Coruscation

Beijing has said it will introduce in 2020 its own social credit system that is expected to give and take away privileges based on spending habits, online and real-world behavior, and social relationships. Foreign travel, speedy internet, school access, and social benefits could all be granted or denied based on a person's score. The government system will most likely be at least partly dependent on data collected by companies like Alibaba and Tencent.

It is unclear how many Chinese are truly against such programs.

Mr. Li, the Beijing college student, said that many of his friends still shared the shopping breakdowns -- which now include a number indicating a user's Sesame Credit score.

Such is the power and ubiquity of Alibaba and Tencent in China, he added, that customers would find voting with their feet and quitting the services difficult.

"Being angry doesn't do us any good," he said. "Maybe you can stop using Alipay if you are angry, but there's no way you could stop using WeChat."

-- Carolyn Zhang and Paul Mozur

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"There's no privacy and information security these days," Li Shufu, the chairman of Geely Holding Group and Volvo Cars, said at a New Year's forum. "When you walk on the road, there are surveillance cameras everywhere."

"Pony Ma must be reading our WeChat messages every single day," he added, referring to the founder of Tencent, the Chinese internet giant that runs the social media and chat app, which has almost one billion users.

In a statement, Tencent said that the company did not store the chat history of users and that it would never use chat history for big data analytics. The comments were met with widespread disbelief: WeChat users have been arrested over what they've said on the app, conversations have turned up as evidence in court proceedings, and activists have reported being followed based on WeChat conversations.

"It has become a default setting for me now to assume that we have no privacy in the face of Alibaba and Tencent," said Li Luyao, a college student in Beijing.

The issue has filtered to the top of the Chinese leadership. Even as Beijing continues to assemble one of the most sophisticated and wide-scale surveillance systems in the world, politicians have called for better privacy protections. Laws have been beefed up to better protect consumer data. And it has had an impact overseas, too: Ant Financial's deal to buy MoneyGram, the money-transfer company, collapsed amid concerns in the United States over a Chinese company having access to a large amount of financial data.

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Complain about the doorman service to my management company;
but also be super nice to the doormen because my luxury building is giving jobs to the local community;
but also make sure to leave a bad review on the management company's website so people avoid renting an apartment in my luxury building,
which in turn might make my luxury building's rent prices go down
and thus making it more accessible to the local community to get a place there at an affordable rate
and then getting the snobby tenants to complain about the new tenants using the common washer/dryer for their entire family
and how they have very loud music,
eventually getting so annoyed they will not renew their lease
and force them to seek out a fancier luxury building in which to live,
resulting in even lower rents in my luxury building,
rendering my luxury building a luxury building for the people.

-- TULIO ESPINOZA

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Brisbane: "I totally understand the reporter going into full 100-percent defense mode arguing every point. That's what you kind of would expect somebody to do. But I figured that the editor would be, you know, 100-percent adult in the room and acknowledge where there were flaws and try to sort of essentially mediate an understanding that this could have been done differently and better. They relied for their sourcing on people who were in active ongoing disputes with the people they were criticizing. They didn't mention this kind of stuff. And they also grossly mis-described what was going on and who they were writing about. There were a lot of problems, but I got nothing. I spent hours and hours in that room with these guys, and there were many times when I thought, 'Why am I in this room talking these people? Why why am I giving them this much'-- frankly I don't want to say respect, they deserve respect, but, 'Why am I giving them this m

They didn't mention this kind of stuff. And they also grossly mis-described what was going on and who they were writing about. There were a lot of problems, but I got nothing.

I spent hours and hours in that room with these guys, and there were many times when I thought, 'Why am I in this room talking these people? Why why am I giving them this much'-- frankly I don't want to say respect, they deserve respect, but, 'Why am I giving them this much of the benefit of the doubt?' I have zero doubts having talked to a lot of people about this. They have some serious problems --the fact they can't acknowledge it struck me as neurotic institutionally."

What sometimes followed a public editor's conclusion was a rebuttal by those involved. The public editors have published letters from the executive editors, and in the case of Urbina's story, Brisbane published a response from editors Bryant and Berke. "Everyone is entitled to opinions. But facts are facts. And the public editor's column about our June 26 story on shale gas economics gets many of them wrong. As a result, the column's conclusions are, quite simply, misguided and unsupported." Urbina recalls in an email to me that Brisbane went into the meeting with his mind made up and that, "his meeting us was a pro-forma gesture so that he could the write his column with the veneer of due diligence."

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Refrain from offering platitudes such as, "'I know how you feel'" or "'Things will get better'" to those who visit his center. "Often times when someone close to you is going through difficulty, we want to cheer that person up with lots of nice sayings, but the truth is, you don't know how this person feels. Rather than wanting to change that situation, just be there. When you say those common phrases, it is often yourself who cannot bear the grief that the other person is going through."

-- Haemin Sunim, author, The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down.

Mindfulness is a skill that people can develop over time and "can practice in small acts," such as decluttering, says Sunim. "Decluttering is one way to reconnect with some of the memories of each item you have and realizing that everything is impermanent. If you realize this, you will lessen your attachment to material things."

Marie "envisions decluttering in terms of relationships with the material, whether it brings you joy or happiness," says Sunim. "She considers joy and how your mind has spiritual elements. It isn't just about cleaning up. It's about whether you are finding joy in the process and in the end result."

To use himself as an example, Sunim describes how he practices mindfulness even while walking, a daily activity which he loves. "Walking here in Manhattan can be hectic, but I try to relax and walk very slowly and regain that sense of joy."

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But with the company's vast reach has come another kind of problem: Facebook is becoming too big for its computer algorithms and relatively small team of employees and contractors to manage the trillions of posts on its social network.

Earlier Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg, the company's chief executive, acknowledged the problem. In a Facebook post, he said that over the next year, the company would add 3,000 people to the team that polices the site for inappropriate or offensive content, especially in the live videos the company is encouraging users to broadcast.

"If we're going to build a safe community, we need to respond quickly," he wrote. "We're working to make these videos easier to report so we can take the right action sooner -- whether that's responding quickly when someone needs help or taking a post down." He offered no details on what would change.

Facebook is also grappling with the limitations of its automated algorithms on other fronts, from the prevalence of fake news on the service to a News Feed that tends to show people information that reinforces their views rather than challenges them.

Despite Mr. Zuckerberg's pledge to do a better job in screening content, many Facebook users did not seem to believe that much would change. Hundreds of commenters on Mr. Zuckerberg's post related personal experiences of reporting inappropriate content to Facebook that the company declined to remove.

Zeynep Tufekci, an associate professor at University of North Carolina who studies online speech issues, said that Facebook designed Live to notify your friends automatically about a live feed -- something guaranteed to appeal to publicity seekers of all sorts.

"It was pretty clear to me that this would lead to on-camera suicides, murder, abuse, torture," she said. "The F.B.I. did a pretty extensive study of school shooters: The infamy part is a pretty heavy motivator."

Facebook has no intention of dialing back its promotion of video, including Live, telling investors on a conference call Wednesday that it would continue to rank it high in users' news feeds and add more advertising within live videos and clips.

"All policies need to recognize that distressing speech is sometimes the most important to a public conversation," said Lee Rowland, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union who works on free speech issues.

She said that the decision to hire more moderators can only help the company make better judgments, especially about live events where fast decisions can be critical. "Humans tend to have more nuance and context than an algorithm," Ms. Rowland said.

But Ms. Rowland said Facebook must also be more clear to the public about its rules on making those calls.

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Geoffrey Hinton and Sara Sabour, holding a two-piece pyramid puzzle, are researching a system that could let computers see more like humans at a Google laboratory in Toronto.

But as Mr. Hinton himself points out, his idea has had its limits. If a neural network is trained on images that show a coffee cup only from a side, for example, it is unlikely to recognize a coffee cup turned upside down.

Now Mr. Hinton and Sara Sabour, a young Google researcher, are exploring an alternative mathematical technique that he calls a capsule network. The idea is to build a system that sees more like a human. If a neural network sees the world in two dimensions, a capsule network can see it in three.

Mr. Hinton, a 69-year-old British expatriate, opened Google's artificial intelligence lab in Toronto this year. The new lab is emblematic of what some believe to be the future of cutting-edge tech research: Much of it is expected to happen outside the United States in Europe, China and longtime A.I. research centers, like Toronto, that are more welcoming to immigrant researchers.

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New-wave farmers: An urban farming accelerator in Brooklyn co-founded by Kimbal Musk (yes, Elon's brother) is hoping to expand with campuses in other cities, after graduating 10 entrepreneurs from its first nine-month training program on "vertical farming." (Fast Company)

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Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and
Transparency (FAT*)

Program for 2018 is out.
Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and
Transparency (FAT*) is from Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and
Transparency in Machine Learning (FATML).

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So much for the idea that bots will be taking over human jobs. Once we have AIs doing work for us, we'll need to invent new jobs for humans who are testing the AIs' results for accuracy and prejudice. Even when chatbots get incredibly sophisticated, they are still going to be trained on human language. And since bias is built into language, humans will still be necessary as decision-makers.

In a recent paper for Science about their work, the researchers say the implications are far-reaching. "Our findings are also sure to contribute to the debate concerning the Sapir Whorf hypothesis," they write. "Our work suggests that behavior can be driven by cultural history embedded in a term's historic use. Such histories can evidently vary between languages." If you watched the movie Arrival, you've probably heard of Sapir Whorf--it's the hypothesis that language shapes consciousness. Now we have an algorithm that suggests this may be true, at least when it comes to stereotypes.

Aylin Caliskan said her team wants to branch out and try to find as-yet-unknown biases in human language. Perhaps they could look for patterns created by fake news or look into biases that exist in specific subcultures or geographical locations. They would also like to look at other languages, where bias is encoded very differently than it is in English.

"Let's say in the future, someone suspects there's a bias or stereotype in a certain culture or location," Caliskan mused. "Instead of testing with human subjects first, which takes time, money, and effort, they can get text from that group of people and test to see if they have this bias. It would save so much time."

See also Princeton Researchers discover AI bias and
Science, 2017. DOI: 10.1126/science.aal4230

See

Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases
Aylin Caliskan1,*, Joanna J. Bryson1,2,*, Arvind Narayanan1,*
See all authors and affiliations

Science 14 Apr 2017:
Vol. 356, Issue 6334, pp. 183-186
DOI: 10.1126/science.aal4230

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By the way, you and I agree on that. What do you think ... The point is ... Focusing this attention on them, it's negative. Do you think they think, "We're going to cycle through this?"

KS: Yes. Yes, I think they do think that. The most cynical of them know it. The others, they're such earnest ... You talk to them. "Oh, we feel bad." I'm sorry. My issue is, they are the richest and most powerful people in the world, and they're always acting like they're victims, and that's exhausting from a group of people that have an ability to actively change the world.

I was talking to, I think it was Susan Wojcicki, someone at YouTube, I think it was Susan. I had interviewed Reid Hoffman, who actually does answer questions, which is really refreshing, and in an honest way. We were at the ADL, which is the Anti-Defamation League, and I pulled up the Google search on ADL, and you got what you get. ADL.com, or whatever, the homepage. Here's some stories about ADL. Here's some issues recently about Charlottesville and ADL. It was all the ones you would expect to get.

When you went to YouTube and typed in ADL, you got alt-right, anti-Semitic videos, one after the next after the next, and it was astonishing that that was what you got. About 20, you got an interview with John Greenblatt, who's the head of it, No. 20 on the search. I think I wrote Susan a note that said, "Hey, you have this company called Google that owns you that seems to be doing a pretty good job on search, why is YouTube search so bad? Why are we getting this vile stream of horror from YouTube, when you're owned by the company who does search very well in regular circumstances?"

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A leader of this movement is Dr. Kevin Volpp, a physician at the University of Pennsylvania and founding director of the Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics. He designs randomized trials around some of health care's most important challenges: nudging doctors to provide evidence-based care; ensuring patients take their medications; and helping consumers choose better health plans.

"There's starting to be a broad recognition that decision-making environments in health care could better reflect how doctors and patients actually make decisions," he said.

Dr. Volpp, whose work is used by both the public and private sector, recently collaborated with CVS Caremark to test which financial incentives are most effective for getting employees to quit smoking. Employees were randomly assigned to one of three groups. The first was "usual care," in which they received educational materials and free smoking cessation aids. The second was a reward program: Employees could receive up to $800 over six months if they quit. The third was a deposit program, in which smokers initially forked over $150 of their money, but if they quit, they got their deposit back along with a $650 bonus.

Compared with the usual care group, employees in both incentive groups were substantially more likely to be smoke-free at six months. But the nature of the incentives mattered. Those offered the reward program were far more likely to accept the challenge than those offered the deposit program. But the deposit program was twice as effective at getting people to quit -- and five times as effective as just pamphlets and Nicorette gum.

-- Dhruv Khullar, M.D., M.P.P., is a resident physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Follow him on Twitter at @DhruvKhullar.

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Facebook has publicly acknowledged that its platform has been exploited by governments seeking to manipulate public opinion in other countries - including during the presidential elections in the US and France - and pledged to clamp down on such "information operations".

Facebook urged to step up fake news fight before UK election

In a white paper authored by the company's security team and published on Thursday, the company detailed well-funded and subtle techniques used by nations and other organizations to spread misleading information and falsehoods for geopolitical goals. These efforts go well beyond "fake news", the company said, and include content seeding, targeted data collection and fake accounts that are used to amplify one particular view, sow distrust in political institutions and spread confusion.

"We have had to expand our security focus from traditional abusive behavior, such as account hacking, malware, spam and financial scams, to include more subtle and insidious forms of misuse, including attempts to manipulate civic discourse and deceive people," said the company.

In its effort to clamp down on information operations, Facebook suspended 30,000 accounts in France before the presidential election. The company said it was a priority to remove suspect accounts with high volumes of posting activity and the biggest audiences.

Facebook pledged to monitor attempts to manipulate the platform, to develop new ways of identifying fake accounts, educate at-risk people about how to keep their information safe, and support civil society programs around media literacy.

"We recognize that, in today's information environment, social media plays a sizable role in facilitating communications - not only in times of civic events, such as elections, but in everyday expression," said the report. "In some circumstances, however, we recognize that the risk of malicious actors seeking to use Facebook to mislead people or otherwise promote inauthentic communications can be higher."

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Car and Driver details the responsiveness of touchscreen dashboards.

Examples tested include VW Golf R, Ford Focus RS, Subaru WRX STi, and Honda Civic Type R.

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This is a third of a day with light use, not a day of full use.

Nevertheless, in my tests, I found the Samsung Galaxy s8 cell phone battery life to be good enough to last a full day at 75 percent brightness.

For instance, on one day, I (The Verge / Walt Mossberg ) streamed two movies and a TV show from Netflix, did a bunch of photo and video shooting, placed a few phone calls, and did email, texting, and social media posting and reading. The battery lasted about 10 hours. As it was a Saturday, the phone wasn't receiving nearly the typical weekday volume of emails, texts, tweets, and Facebook posts. But I still think that, for most people who aren't likely to be watching all that video on a work day, the S8 would get them through the day.

Here is a Ten-Hour SmartPhone Battery Test (THSPBT) for celphone usability:

1. Stream music on Youtube Red over LTE. Mix plugged-in speakers or headphones (five hours) with Bluetooth speakers or headphones (five hours).
2. Navigate with GoogleMaps; keeping the screen unlocked and illuminated so you can see the screen in order to navigate.
3. Log your movement with Strava or RideWithGPS.
4. Take ten videos of 5 minutes length, each. Edit and post ten onto Instagram / Twitter / Strava while stopped (for water, etc)
5. Also post 10 snapchat short videos.
6. Receive a full suite of Yelp, Twitter, Swarm, Outlook, etc notifications, whilst en route.


7. upon arriving, is there sufficent battery to stream two netflix movies ?

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Compromising someone's digital security is time-consuming, though not for the reasons pop culture might suggest. Hacking isn't a matter of typing furiously into a cyberpunk-y computer terminal like in The Matrix (although Cooper Quintin--staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation -- did indeed spend much of our session typing into an old-fashioned command-line interface).

What he needed was time to skulk through my social-media profiles to figure out who I was, who my friends were, where I worked, who I worked with, who I was close to, who I would trust--the kind of information, thanks to social media, that's available to anyone who wants to look. This is the key difference between spearphishing and regular ol' phishing. Spearphishing involves a component of social engineering: It's the most boring kind of hacking, but also the most dangerous.

A social engineer might pretend to be a customer-service representative at Comcast, the IT guy at your company, even a FedEx automatic package-tracking e-mail. A good social engineer can convincingly take on the guise of a colleague, an acquaintance, a friend, even sometimes a relative. It's shocking the things you'll click on if you trust the sender.

Someone trying to collect a flag might pretend to be another employee working in a different department of the company, an outside salesperson making an inquiry, or the IT help desk. The goal is to pass under the radar; to be a boring, routine communication you answer without thinking twice. Good social engineers persuade people to give something away without a second thought, because the request is so innocuous--like a friend asking me to look at his or her Google Doc. Spearphishing is just another form of social engineering.

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Consider, for example, the "innovation" known as Gas Station TV--that is, the televisions embedded in gasoline pumps that blast advertising and other pseudo-programming at the captive pumper. There is no escape: as the CEO of Gas Station TV puts it, "We like to say you're tied to that screen with an 8-foot rubber hose for about five minutes." It is an invention that singlehandedly may have created a new case for the electric car.

As neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley and psychologist Larry Rosen put it in their book, The Distracted Mind, humans have an "extreme sensitivity to goal interference from distractions by irrelevant information."

In some ways this is a problem we have faced before: In the 1940s cities banned noisy advertising trucks bearing loudspeakers; the case against advertising screens and sound-trucks is basically the same. It is a small thing cities and towns can do to make our age of bombardment a bit more bearable.

we regularly pay for things in ways other than using money. Sometimes we pay still with cash. But we also pay for things with data, and more often, with our time and attention. We effectively hand over access to our minds in exchange for something "free," like email, Facebook, or football games on TV. As opposed to "paying" attention, we actually "spend attention," agreeing to the view ads in exchange for something we really want.

The centrality of that deal in our lives makes it outrageous that there are companies who seize our time and attention for absolutely nothing in exchange, and indeed, without consent at all--otherwise known as "attention theft."

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Why do free speech absolutists scurry out of the woodwork to defend Milo Yiannopoulos, Richard Spencer, and Ann Coulter, but not Linda Sarsour, George Ciccariello-Maher, or Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor?

Have we made up our mind on whose "opposing views" are okay for college students to hear ?

-- Joshua Adams is a writer, journalist, and adjunct instructor at DePaul University. He holds a B.A. in African American Studies from the University of Virginia and a Journalism M.A. from the University of Southern California.

As more liberal journalists fight against the idea of liberalism as "feelings over facts," a whole news industry on the right fueled grievances, fears, attacks, and false equivalencies. It's also why outlets like MSNBC can have scholars and activists on to explain why "black-on-black crime" is a racist term, and also get political commentary from former reporters of Breitbart, a site with tags dedicated to "black crime" and "black-on-black violence." If this is the type of "balance" news outlets need to have, then the burden should be equally distributed, not just for "the liberal media."

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Princeton researchers discover why AI become racist and sexist
Study of language bias has implications for AI as well as human cognition.

-- An algorithm that can actually predict human prejudices based on an intensive analysis of how people use English online.

The Common Crawl is the result of a large-scale crawl of the Internet in 2014 that contains 840 billion tokens, or words. Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy researcher Aylin Caliskan and her colleagues wondered whether that corpus--created by millions of people typing away online--might contain biases that could be discovered by algorithm. To figure it out, they turned to an unusual source: the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which is used to measure often unconscious social attitudes.

Using the IAT as a model, Caliskan and her colleagues created the Word-Embedding Association Test (WEAT), which analyzes chunks of text to see which concepts are more closely associated than others. The "word-embedding" part of the test comes from a project at Stanford called GloVe, which packages words together into "vector representations," basically lists of associated terms. So the word "dog," if represented as a word-embedded vector, would be composed of words like puppy, doggie, hound, canine, and all the various dog breeds.

The idea is to get at the concept of dog, not the specific word. This is especially important if you are working with social stereotypes, where somebody might be expressing ideas about women by using words like "girl" or "mother." To keep things simple, the researchers limited each concept to 300 vectors.

-- ANNALEE NEWITZ

People taking the IAT are asked to put words into two categories. The longer it takes for the person to place a word in a category, the less they associate the word with the category. (If you'd like to take an IAT, there are several online at Harvard University.) IAT is used to measure bias by asking people to associate random words with categories like gender, race, disability, age, and more.

Outcomes are often unsurprising: for example, most people associate women with family, and men with work. But that obviousness is actually evidence for the IAT's usefulness in discovering people's latent stereotypes about each other. (It's worth noting that there is some debate among social scientists about the IAT's accuracy.)

Though Caliskan and her colleagues found language was full of biases based on prejudice and stereotypes, it was also full of latent truths as well. In one test, they found strong associations between the concept of woman and the concept of nursing. This reflects a truth about reality, which is that nursing is a majority female profession.

"Language reflects facts about the world," Caliskan told

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Sony's recently announced full-frame flagship a9 camera is a game changer for mirrorless systems. Designed to compete directly against the Canon EOS 1D X Mark II and Nikon D5 DSLRs, Sony has seemingly solved some of the major complaints of the a7 series and mirrorless systems in general.

It has been very interesting to see a slow migration of highly respected professionals to Sony over the past few years. Everyone from Michael Yamashita to Ben Lowy can be found using the systems, so it's clear that multiple thresholds have been crossed with regards to build quality, IQ and glass availability. This includes the general fear that EVFs aren't good enough compared to an optical viewfinder.

Sony recently also displaced Nikon as the #2 camera brand for full-frame systems, which is both scary and a cause for celebration.

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Self-identified, self-reported, but doubted:

Indeed it's hard to know who we do feel pity toward, except ourselves -- for we believe that we are the real victims in today's world. Those among us who are evangelical Christians are especially paranoid: While Americans overall are twice as likely to say there is more discrimination against Muslims than against Christians, the numbers are almost reversed for white evangelical Protestants.

And apparently things are getting worse: the percentage of evangelicals who said that religious freedom in the U.S. declined over the past decade rose from 60 percent in 2012 to 77 percent in 2015.

-- Charles Mathewes is a professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, and a senior fellow at UVA's Miller Center.

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Emporia Telecom, an Austrian cellphone company, has expanded production since T-Mobile, the largest German mobile operator, began selling its TalkPremium model for seniors. The phone has a large keypad and is built for voice- and text-messaging.

The very young and the elderly have never been target markets for high-tech companies, which focus instead on the global mainstream. But with the economic downturn reducing growth, companies are applying cutting-edge technology to the often-neglected extremes of the consumer spectrum.

...

In the 1980s, Sony tried to design products with older consumers in mind, said Fujio Nishida, president of Sony Europe. But the effort did not work and has not been tried since. Seniors rejected Sony's clock-radio with simple mechanical dials and large buttons, Mr. Nishida said.

"Even though the design was helpful for them, it turned out that a lot of older consumers didn't want to admit to being old," Mr. Nishida said. "So they didn't buy it."

Technology
Electronics Reach Out to the Ends of the Age Spectrum
By KEVIN J. O'BRIEN
Published: September 7, 2009
The big electronics companies have focused on the mass market. Clipped by the recession, they are looking at the very young and the old.

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Auditing Algorithms: Adding Accountability to Automated Authority is A6.

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