History has long denied the political genius of the Black Panther Party. At worst, its members have been cast as unconscionable criminals. At best, such seminal figures as party founders Huey Newton and Bobby Seale and early supporter Stokely Carmichael have been portrayed as outlaw folk heroes who, propelled by the progressive winds of the late 1960s, dared to take on the establishment.
But a UCLA graduate student in sociology who worked alongside former Panthers a decade ago as a community organizer in Oakland, Calif., didn’t buy the conventional wisdom. (more…)
More Asian Pacific Americans hold public office in the United States than at any other time in U.S. history, a sign of the community’s growing engagement with the political process, according to a newly released political almanac published by UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center.
The 14th edition of the National Asian Pacific American Political Almanac, first published in 1976, contains information on all 3,000 current elected and appointed officials. It also analyzes political trends and makes electoral projections of the nation’s 17 million Asian Pacific Americans. (more…)
*Co-Authored by WPI Computer Science Professor Craig Wills, Study Shows that Existing and Proposed Safeguards Against Leakage and Linking of Private Information are Inadequate*
A study of more than 100 popular websites used by tens of millions of people has found that three quarters directly leak either private information o r users’ unique identifiers to third-party tracking sites. The study, co-authored by Craig Wills, professor of computer science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), also demonstrated how the leakage of private information by many sites, including email addresses, physical addresses, and even the configuration of a user’s web browser—so-called browser fingerprints—could permit tracking sites to link many disparate pieces of information, including browsing histories contained in tracking cookies and the contents of searches on health and travel sites, to create detailed profiles of individuals. (more…)
