Week 2

This first week of research marked a growth period for me and my team. The growth was far more on a personal level than the knowledge and skills. This is due to each member of the research team I am a part of contributing their various skills as well as their idiosyncrasies to the dynamics of the team. Tuesday was essentially a day of overview used by our mentor to address what the project is about. The overview gave us the point from which we were starting relative to a predicted end of the research for our ten weeks of work. There was no convenient conclusion grafted onto the project as the nature of research is a lack of conclusion, there was the marked interval of progression that the team was to make regarding our research into the systems of a popular editorial website. Tuesday consisted of training in the basics of manipulating data structures in Python, which would prove necessary in the research endeavor given that the amount of data that was being handled was enormous with multiple layers of details. This marked our first official day working within the Privacy Lab on our research project which sent a jolt of energy throughout my spine.

Wednesday was another set of introductions for Python skills that would be needed for the project, the first week of research being a crash course in the capabilities that the team would need to develop to advance the research. It was tedious working with regular expressions were multiple transformations of data from datatype to datatype and to different data structures to effectively extract relevant information for specific aims. The first test was on a sample set to observe the structure of code that would be utilized for searching and extracting critical portions of data that were a small sample of the total volume of data that will be relevant to the research. Thursday marked a similar day of training only the focus was completely on regular expressions to make sure that the team was all on the same page in terms of the work being done. Each passing day further entrenched the interconnections of the team to our ability to work as separate gears to a sole process to be completed.

Friday marked the first day we received stipends for our research. It started like any other day, although it had an air of depth thrown in as the mentor of EJ and I began to discuss with our mentor the state of social media and the consequences of government leaks that threaten the interests of the United States. The social media conversation mixed in with the conversation on government leaks in that social media has become a security risk of every person not simply the public. Social media can compromise a great deal of privacy which makes social media a vulnerability of everyone as anyone can be captured in a stray picture or have a statement propagandized out of context. In an unusual way, the public has become the watch dogs of themselves with so much information being placed online for the world to access. In the assessment of government leaks, my mentor enlightened me and EJ on the unintended consequence of surveillance legislation was the capture of a multitude of government leaks that ultimately fell into some power of the federal government to ultimately alert the government structure of the leak. Friday was also my third time seeing Dr. Warren which I admit was awesome considering she was out for a considerable number of days.