportunities, some cases show that robust rules are needed to address clear risks for individuals and for our democracies. In Europe we know that strong data protection rules are not a luxury, but a necessity. […]20 months after the entry into application of the landmark General Data Protection Regulation, we see that the GDPR has acted as a catalyst to put data protection at the centre of many of the on-going policy debates. It is a cornerstone of the European approach underpinning several political priorities of the new Commission promoting a human centric approach to Artificial Intelligence and other digital technologies. European Data Protection rules will therefore be a foundation and inspiration for the success of key initiatives in artificial intelligence, health or mobility to name just a few.
Part of me wants to find out how our leaving the EU on Friday will affect this, but a larger part of me is too fed up with the whole stupid act of national self-harm to bother.
Happy “Data Privacy Day” – Now read The New York Times privacy project about total surveillance – Forbes
The shocking thing about the obvious and growing loss of privacy is how unconcerned everyone is. Technologists started “snooping” around servers, desktops and data bases years ago to understand the status of hardware and software and how they should be managed. Enterprise snooping is still a best practice. But snooping is now central to entire national and global business models, and has emerged with a scary name: surveillance capitalism. No one predicted how pervasive snooping would become. No one predicted just how much profit snooping would generate, and no one predicted how entire populations would essentially shrug their shoulders about how they’re stalked each and every day – to make someone else money!
I’ve shared a number of articles about surveillance before, including one from The New York Times Privacy Project mentioned above, but there are many more to worry over.
Surprisingly (not really), Google doesn’t seem to be celebrating the day with a Google Doodle, although there is a prompt to complete a privacy check-up.
I quite like Protect Internet health and privacy with Mozilla’s internet health initiative, on the other hand.
Data detox: Five ways to reset your relationship with your phone – The Firefox Frontier
We use our phones for everything from hailing rides to ordering in, and even to track our literal steps. All that convenience at our fingertips comes at a cost: our personal data and our mental health. It’s hard to be present in the moment when push notifications and texts are enticing us to look down. Meanwhile, the amount of personal data we share, many times without even realizing, can be alarming.But not all hope is lost! Here are five simple steps you can take to protect your data and sanity.
Data disasters
Check out this interactive ‘balloon race’ data visualisation from Information Is Beautiful, of all the major data breaches from the last ten years. Billions of records.
You can choose to highlight the items by year or data sensitivity, and filter for different sectors like academic, governmental or the media.
Our data problems could get a whole lot worse, and not because of hackers this time, but politicians.
A no-deal Brexit may trigger a data disaster, and UK companies don’t have a clue
In the event of a no-deal Brexit, the Data Protection Act will ensure that personal information processed in the UK will keep enjoying the same level of protection they do now. Still, under EU law, the UK will be automatically considered a third country not bound by GDPR rules, and able to diverge from the current strong standards if parliament so decides. Consequently, data from EU countries would not be able to flow freely to the UK.
“Things will remain the same for organisations residing in the UK, and who need to transfer data to the EU,” says Cillian Kieran, CEO of privacy start-up Ethyca. “But you won’t be able to gather data from the EU into the UK. This is an issue for any company that processes information at any level.”
Poor performance
For such a small number, a school’s Progress 8 score can be quite a big deal. So the last thing we need is an exam board messing up the performance tables process by not sending complete data to the DfE.
Progress 8 error in performance table checking after BTEC gaffe
Peter Atherton, data manager at a school in Wakefield, told Schools Week some schools had received a “nasty surprise” when they went to check the website.“It could be the case that, if all of these qualifications were missing for your school, that could affect your progress 8 score by quite a lot. Some schools are saying they’re -0.20 below what they were expecting.”
Gaffe is such an odd word, if you think about it. French, I guess. Would that make Pearson a gaffeur?
It is the second gaffe relating to BTECs to hit the exam board this year.
In August, Pearson was forced to apologise after it hiked grade boundaries for its BTEC Tech Awards just days before pupils were due to collect their results, meaning youngsters were handed lower grades than they were expecting.
Requires improvement, I’d say.
Excel errors are everywhere
I know that Excel is only trying to be helpful when it ‘corrects’ what it sees as formatting errors, but it really needs to pack it in.
An alarming number of scientific papers contain Excel errors
A team of Australian researchers analyzed nearly 3,600 genetics papers published in a number of leading scientific journals [and] found that roughly 1 in 5 of these papers included errors in their gene lists that were due to Excel automatically converting gene names to things like calendar dates or random numbers.You see, genes are often referred to in scientific literature by symbols — essentially shortened versions of full gene names. The gene “Septin 2” is typically shortened as SEPT2. “Membrane-Associated Ring Finger (C3HC4) 1, E3 Ubiquitin Protein Ligase” gets mercifully shortened to MARCH1.
But when you type these shortened gene names into Excel, the program automatically assumes they refer to dates — Sept. 2 and March 1, respectively. If you type SEPT2 into a default Excel cell, it magically becomes “2-Sep.” It’s stored by the program as the date 9/2/2016.
Miscellaneous Details 