This week, I have been mostly reading:

• How Laissez-Faire Economics Led to Inequality and Recession — Jeff Madrick in the Huffington Post: The Federal Reserve just named a new committee headed by vice chairman Stanly Fischer to research how unstable financial markets may affect the real economy of jobs, production, business investment and profits. If you read the 2008 minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee (released earlier this year), which meets roughly every six weeks to set interest rate and other policies, you’ll see that the policymakers and their staffs had little idea how to account for financial risk. Finance simply wasn’t in their economic models.
• “I don’t need your civil war.” — Jonathan Rees: All us historians let out a loud sigh when we read that story about Republican Senator Ron Johnson wanting to replace us all with Ken Burns videos. It’s an incredibly stupid argument, of course, but it’s also sadly typical of everyone who has no idea what history professors actually do all day. […] Better to be the ones inserting the video cassette and administering the multiple choice test after the tape ends than not to have any job at all.
• Facebook recommended that this psychiatrist’s patients friend each other — Kashmir Hill, Fusion: She hadn’t friended any of her patients on Facebook, nor looked up their profiles. She didn’t have a guest wifi network at the office that they were all using. After seeing my report that Facebook was using location from people’s smartphones to make friend recommendations, she was convinced this happened because she had logged into Facebook at the office on her personal computer. She thought that Facebook had figured out that she and her patients were all in the same place repeatedly. However, Facebook says it only briefly used location for friend recommendations in a test and that it was just “at the city-level.”
• Where’s your data? It’s not actually in the cloud, it’s sitting in a data centre — Brett Neilson, Ned Rossiter, and Tanya Notley of Western Sydney University in the Conversation: Governments spend a great deal of resources safeguarding critical infrastructure. The protection of data and information systems is now included in this work. However, the focus for data security is on the development of software, as though we have forgotten that data storage happens in real places on the ground – and not in “virtual” clouds. Not knowing where data centres are located, or indeed what they actually do, prevents us from having conversations about how this infrastructure is governed, supported and protected.