U.S. soldiers are revealing sensitive and dangerous information by jogging

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Liz Sly at Washington Post: “An interactive map posted on the Internet that shows the whereabouts of people who use fitness devices such as Fitbit also reveals highly sensitive information about the locations and activities of soldiers at U.S. military bases, in what appears to be a major security oversight.

The Global Heat Map, published by the GPS tracking company Strava, uses satellite information to map the locations and movements of subscribers to the company’s fitness service over a two-year period, by illuminating areas of activity.

Strava says it has 27 million users around the world, including people who own widely available fitness devices such as Fitbit and Jawbone, as well as people who directly subscribe to its mobile app. The map is not live — rather, it shows a pattern of accumulated activity between 2015 and September 2017.

Most parts of the United States and Europe, where millions of people use some type of fitness tracker, show up on the map as blazes of light because there is so much activity.

In war zones and deserts in countries such as Iraq and Syria, the heat map becomes almost entirely dark — except for scattered pinpricks of activity. Zooming in on those areas brings into focus the locations and outlines of known U.S. military bases, as well as of other unknown and potentially sensitive sites — presumably because American soldiers and other personnel are using fitness trackers as they move around.

The U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State said on Monday it is revising its guidelines on the use of all wireless and technological devices on military facilities as a result of the revelations….(More)”.

2018 Edelman Trust Barometer

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Executive Summary: “Volatility brews beneath a stagnant surface. If a single theme captures the state of the world’s trust in 2018, it is this. Even as people’s trust in business, government, NGOs and media across 28 countries remained largely unchanged, experiencing virtually no recovery from 2017 (Fig. 1), dramatic shifts are taking place at the country level and within the institution of media.

Globally, 20 of 28 countries lie in distruster territory (Fig. 2), one more than in 2017. Trust among the informed public—those with higher levels of income and education— declined slightly on a global level, from 60 percent to 59 percent, thrusting this group into neutral territory from its once trusting status. A closer look, however, reveals a world moving apart (Fig. 3).

In 2018, two poles have emerged: a cluster of six nations where trust has dramatically increased, and six where trust has deeply declined. Whereas in previous years country-level trust has moved largely in lockstep, for the first time ever there is now a distinct split between extreme trust gainers and losers. No country saw steeper declines than the United States, with a 37-point aggregate drop in trust across all institutions.

The loss of trust was most severe among the informed public—a 23-point fall on the Trust Index—nearly erasing the “mass-class” divide that once stood between this segment of the U.S. population and the country’s farless-trusting mass population. At the opposite end of the spectrum, China experienced a 27-point gain, more than any other country. Following behind in the trust gainer category are the UAE (24 points) and South Korea (23 points)….(More)”.

Is Social Media Good or Bad for Democracy?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Cass R. Sunstein,  as  part of a series by Facebook on social media and democracy: “On balance, the question of whether social media platforms are good for democracy is easy. On balance, they are not merely good; they are terrific. For people to govern themselves, they need to have information. They also need to be able to convey it to others. Social media platforms make that tons easier.

There is a subtler point as well. When democracies are functioning properly, people’s sufferings and challenges are not entirely private matters. Social media platforms help us alert one another to a million and one different problems. In the process, the existence of social media can prod citizens to seek solutions.

Consider the remarkable finding, by the economist Amartya Sen, that in the history of the world, there has never been a famine in a system with a democratic press and free elections. A central reason is that famines are a product not only of a scarcity of food, but also a nation’s failure to provide solutions. When the press is free, and when leaders are elected, leaders have a strong incentive to help.

Mental illness, chronic pain, loss of employment, vulnerability to crime, drugs in the family – information about all these spread via social media, and they can be reduced with sensible policies. When people can talk to each other, and disclose what they know to public officials, the whole world might change in a hurry.

But celebrations can be awfully boring, so let’s hold the applause. Are automobiles good for transportation? Absolutely, but in the United States alone, over 35,000 people died in crashes in 2016.

Social media platforms are terrific for democracy in many ways, but pretty bad in others. And they remain a work-in-progress, not only because of new entrants, but also because the not-so-new ones (including Facebook) continue to evolve. What John Dewey said about my beloved country is true for social media as well: “The United States are not yet made; they are not a finished fact to be categorically assessed.”

For social media and democracy, the equivalents of car crashes include false reports (“fake news”) and the proliferation of information cocoons — and as a result, an increase in fragmentation, polarization and extremism. If you live in an information cocoon, you will believe many things that are false, and you will fail to learn countless things that are true. That’s awful for democracy. And as we have seen, those with specific interests — including politicians and nations, such as Russia, seeking to disrupt democratic processes — can use social media to promote those interests.

This problem is linked to the phenomenon of group polarization — which takes hold when like-minded people talk to one another and end up thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk. In fact that’s a common outcome. At best, it’s a problem. At worst, it’s dangerous….(More)”.

Is There Something Wrong with Democracy?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Max Fisher and Amanda Taub at The New York Times: “After 200 years of expansion, democracy’s growth in the world has stalled. A handful of democracies like Venezuela and Hungary are backsliding into authoritarianism. And even in established Western democracies, voters are losing faith in democratic institutions and norms.

That has left us and scholars who study democracy obsessed with a set of questions. Is this all just a blip, or is democracy in real trouble? Are the oldest and sturdiest democracies, like those of Europe and the United States, really as safe as they seem? And why would people voluntarily dismantle their own democracy from within?

No one knows the answers for sure. But we’re starting to figure them out and it’s not all good news. Here, in the first of what will become a regular series of videos exploring big questions and ideas about the world, we explain what we know about democracy’s troubles, what’s causing them and where it leads….(See VIDEO)”.

Improving refugee integration through data-driven algorithmic assignment

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Kirk Bansak, et al in Science Magazine: “Developed democracies are settling an increased number of refugees, many of whom face challenges integrating into host societies. We developed a flexible data-driven algorithm that assigns refugees across resettlement locations to improve integration outcomes. The algorithm uses a combination of supervised machine learning and optimal matching to discover and leverage synergies between refugee characteristics and resettlement sites.

The algorithm was tested on historical registry data from two countries with different assignment regimes and refugee populations, the United States and Switzerland. Our approach led to gains of roughly 40 to 70%, on average, in refugees’ employment outcomes relative to current assignment practices. This approach can provide governments with a practical and cost-efficient policy tool that can be immediately implemented within existing institutional structures….(More)”.

StatCan now crowdsourcing cannabis data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Kyle Duggan at iPolitics: “The national statistics agency is launching a crowdsourcing project to find out how much weed Canadians are consuming and how much it costs them.

Statistics Canada is searching for the best picture of consumption it can find ahead of legalization, and is turning to average Canadians to improve its rough estimates about a product that’s largely been accessed illegally by the population.

Thursday it released a suite of “experimental” data that make up its current best guesses on Canadian consumption habits, along with a crowdsourcing website and app to get its own estimates – a project officials said is an experiment itself.

Statscan is also rolling out a quarterly cannabis survey this year.

The agency has been combing through historical research on legal and illegal cannabis prices, scraping price data from illegal vendors online and, for some data, is relying largely on the self-reporting website priceofweed.com to assemble as much pot information as possible, even if it’s not perfect data.

The agency has been quietly preparing for the July legalization deadline by compiling health, justice and economic datasets and scouring to fill in the blanks where it can. Come July, legal cannabis will suddenly also need to be rolled into other important data products, like the GDP accounts….(More)”.

They Are Watching You—and Everything Else on the Planet

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Cover article by Robert Draper for Special Issue of the National Geographic: “Technology and our increasing demand for security have put us all under surveillance. Is privacy becoming just a memory?…

In 1949, amid the specter of European authoritarianism, the British novelist George Orwell published his dystopian masterpiece 1984, with its grim admonition: “Big Brother is watching you.” As unsettling as this notion may have been, “watching” was a quaintly circumscribed undertaking back then. That very year, 1949, an American company released the first commercially available CCTV system. Two years later, in 1951, Kodak introduced its Brownie portable movie camera to an awestruck public.

Today more than 2.5 trillion images are shared or stored on the Internet annually—to say nothing of the billions more photographs and videos people keep to themselves. By 2020, one telecommunications company estimates, 6.1 billion people will have phones with picture-taking capabilities. Meanwhile, in a single year an estimated 106 million new surveillance cameras are sold. More than three million ATMs around the planet stare back at their customers. Tens of thousands of cameras known as automatic number plate recognition devices, or ANPRs, hover over roadways—to catch speeding motorists or parking violators but also, in the case of the United Kingdom, to track the comings and goings of suspected criminals. The untallied but growing number of people wearing body cameras now includes not just police but also hospital workers and others who aren’t law enforcement officers. Proliferating as well are personal monitoring devices—dash cams, cyclist helmet cameras to record collisions, doorbells equipped with lenses to catch package thieves—that are fast becoming a part of many a city dweller’s everyday arsenal. Even less quantifiable, but far more vexing, are the billions of images of unsuspecting citizens captured by facial-recognition technology and stored in law enforcement and private-sector databases over which our control is practically nonexistent.

Those are merely the “watching” devices that we’re capable of seeing. Presently the skies are cluttered with drones—2.5 million of which were purchased in 2016 by American hobbyists and businesses. That figure doesn’t include the fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles used by the U.S. government not only to bomb terrorists in Yemen but also to help stop illegal immigrants entering from Mexico, monitor hurricane flooding in Texas, and catch cattle thieves in North Dakota. Nor does it include the many thousands of airborne spying devices employed by other countries—among them Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.

We’re being watched from the heavens as well. More than 1,700 satellites monitor our planet. From a distance of about 300 miles, some of them can discern a herd of buffalo or the stages of a forest fire. From outer space, a camera clicks and a detailed image of the block where we work can be acquired by a total stranger….

This is—to lift the title from another British futurist, Aldous Huxley—our brave new world. That we can see it coming is cold comfort since, as Carnegie Mellon University professor of information technology Alessandro Acquisti says, “in the cat-and-mouse game of privacy protection, the data subject is always the weaker side of the game.” Simply submitting to the game is a dispiriting proposition. But to actively seek to protect one’s privacy can be even more demoralizing. University of Texas American studies professor Randolph Lewis writes in his new book, Under Surveillance: Being Watched in Modern America, “Surveillance is often exhausting to those who really feel its undertow: it overwhelms with its constant badgering, its omnipresent mysteries, its endless tabulations of movements, purchases, potentialities.”

The desire for privacy, Acquisti says, “is a universal trait among humans, across cultures and across time. You find evidence of it in ancient Rome, ancient Greece, in the Bible, in the Quran. What’s worrisome is that if all of us at an individual level suffer from the loss of privacy, society as a whole may realize its value only after we’ve lost it for good.”…(More)”.

The Assault on Reason

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Zia Haider Rahman at the New York Review of Books: “Albert Einstein was awarded a Nobel Prize not for his work on relativity, but for his explanation of the photoelectric effect. Both results, and others of note, were published in 1905, his annus mirabilis. The prize was denied him for well over a decade, with the Nobel Committee maintaining that relativity was yet unproven. Philosophers of science, most notably Karl Popper, have argued that for a theory to be regarded as properly scientific it must be capable of being contradicted by observation. In other words, it must yield falsifiable predictions—predictions that could, in principle, be shown to be wrong. On the basis of his theory, Einstein predicted that starlight was being deflected by the sun by specified degrees. This was a prediction that was, in principle, capable of being wrong and therefore capable of falsifying relativity. The physicist offered signs others could look for that would lend credibility to his theory—or refute it. Evidence eventually came from the work of Arthur Eddington and the arrival of instruments that could make sufficiently fine measurements, though Einstein’s Nobel medal would elude him for two more years because of gathering anti-Semitism in Europe.

Mathematics, so often lumped together with the sciences, actually adheres to an entirely different standard. A mathematical theorem never submits itself to hypothesis testing, never needs an experiment to support its validity. Once described to me as an education in thinking without the encumbrance of facts, mathematics is unlike the sciences in that no empirical finding can ever shift a mathematical theorem by one iota; it is true forever. Mathematical reasoning is a given, something commonly understood and shared by all mathematicians, because mathematical reasoning is, fundamentally, no more than logical reasoning, a thing universally shared. My own study of mathematics has left me with a deep respect for the distinction between relevance and irrelevance in making a reasoned argument.

These are the gold standards of human intellectual progress. Society, however, has to deal with wildly contested facts. We live in a post-truth world, by some accounts, in which facts are willfully bent to serve political ends. If the forty-fifth president is to be believed, Christmas has apparently been restored to the White House. Never mind the contradictory videos of the forty-fourth president and his family celebrating the holiday.

But there is nothing particularly new about this distorting. In his landmark work, Public Opinion, published in 1922, the formidable American journalist, Walter Lippmann reflected on the functions of the press:

That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements no one, I think, denies. The process by which public opinions arise is certainly no less intricate than it has appeared in these pages, and the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the process are plain enough.… as a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power.… Under the impact of propaganda, not necessarily in the sinister meaning of the word alone, the old constants of our thinking have become variables. It is no longer possible, for example, to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify. It has been demonstrated that we cannot rely upon intuition, conscience, or the accidents of casual opinion if we are to deal with the world beyond our reach.

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts, as United States Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was fond of saying. None of us is in a position, however, to verify all the facts presented to us. Somewhere, we each draw a line and say on this I will defer to so-and-so or such-and-such. We have only so many hours in the day. Besides, we acknowledge that some matters lie outside our expertise or even our capacity to comprehend. Doctors and lawyers make their livings on such basis.

But it is not merely facts that are under assault in the polarized politics of the US, the UK, and other nations twisting in the winds of what some call populism. There is also a troubling assault on reason….(More)”.

Advanced Design for the Public Sector

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Kristofer Kelly-Frere & Jonathan Veale: “…It might surprise some, but it is now common for governments across Canada to employ in-house designers to work on very complex and public issues.

There are design teams giving shape to experiences, services, processes, programs, infrastructure and policies. The Alberta CoLab, the Ontario Digital Service, BC’s Government Digital Experience Division, the Canadian Digital Service, Calgary’s Civic Innovation YYC, and, in partnership with government,MaRS Solutions Lab stand out. The Government of Nova Scotia recently launched the NS CoLab. There are many, many more. Perhaps hundreds.

Design-thinking. Service Design. Systemic Design. Strategic Design. They are part of the same story. Connected by their ability to focus and shape a transformation of some kind. Each is an advanced form of design oriented directly at humanizing legacy systems — massive services built by a culture that increasingly appears out-of-sorts with our world. We don’t need a new design pantheon, we need a unifying force.

We have no shortage of systems that require reform. And no shortage of challenges. Among them, the inability to assemble a common understanding of the problems in the first place, and then a lack of agency over these unwieldy systems. We have fanatics and nativists who believe in simple, regressive and violent solutions. We have a social economy that elevates these marginal voices. We have well-vested interests who benefit from maintaining the status quo and who lack actionable migration paths to new models. The median public may no longer see themselves in liberal democracy. Populism and dogmatism is rampant. The government, in some spheres, is not credible or trusted.

The traditional designer’s niche is narrowing at the same time government itself is becoming fragile. It is already cliche to point out that private wealth and resources allow broad segments of the population to “opt out.” This is quite apparent at the municipal level where privatized sources of security, water, fire protection and even sidewalks effectively produce private shadow governments. Scaling up, the most wealthy may simply purchase residency or citizenship or invest in emerging nation states. Without re-invention this erosion will continue. At the same time artificial intelligence, machine learning and automation are already displacing frontline design and creative work. This is the opportunity: Building systems awareness and agency on the foundations of craft and empathy that are core to human centered design. Time is of the essence. Transitions between one era to the next are historically tumultuous times. Moreover, these changes proceed faster than expected and in unexpected directions….(More).

It’s the (Democracy-Poisoning) Golden Age of Free Speech

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Zeynep Tufekci in Wired: “…In today’s networked environment, when anyone can broadcast live or post their thoughts to a social network, it would seem that censorship ought to be impossible. This should be the golden age of free speech.

And sure, it is a golden age of free speech—if you can believe your lying eyes….

The most effective forms of censorship today involve meddling with trust and attention, not muzzling speech itself. As a result, they don’t look much like the old forms of censorship at all. They look like viral or coordinated harassment campaigns, which harness the dynamics of viral outrage to impose an unbearable and disproportionate cost on the act of speaking out. They look like epidemics of disinformation, meant to undercut the credibility of valid information sources. They look like bot-fueled campaigns of trolling and distraction, or piecemeal leaks of hacked materials, meant to swamp the attention of traditional media.

These tactics usually don’t break any laws or set off any First Amendment alarm bells. But they all serve the same purpose that the old forms of censorship did: They are the best available tools to stop ideas from spreading and gaining purchase. They can also make the big platforms a terrible place to interact with other people.

Even when the big platforms themselves suspend or boot someone off their networks for violating “community standards”—an act that doeslook to many people like old-fashioned censorship—it’s not technically an infringement on free speech, even if it is a display of immense platform power. Anyone in the world can still read what the far-right troll Tim “Baked Alaska” Gionet has to say on the internet. What Twitter has denied him, by kicking him off, is attention.

Many more of the most noble old ideas about free speech simply don’t compute in the age of social media. John Stuart Mill’s notion that a “marketplace of ideas” will elevate the truth is flatly belied by the virality of fake news. And the famous American saying that “the best cure for bad speech is more speech”—a paraphrase of Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis—loses all its meaning when speech is at once mass but also nonpublic. How do you respond to what you cannot see? How can you cure the effects of “bad” speech with more speech when you have no means to target the same audience that received the original message?

This is not a call for nostalgia. In the past, marginalized voices had a hard time reaching a mass audience at all. They often never made it past the gatekeepers who put out the evening news, who worked and lived within a few blocks of one another in Manhattan and Washington, DC. The best that dissidents could do, often, was to engineer self-sacrificing public spectacles that those gatekeepers would find hard to ignore—as US civil rights leaders did when they sent schoolchildren out to march on the streets of Birmingham, Alabama, drawing out the most naked forms of Southern police brutality for the cameras.

But back then, every political actor could at least see more or less what everyone else was seeing. Today, even the most powerful elites often cannot effectively convene the right swath of the public to counter viral messages. …(More)”.