Once the darling of the developer community, Ruby's popularity has plummeted in the past few years, leading some tech leaders to wonder if the language may eventually die out completely.

The evidence is in the jobs: Java, JavaScript, .Net, HTML, and Python topped the list of languages found most often in tech job postings in the past year, according to Indeed, while Ruby came in far down the list, at No. 9.

Java may be ready for a new beginning after spending the past two decades as a general purpose programming language mainstay. While it remains one of the most popular programming languages in use today, its demand in the enterprise has diminished in recent years, and other languages are beginning to outpace it in terms of growth.

The tone appears to have changed at ASU+GSV, the booming ed-tech and investment extravaganza held here each April by Arizona State University and GSV Capital.

Predictions of doom for hidebound colleges have been less common during sessions at the conference. Instead, attendees are focused on job training and the skills gap, challenges most think offer opportunities for both technology-focused start-ups and the more nimble segments of higher education.

In October 2015, the Obama administration announced a radical experiment to give low-income students access to boot camps, massive open online courses and other nondegree credentials, mostly from for-profit alternative providers.

The experiment, called Educational Quality through Innovative Partnerships (EQUIP), planned to give unaccredited providers access to federal financial aid in a controlled setting. The idea was to see whether these nontraditional providers could deliver "high standards of quality and positive student outcomes" -- conceivably opening the door for them to receive federal funds. The program also aimed to develop new ways of assessing quality in higher education -- potentially providing alternatives to traditional accreditation, Education Department officials hoped.

The program's goals were beyond ambitious -- and so far it has achieved few if any of them, leading even strong supporters to say that it has "floundered." Eight pilot programs were selected in August 2016, but it was not until this month that the first program received final approval to launch -- a year later than expected. And three of the eight programs have dropped out.

“It’s been a slog,” said Marc Singer, vice provost of the Center for the Assessment of Learning at Thomas Edison State University, a participant in one EQUIP project.

Why, over the past year, has Silicon Valley begun to regret the foundational elements of its own success?

Recent polling shows a loss of faith in Facebook, but the public conversation suggests a much larger shift in consciousness. The coverage of the Cambridge Analytica story has provided a belated and harsh education for the public, illustrating the extent to which it has unwittingly submitted to the manipulation and surveillance of Silicon Valley companies. It’s always stunning to hear otherwise media-savvy friends profess shock at how much information they had handed over to Facebook, and how little sensitivity the company showed to its precious cargo. Equally stunning is the fact that many of those who understood Facebook’s transactional relationship with its users’ private information couldn’t seem to muster enough energy to actually care. The surrender of privacy, which had only theoretically bothered consumers, finally seems to have elicited genuine anger. It’s a backlash that has been stoked by media, making noises about extracting itself from its own dependence on Facebook. This makes for a stunning reversal. In the face of Silicon Valley’s power, there’s a widely shared sense that the public has has no agency. Even if people weren’t thrilled with the terms-of-service agreements offered by the companies, they accepted them as the natural course of life on the internet. Media, regulators, and engineers all knew perfectly well that Facebook had created a pernicious system, yet they assumed there was no way to blunt it. This reflected a broader attitude toward both technology and the market.

The disorienting and thoroughly unsatisfying Cambridge Analytica saga is a preview of what trailing indicators of the collapse of the data boom might look like: revealing signs, evident years later, that something was rotten with these arrangements, arriving too late to be actionable but soon enough to foster resentment against companies and services on which we’ve come to depend.

Facebook, along with Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and others, have been key to boosting the US stock market to record heights. They have ensured a modicum of prosperity at a time when the rest of the economy is still struggling with the fallout from the financial crisis.

In some sense, America’s tech markets of the 2010s are not much different from America’s housing markets of the 2000s: both have tried to generate wealth, by means of asset appreciation, even when the real economy struggled. Remove the immense gains in the stock value of big tech companies over the past few years and there would be little reason to speak about any meaningful recovery from the crisis.

There’s every reason to believe that academics were included in this massive data acquisition activity, making it unlikely our world will remain the same now. [...] This more basic reassessment will change academia, publishing businesses, research, and instruction. #DeleteFacebook feels like a watershed moment. Things will change a great deal from here.

Martin Dimitrov of Balkan Insight reports that psychoanalyst and philosopher Julia Kristeva, who was born in Bulgaria, was allegedly an agent for the country’s security body that was active during the nation’s Communist regime. The agency—called the Committee for Disclosing the Documents and Announcing the Affiliation of Bulgarian Citizens to the State Security and Intelligence Services of the Bulgarian National Army—claims that Kristeva was an agent and a “secret associate” for the First General Department of the State Security, a bureau that collected foreign political intelligence.

It seems remarkable that an Obama volunteer who studied human rights and voted for Bernie Sanders ended up working for a controversial data analytics company at the centre of a global story about the use of data and dirty tricks. The company’s work on Donald Trump’s election campaign left her feeling “incredibly internally conflicted”, but she insists she was only doing her job; her political views have nothing to do with her decision to reveal secrets about Cambridge Analytica. Asked why she has decided to speak out, Kaiser flares: “Why should we make excuses for these people? Why? I’m so tired of making excuses for old white men. Fucking hell.”

Kogan told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Wednesday that he was being unjustly blamed for the scandal. He said: “My view is that I’m being basically used as a scapegoat by both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. Honestly we thought we were acting perfectly appropriately. We thought we were doing something that was really normal.”

This is frustrating, perhaps more so given that we certainly are not the first study to look at the ways that student evaluations are biased against female professors. But we might be among the first to make the case explicitly that the use of student evaluations in hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions represents a discrimination issue. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission exists to enforce the laws that make it illegal to discriminate against a job applicant or employee based on sex.

Klimburg gives a fascinating diagnosis of how this situation has been inflamed. He describes a growing tension in the US over the last twenty years, coming to a head under Obama, between the perception of the Internet and its reality.

Wylie grew up in British Columbia and as a teenager he was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia. He left school at 16 without a single qualification. Yet at 17, he was working in the office of the leader of the Canadian opposition; at 18, he went to learn all things data from Obama’s national director of targeting, which he then introduced to Canada for the Liberal party. At 19, he taught himself to code, and in 2010, age 20, he came to London to study law at the London School of Economics.

Cambridge paid to acquire the personal information through an outside researcher who, Facebook says, claimed to be collecting it for academic purposes.

In the half-decade since the wry study of startup culture premiered, the ground has shifted beneath it — the public perception of the tech industry has dimmed considerably [...] When Silicon Valley premiered in the spring of 2014, Uber was still a controversy-free ride­sharing service and Facebook had yet to taint a presidential election.

Wansink’s practices are part of a troubling pattern of strategic data-crunching across the entire field of social science. Even so, several independent statisticians and psychology researchers are appalled at the extent of Wansink’s data manipulation.

I note that while my own university did have a digital humanities programme that was inching toward such a critical digital humanities it has suffered funding cutbacks primarily because a focus on a (traditional) functional digital humanities failed to attract the expected numbers of students.

As the ranks of tech-industry critics have expanded, it has become harder to tell what common ground they occupy. Across various political divides, there is a sense that Facebook, Twitter and Google exert too much influence on the national discourse; closely connected to this is the widespread concern that we users have developed an unhealthful relationship with our phones, or with the apps on them. But on any more specific claim than that, consensus becomes impossible. The sudden arrival of a new class of tech skeptic, the industry apostate, has only complicated the discussion. Late last year, the co-inventor of the Facebook “like,” Justin Rosenstein, called it a “bright ding of pseudopleasure”; in January, the investment firm Jana Partners, a shareholder in Apple, wrote a letter to the company warning that its products “may be having unintentional negative consequences.”

All but conjuring Oppenheimer at White Sands, these critics offer broadsides, warning about addictive design tricks and profit-driven systems eroding our humanity. But it’s hard to discern a collective message in their garment-rending: Is it design that needs fixing? Tech? Capitalism? This lack of clarity may stem from the fact that these people are not ideologues but reformists. They tend to believe that companies should be more responsible — and users must be, too. But with rare exceptions, the reformists stop short of asking the uncomfortable questions: Is it possible to reform profit-driven systems that turn attention into money? In such a business, can you even separate addiction from success?

The charge sheet is mounting against Facebook in particular, but also against the other digital behemoths. With power comes responsibility, and these relatively young organisations are struggling to deal with it. So society is stepping in. The age of unregulated social media is, apparently, over. It is one of the core issues for the LSE’s Truth, Trust and Technology Commission that will seek to set out an agenda for the public information role of news and social media. But before we start creating new rules, we need to have an honest and open conversation amongst all parties about what the problem is and what has caused it.

The different companies such as Google, Twitter, Amazon, Apple, Uber and Air bnb, have responded with varying degrees of openness to the growing chorus of anger around topics such as (not) paying taxes, labour exploitation, misinformation, fostering propaganda, offence, polarisation, and mental ill-health. They all have different histories and corporate identities and varying capacity to understand and engage with public disquiet.

The stories varied, but most people told the same basic tale: of a company, and a CEO, whose techno-optimism has been crushed as they’ve learned the myriad ways their platform can be used for ill. Of an election that shocked Facebook, even as its fallout put the company under siege. Of a series of external threats, defensive internal calculations, and false starts that delayed Facebook’s reckoning with its impact on global affairs and its users’ minds.

The courses are emerging at a moment when big tech companies have been struggling to handle the side effects — fake news on Facebook, fake followers on Twitter, lewd children’s videos on YouTube — of the industry’s build-it-first mind-set.

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One source of angst came close to being 2017’s signature subject: how the internet and the tiny handful of companies that dominate it are affecting both individual minds and the present and future of the planet. The old idea of the online world as a burgeoning utopia looks to have peaked around the time of the Arab spring, and is in retreat.

interfaces

It is with great regret that we must announce that the Digital Humanities Research Centre at the University of Chester will close this Christmas.

All of which brings to mind CP Snow’s famous Two Cultures lecture, delivered in Cambridge in 1959, in which he lamented the fact that the intellectual life of the whole of western society was scarred by the gap between the opposing cultures of science and engineering on the one hand, and the humanities on the other – with the latter holding the upper hand among contemporary ruling elites. Snow thought that this perverse dominance would deprive Britain of the intellectual capacity to thrive in the postwar world and he clearly longed to reverse it. Snow passed away in 1980, but one wonders what he would have made of the new masters of our universe. One hopes that he might see it as a reminder of the old adage: be careful what you wish for – you might just get it.

One week before he was first publicly accused of sexual assault and harassment by a former graduate student, Emeritus Professor of English Franco Moretti was profiled in The New York Times as a self-proclaimed revolutionary in literary scholarship. Moretti, a founder of Stanford’s Literary Lab, has helped pioneer the growing field of digital humanities, approaching texts as data that can be computationally analyzed en masse. In the process, The Times writes, he has become something of a celebrity in the literary world by “promoting a ruthlessly impersonal idea of both scholarship and literary history itself.” The beginnings of that celebrity loomed large in Kimberly Latta’s account earlier this month of the power dynamic underlying her public accusations of rape and sexual harassment against Moretti, her former professor at UC Berkeley.

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Poster from student demonstrations against the ILLIAC IV computer designed at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Parents and children have flocked to Google-owned YouTube Kids since it was introduced in early 2015. The app’s more than 11 million weekly viewers are drawn in by its seemingly infinite supply of clips, including those from popular shows by Disney and Nickelodeon, and the knowledge that the app is supposed to contain only child-friendly content that has been automatically filtered from the main YouTube site.

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But the app contains dark corners, too, as videos that are disturbing for children slip past its filters, either by mistake or because bad actors have found ways to fool the YouTube Kids algorithms.

In recent months, parents like Ms. Burns have complained that their children have been shown videos with well-known characters in violent or lewd situations and other clips with disturbing imagery, sometimes set to nursery rhymes. Many have taken to Facebook to warn others, and share video screenshots showing moments ranging from a Claymation Spider-Man urinating on Elsa of “Frozen” to Nick Jr. characters in a strip club.

YouTube and Google are complicit in that system. The architecture they have built to extract the maximum revenue from online video is being hacked by persons unknown to abuse children, perhaps not even deliberately, but at a massive scale.

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Big Tech is broken. Suddenly, a wide range of journalists and politicians agree on this. For decades, most of the media and political establishment accepted Silicon Valley’s promise that it would not “be evil,” as the first Google code of corporate conduct put it. But the past few months have brought a constant stream of negative stories about both the internal culture of the tech industry and the effect it is having on society.

It is difficult to know where to begin. How about the rampant sexual harassment at companies such as Uber, which fired 20 employees in June after receiving hundreds of sexual harassment claims? Or the growing body of evidence that women and people of colour are not only dramatically underrepresented at tech firms, but also systematically underpaid, as three Google employees alleged in a lawsuit last month? Should we focus on the fact that Facebook allowed advertisers to target users who listed “Jew hater” as one of their interests? Or that they and Google have helped clients to spread fake news?

In response to concerns about Russian interference in the 2016 election, politicians are threatening to take action against companies they have long left alone. By late September this year, when the Senate intelligence committee demanded that Facebook, Google and Twitter conduct internal investigations – and those companies admitted that, yes, foreign actors had used their platforms to communicate misinformation that was viewed millions of times by voters in hotly contested swing states – it seemed fair to ask whether democracy could survive them. A New York Times headline on 13 October captured how the mood had shifted: “Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend.”

It is tempting to turn this shift of mood against Big Tech into a story of betrayal. On 1 November, representatives of Facebook and Twitter will appear before the Senate to testify about divisive political advertising paid for by Russian actors on their platforms. The setting suggests wrongdoing and retribution. But the drama playing out involves more than uncovering specific lies or misdeeds. We are watching an entire worldview start to fall apart.

Two trends have converged to create this surge in academic spying. The first is the growing intimacy between U.S. intelligence and academia, driven partly by patriotic fervor and terrorism fears in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks. Deterred by student protests and faculty hostility during the Vietnam era, the CIA, FBI, and other security agencies have returned in force, forging a tenuous alliance of spies and scholars.

“September 11 led to a quiet reengagement of a lot of the academy with the national security community,” says Austin Long, who taught security policy at Columbia University. Perhaps more than anyone else, Graham Spanier is responsible for this rapprochement. As president of Pennsylvania State University from 1995 to 2011, he helped establish and chaired the National Security Higher Education Advisory Board, which fosters dialogue between intelligence agencies and universities. He also gave FBI-sponsored seminars for administrators at MIT, Michigan State, Stanford, and other universities, and opened doors for the CIA throughout academia.

The publication provides something of a retrospective occasion for Mr. Moretti, 67, who retired last spring from Stanford. But it also prompts a larger question at a time when the broader field of digital humanities is booming: What has the Big Data approach to literature added up to?

It’s a question that draws heated answers. Digital humanities has been accused of fetishizing science, of acting as a Trojan horse for the corporate forces threatening the university, and worse. A recent broadside in The Chronicle of Higher Education called “The Digital-Humanities Bust” took a bludgeon to the field’s revolutionary rhetoric, with Mr. Moretti among those accused of issuing a stream of vague “promissory notes” for results that never arrive.

Mr. Moretti — who prefers to call the lab’s work “computational criticism” — tends to greet such challenges with a mixture of modesty and bravado.

“Our results are not as good as what I had hoped for 10 or 15 years ago,” he said in an interview earlier this month, during a brief trip to New York. “We have not yet created a revolution in knowledge. But how much of literary scholarship is even trying to do that?”

Justifications for the digitally expanded library that go beyond the functional or budgetary to include some sort of social vision almost all evince an obsession with a technological—even ahistorical—future and, in addition, an ideal of ‘service’ conceived in terms of blinkered populism. There is an odd linguistic resonance between the prophets of fascism and the proponents of digital preservation and access. For Leo Lowenthal, book-burning by authoritarian and totalitarian societies was a ‘mad attempt to found anew the history of the world, to devise a new creation myth, the genealogy of a new history of salvation, which disowns, destroys and erases all that precedes a new arbitrary calendar’. [18] The logic of contemporary ‘universal libraries’ such as Google Books appears antithetical to such an ideological agenda. But mapped onto the digitization of all the world’s information is the ideology of the information age, which figures itself as a radical break from the past—a paradigm shift of unseen proportions and the very stuff of a future social organization that is horizontal, open, flexible and democratic. The internet and the set of metaphors and practices that have grown up within and around it—the very conviction that this environment is absolutely new—contain a similar urge ‘to found anew the history of the world’, and offer ‘a new history of salvation’.

Instead, Piper and Wellmon offer data, or rather the idea of it. "The university is a technology," they write. "Let’s treat it like one." One can call any institution one likes — a town hall, an AA meeting, a tri-county soccer league — a "technology," though it’s not clear what’s gained.

All of these scholars are well aware of the value of numbers. Numbers allow for abstract picturing of groups, societies, and cities. They regularize anomalies and exceptions, and allow us access to invisible worlds, social and physical alike. Numbers support distributed cognition and collective intelligence. Both are desperately needed in a world damaged by human stupidity. But quantification in its many forms now operates within a complex metrics culture — a contradictory and contested battleground, as these three books explain. Together, they offer an understory that we could call metrics noir.

It is this techno-utopian vision that Piper and Wellmon are peddling; and like all lefty versions of technological salvation, it promises liberation from confining structures like states, universities, disciplines, departments, canons — in short, from the academy. At the moment of liberation, opacity, patrimony, favoritism, patronage, hegemony and all those bad things will have been cast off like shadows and veils and succeeded by the blessed condition of transparency.

First came the debacle of the high-priced "Ada" algorithm, the control center of Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated operation. Next ESPN wonk Nate Silver, after flubbing the 2016 election forecast, defended his numbers by claiming that he was not more wrong than every other statistical predictor since 1968. Finally, consider the kerfuffle over Cambridge Analytica, the British company whose "psychographics" method of data modeling and "emotion analysis" claimed to be the Trump camp’s secret weapon — until skeptics recalled that Ted Cruz and Ben Carson had employed their services as well. The dream that algorithmic computation might reveal the secrets of complex social and cultural processes has suffered a very public and embarrassing results crisis. These setbacks have also led to some soul-searching in the university, prompting a closer look at the digital humanities

While almost all historians said they used library-supported databases, online archives or digital cameras, fewer than one in five said that they used more advanced digital tools such as text mining or statistical analysis software. Most historians said that they only adopted digital tools when they found there was no other way to resolve an issue in their research.

Spanier’s CIA medal, and a similar FBI award a year later, symbolized a reconciliation between the intelligence services and the academy. The relationship has come full circle: from chumminess in the 1940s and 1950s, to animosity during the Vietnam War and civil-rights era, and back to cooperation after the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Their unequal partnership, though, tilts toward the government. U.S. intelligence seized on the renewed goodwill, and the red carpet rolled out by Spanier and other university administrators, to expand not only its public presence on campus but also covert operations and sponsoring of secret research. Federal encroachment on academic prerogatives has met only token resistance.

The two cultures are antithetical: Academe is open and international, while intelligence services are clandestine and nationalistic. Still, after Islamic-fundamentalist terrorists toppled the World Trade Center, colleges became part of the national security apparatus. The new recruiting booths at meetings of academic associations were one telling indicator. The CIA began exhibiting at the annual convention of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages in 2004, as did the FBI and National Security Agency around the same time. Since 2011 the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the NSA have participated on a panel at the Modern Language Association convention titled "Using Your Language Proficiency and Cultural Expertise in a Federal Government Career."

There has been a rising bipartisan clamor, meanwhile, for new regulation of a tech industry that, amid a historic surge in wealth and power over the past decade, has largely had its way in Washington despite concerns raised by critics about its behavior. [...] “There is no question that the idea that Silicon Valley is the darling of our markets and of our society — that sentiment is definitely turning,” said Tim O’Reilly, an adviser to tech executives and chief executive of the influential Silicon Valley-based publisher O’Reilly Media.

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A decade ago, whatever the reality, very few of us thought of tech as a driver of things that were wrong about the larger political economy. We knew about wage stagnation. Growing wealth inequality was getting more attention. But tech didn’t have anything to do with that. They were just smallish companies with no smokestacks making cool things out in Silicon Valley and outside Seattle. As I’ve noted in a few recent posts, there’s a growing body of policy literature and research which argues that monopolies really are causing many of these ills. It’s not just people being dissatisfied with poor economic prospects and lashing out at what’s big. Nor is this the end of it. You’ll notice that I haven’t even discussed what may be Big Tech’s biggest reptuational black eye: privacy or the lack thereof. Tech is also driving artificial intelligence research which may put countless people out of work. Again, my point here isn’t to litigate the various arguments and claims at play here but only to note the emerging sea change in public perceptions. It’s a vast difference and I suspect it – it being the public opposition to and backlash against Big Tech and other monopolies – will bulk very large in our politics in the coming years.

The blinding rise of Donald Trump over the past year has masked another major trend in American politics: the palpable, and perhaps permanent, turn against the tech industry. The new corporate leviathans that used to be seen as bright new avatars of American innovation are increasingly portrayed as sinister new centers of unaccountable power, a transformation likely to have major consequences for the industry and for American politics.

Unlike industry influence in medicine, however, the phenomenon of company-affiliated teachers has received little scrutiny. Twitter alone is rife with educators broadcasting their company-bestowed titles. “If medical experts started saying, ‘I’m a Google Certified Doctor’ or ‘I’m a Pfizer Distinguished Nurse,’ people would be up in arms,” said Douglas A. Levin, president of EdTech Strategies, a consulting firm. [...] Some academic medical centers now prohibit their doctors from giving industry-sponsored speeches. And some drug companies have stopped giving doctors swag. But there has been little public discussion about the ramifications of similar tech industry cultivation of teachers.

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Within the past week, two well-known and well-established coding bootcamps have announced they’ll be closing their doors: Dev Bootcamp, owned by Kaplan Inc., and The Iron Yard, owned by the Apollo Education Group (parent company of the University of Phoenix).

The tech giant Google has paid academics up to hundreds of thousands of dollars to research topics that support the company’s business practices, according to an investigation by The Wall Street Journal, based on data compiled by the Campaign for Accountability, an advocacy group that has received funding from companies that compete with Google. The newspaper reported that Google at times compiled “wish lists” of academic studies, complete with titles and abstracts, and then searched for academics who were game to write the papers. In many cases, the Journal reported, the authors of the papers failed to disclose that they had received funding from Google. Those studies included research suggesting that collecting user data was a fair trade for the services Google provides or that it hadn’t competed unfairly against market rivals. The article also states that Google has provided the research to lawmakers, and sometimes covered travel costs for professors to meet government officials.

Paying Professors: Inside Google’s Academic Influence Campaign. Company pays grants of $5,000 to $400,000 for research supporting business practices that face regulatory scrutiny; a ‘wish list’ of topics.

The rise of Code.org coincides with a larger tech-industry push to remake American primary and secondary schools with computers and learning apps, a market estimated to reach $21 billion by 2020.

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