Distantiated Communities: A Social History of Social Distancing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Lily Scherlis: “The term “social distancing” trickled into the US news at the end of January, and by mid-March had become the governing creed of interpersonal relations for the time being. It surfaced in the midst of early doubts about the efficacy and ethics of the quarantine in China. The media began to recite it, wrapping it in scare quotes. The omnipresent quotation marks created the impression that reporters were holding the term at bay and contemplating it. By mid-March—after the flood of guidelines from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and subsequent executive orders—social distancing had become sufficiently imperative for the term to be folded directly into sentences, shedding its quotation marks once and for all. But the initial presence of the quotes reflects the early mass fascination with the unfamiliar term. It materialized as if from nowhere: a scientific coinage, a spontaneous naming of a systematized set of behaviors miraculously devised by presumed experts.

“Social distancing” has actually lived several lives. It and its precursor, “social distance,” had long been used in a variety of colloquial and academic contexts, both as prescriptions and descriptions, before being taken up by epidemiologists in this century. In the nineteenth century, “social distance” was a polite euphemism used by the British to talk about class and by Americans to talk about race. It was then formally adopted in the 1920s by sociologists as a term to facilitate the quantitative codification that was then being introduced into the nascent study of race relations. In the second half of the twentieth century, psychiatry, anthropology, and zoology all adapted it for various purposes. And it was used in the 1990s in the United States to analyze what happened to the gay community when faced with straight fears of contagion. It was only in 2004 in a CDC publication on controlling the recent SARS outbreak that the term “social distance” was finally deployed for the first time by the medical community.

The history I trace here doesn’t presume that the doctors who appropriated it to control disease knew about its legacy, or that these links are relationships of causation. But there was something in the air in 2004 that encouraged the practices we now know as social distancing to be christened in this way—as if its past meanings had coalesced into a semantic atmosphere ripe for the emergence of this new use. Which is why if you think the term is weird, you’re right….(More)”.

How ‘Social Distancing’ Can Get Lost in Translation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ruth Michaelson at the Smithsonian Magazine: “…Even as tongue-in-cheek phrases like “avoiding the Rona” abound on American social media, to say nothing of the rapper Cardi B’s enunciation of “coronavirus,” other terms like “social distancing,” or “lockdown,” have quickly entered our daily vocabulary.

But what these terms mean in different countries (or regions or cities within regions, in Wuhan’s case) is a question of translation as well as interpretation. Communities around the world remain under government-enforced lockdown to prevent the spread of COVID-19, but few have understood “stay at home,” or liu-zai-jia-li in Mandarin, to mean precisely the same thing. The concept of social distancing, normally indicating a need to avoid contact with others, can mean anything from avoiding public transport to the World Health Organization’s recommendation to “maintain at least one metre distance,” from those who are coughing or sneezing. In one Florida county, officials explained the guideline by suggesting to residents they stay “one alligator” away from each other.

The way that terms like “social distancing,” are adopted across languages provides a way to understand how countries across the globe are coping with the COVID-19 threat. For instance, the Mandarin Chinese translation of “social distancing”, or ju-li-yuan-dian, is interpreted differently in Wuhan dialect, explains Jin. “Instead of ‘keep a distance,’ Wuhan dialect literally translates this as ‘send far away.’”

Through these small shifts in language, says Jin, “people in Wuhan expose their feelings about their own suffering.”

In Sweden, meanwhile, has currently registered more than 16,000 cases of COVID-19, the highest incidence rate in Scandinavia. The government has taken an unusually lax approach to enforcing its pandemic mitigation policies, placing the emphasis on citizens to self-police, perhaps to ill effect. While Swedes do use terms like social distancing, or rather the noun socialt avstånd, these are accompanied by other ideas that are more popular in Sweden. “Herd immunity or flockimmunitet is a very big word around here,” says Jan Pedersen, director of the Institute for Interpreting and Translation Studies at Stockholm University.

“Sweden is famous for being a very consensus driven society, and this applies here as well,” he says. “There’s a great deal of talk about trust.” In this case, he explained, citizens have trust – tillit – in the authorities to make good choices and so choose to take personligt ansvar, or personal responsibility.

Pedersen has also noticed some new language developing as a result. “The word recommendation, rekommendationer, in Sweden has taken on much stronger force,” he said. “Recommendation used to be a recommendation, what you could do or not. Now it’s slightly stronger … We would use words like obey with laws, but now here you obey a recommendation, lyda rekommendationer.”…(More)”.

Can We Track COVID-19 and Protect Privacy at the Same Time?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Sue Halpern at the New Yorker: “…Location data are the bread and butter of “ad tech.” They let marketers know you recently shopped for running shoes, are trying to lose weight, and have an abiding affection for kettle corn. Apps on cell phones emit a constant trail of longitude and latitude readings, making it possible to follow consumers through time and space. Location data are often triangulated with other, seemingly innocuous slivers of personal information—so many, in fact, that a number of data brokers claim to have around five thousand data points on almost every American. It’s a lucrative business—by at least one estimate, the data-brokerage industry is worth two hundred billion dollars. Though the data are often anonymized, a number of studies have shown that they can be easily unmasked to reveal identities—names, addresses, phone numbers, and any number of intimacies.

As Buckee knew, public-health surveillance, which serves the community at large, has always bumped up against privacy, which protects the individual. But, in the past, public-health surveillance was typically conducted by contract tracing, with health-care workers privately interviewing individuals to determine their health status and trace their movements. It was labor-intensive, painstaking, memory-dependent work, and, because of that, it was inherently limited in scope and often incomplete or inefficient. (At the start of the pandemic, there were only twenty-two hundred contact tracers in the country.)

Digital technologies, which work at scale, instantly provide detailed information culled from security cameras, license-plate readers, biometric scans, drones, G.P.S. devices, cell-phone towers, Internet searches, and commercial transactions. They can be useful for public-health surveillance in the same way that they facilitate all kinds of spying by governments, businesses, and malign actors. South Korea, which reported its first covid-19 case a month after the United States, has achieved dramatically lower rates of infection and mortality by tracking citizens with the virus via their phones, car G.P.S. systems, credit-card transactions, and public cameras, in addition to a robust disease-testing program. Israel enlisted Shin Bet, its secret police, to repurpose its terrorist-tracking protocols.  China programmed government-installed cameras to point at infected people’s doorways to monitor their movements….(More)”.

Doctors are using AI to triage covid-19 patients. The tools may be here to stay

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Karen Hao at MIT Technology Review: “The pandemic, in other words, has turned into a gateway for AI adoption in health care—bringing both opportunity and risk. On the one hand, it is pushing doctors and hospitals to fast-track promising new technologies. On the other, this accelerated process could allow unvetted tools to bypass regulatory processes, putting patients in harm’s way.

“At a high level, artificial intelligence in health care is very exciting,” says Chris Longhurst, the chief information officer at UC San Diego Health. “But health care is one of those industries where there are a lot of factors that come into play. A change in the system can have potentially fatal unintended consequences.”

Before the pandemic, health-care AI was already a booming area of research. Deep learning, in particular, has demonstrated impressive results for analyzing medical images to identify diseases like breast and lung cancer or glaucoma at least as accurately as human specialists. Studies have also shown the potential of using computer vision to monitor elderly people in their homes and patients in intensive care units.

But there have been significant obstacles to translating that research into real-world applications. Privacy concerns make it challenging to collect enough data for training algorithms; issues related to bias and generalizability make regulators cautious to grant approvals. Even for applications that do get certified, hospitals rightly have their own intensive vetting procedures and established protocols. “Physicians, like everybody else—we’re all creatures of habit,” says Albert Hsiao, a radiologist at UCSD Health who is now trialing his own covid detection algorithm based on chest x-rays. “We don’t change unless we’re forced to change.”

As a result, AI has been slow to gain a foothold. “It feels like there’s something there; there are a lot of papers that show a lot of promise,” said Andrew Ng, a leading AI practitioner, in a recent webinar on its applications in medicine. But “it’s not yet as widely deployed as we wish.”…

In addition to the speed of evaluation, Durand identifies something else that may have encouraged hospitals to adopt AI during the pandemic: they are thinking about how to prepare for the inevitable staff shortages that will arise after the crisis. Traumatic events like a pandemic are often followed by an exodus of doctors and nurses. “Some doctors may want to change their way of life,” he says. “What’s coming, we don’t know.”…(More)”

Reweaving the social fabric after the crisis

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Andy Haldane at the Financial Times: “Yet one source of capital, as in past pandemics, is bucking these trends: social capital. This typically refers to the network of relationships across communities that support and strengthen societies. From surveys, we know that people greatly value these networks, even though social capital itself is rarely assigned a monetary value.

The social distancing policies enacted across the world to curb the spread of Covid-19 might have been expected to weaken social networks and damage social capital. In fact, the opposite has happened. People have maintained physical distance while pursuing social togetherness. Existing networks have been strengthened and new ones ­created, often digitally. Even as other capital has crumbled, the stock of social capital has risen, acting as a counter­cyclical stabiliser across communities. We see this daily on our doorsteps through small acts of neighbourly kindness.

We see it in the activities of community groups, charities and philanthropic movements, whose work has risen in importance and prominence. And we see it too in the vastly increased numbers of people volunteering to help. Before the crisis struck, the global volunteer corps numbered a staggering 1bn people. Since then, more people than ever have signed up for civic service, including 750,000 volunteers who are supporting the UK National Health Service. They are the often-invisible army helping fight this invisible enemy.

This same pattern appeared during past periods of societal stress, from pandemics to wars. Then, as now, faith and community groups provided the glue bonding societies together. During the 19th century, the societal stresses arising from the Industrial Revolution — homelessness, family separation, loneliness — were the catalyst for the emergence of the charitable sector.

The economic and social progress that followed the Industrial Revolution came courtesy of a three-way partnership among the private, public and social sectors. The private sector provided the innovative spark; the state provided insurance to the incomes, jobs and health of citizens; and the social sector provided the support network to cope with disruption to lives and livelihoods. Back then, social capital (every bit as much as human, financial and physical capital) provided the foundations on which capitalism was built….(More)”.

The tricky math of lifting coronavirus lockdowns

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

James Temple at MIT Technology Review: “…A crucial point of the work—which Steinhardt and MIT’s Andrew Ilyas​ wrote up in a draft paper that hasn’t yet been published or peer-reviewed—is that communities need to get much better at tracking infections. “With the data we currently have, we actually just don’t know what the level of safe mobility is,” Steinhardt says. “We need much better mechanisms for tracking prevalence in order to do any of this safely.”

The analysis relies on other noisy and less-than-optimal measurements as well, including using hospitalization admissions and deaths to estimate disease prevalence before the lockdowns. They also had to make informed assumptions, which others might disagree with, about how much shelter-in-place rules have altered the spread of the disease. Much of the overall uncertainty is due to the spottiness of testing to date. If case counts are rising, but so is testing, it’s difficult to decipher whether infections are still increasing or a greater proportion of infected people are being evaluated.

This produces some confusing results in the study for any policymaker looking for clear direction. Notably, in Los Angeles, the estimated growth rate of the disease since the shelter-in-place order went into effect ranges from negative to positive. This suggests either that the city could start loosening restrictions or that it needs to tighten them further.

Ultimately, the researchers stress that communities need to build up disease surveillance measures to reduce this uncertainty, and strike an appropriate balance between reopening the economy and minimizing public health risks.

They propose several ways to do so, including conducting virological testing on a random sample of some 20,000 people per day in a given area; setting up wide-scale online surveys that ask people to report potential symptoms, similar to what Carnegie Mellon researchers are doing through efforts with both Facebook and Google; and potentially testing for the prevalence of viral material in wastewater, a technique that has “sounded the alarm” on polio outbreaks in the past.

A team of researchers affiliated with MIT, Harvard, and startup Biobot Analytics recently analyzed water samples from a Massachusetts treatment facility, and detected levels of the coronavirus that were “significantly higher” than expected on the basis of confirmed cases in the state, according to a non-peer-reviewed paper released earlier this month….(More)”.

Digital solutions to revolutionise community empowerment

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Alan Marcus: “…The best responses to Covid-19 have harmonised top-down policies and grassroots organisation. In the UK, more than 700,000 volunteers for the National Health Service are being organised through GoodSAM—an app that, like many gig economy platforms, allows individuals to switch on availability for delivering supplies to vulnerable people.

Perhaps the best example is Taiwan, where officials have kept the rate of infection to a fraction of even highly-rated Singapore. Coordinating public and private groups, the country has deployed a range of online services, including a system for mapping and allocating rationed face masks developed by Digital Minister Audrey Tang and members of an online hacktivist chatroom. …

Effective responses to the crisis show the value of inclusive government and hint at more resilient models for managing our communities. So far, governments, businesses and individuals have pooled resources to deliver country-wide responses. However, this model should be pushed further. Digital tools should be provided to communities to organise themselves, develop locally tailored solutions and get involved in the governance of their town or neighbourhood.

This model requires open communication between local people and the organisations responsible for administrating neighbourhoods—be they governments or businesses. … 

The platform provides significant opportunities for optimising crisis response and elevating quality of life. For example, a popular solution for market vendors forced to close by Covid-19 has been offering delivery services. As well as the businesses, this benefits local people, who can bypass overcrowded superstores or overcapacity online grocery deliveries. While grassroots movements are largely left to organise themselves, this is a missed opportunity for collaboration with local administrators.

By communicating with vendors, the administrator can not only establish an online platform to coordinate their services, but also connect them with local people to help deliver the service, such as van owners who can loan their vehicles. Moreover, the administrator can collect feedback on local infrastructure needed to improve services, such as communal cold lockers for receiving groceries when no-one is home.

By integrating this model into the day-to-day governance of our communities, we can unite community action with top-down resources, empowering local people to co-own the evolution of their neighbourhoods and helping administrators prioritise projects that maximise quality of life.

As Solnit wrote: “A disaster is a lot like a revolution when it comes to disruption and improvisation.” Pushed to their limits, countries are pioneering ways of coordinating local and national action. From this wave of innovation, we can empower communities to become more resilient in crises, more inclusive in their governance and more engaged in the determination of their future….(More)”.

German humanities scholars enlisted to end coronavirus lockdown

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

David Matthews at THE: “In contrast to other countries, philosophers, historians, theologians and jurists have played a major role advising the state as it seeks to loosen restrictions…

In the struggle against the new coronavirus, humanities academics have entered the fray – in Germany at least.

Arguably to a greater extent than has happened in the UK, France or the US, the country has enlisted the advice of philosophers, historians of science, theologians and jurists as it navigates the delicate ethical balancing act of reopening society while safeguarding the health of the public.

When the German federal government announced a slight loosening of restrictions on 15 April – allowing small shops to open and some children to return to school in May – it had been eagerly awaiting a report written by a 26-strong expert group containing only a minority of natural scientists and barely a handful of virologists and medical specialists.

Instead, this working group from the Leopoldina – Germany’s independent National Academy of Sciences dating back to 1652 – included historians of industrialisation and early Christianity, a specialist on the philosophy of law and several pedagogical experts.

This paucity of virologists earned the group a swipe from Markus Söder, minister-president of badly hit Bavaria, who has led calls in Germany for a tough lockdown (although earlier in the pandemic the Leopoldina did release a report written by more medically focused specialists).

But “the crisis is a complex one, it’s a systemic crisis” and so it needs to be dissected from every angle, argued Jürgen Renn, director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and one of those who wrote the crucial recommendations.

And Professor Renn – who earlier this year published a book on rethinking science in the Anthropocene – made the argument for green post-virus reconstruction. Urbanisation and deforestation have squashed mankind and wildlife together, making other animal-to-human disease transmissions ever more likely, he argued. “It’s not the only virus waiting out there,” he said.

Germany’s Ethics Council – which traces its roots back to the stem cell debates of the early 2000s and is composed of theologians, jurists, philosophers and other ethical thinkers – also contributed to a report at the end of March, warning that it was up to elected politicians, not scientists, to make the “painful decisions” weighing up the lockdown’s effect on health and its other side-effects….(More)“.

How data privacy leader Apple found itself in a data ethics catastrophe

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Daniel Wu and Mike Loukides: “…Apple learned a critical lesson from this experience. User buy-in cannot end with compliance with rules. It requires ethics, constantly asking how to protect, fight for, and empower users, regardless of what the law says. These strategies contribute to perceptions of trust.

Trust has to be earned, is easily lost, and is difficult to regain….

In our more global, diverse, and rapidly- changing world, ethics may be embodied by the “platinum rule”: Do unto others as they would want done to them. One established field of ethics—bioethics—offers four principles that are related to the platinum rule: nonmaleficence, justice, autonomy, and beneficence.

For organizations that want to be guided by ethics, regardless of what the law says, these principles as essential tools for a purpose-driven mission: protecting (nonmaleficence), fighting for (justice), and empowering users and employees (autonomy and beneficence).

An ethics leader protects users and workers in its operations by using governance best practices. 

Before creating the product, it understands both the qualitative and quantitative contexts of key stakeholders, especially those who will be most impacted, identifying their needs and fears. When creating the product, it uses data protection by design, working with cross-functional roles like legal and privacy engineers to embed ethical principles into the lifecycle of the product and formalize data-sharing agreements. Before launching, it audits the product thoroughly and conducts scenario planning to understand potential ethical mishaps, such as perceived or real gender bias or human rights violations in its supply chain. After launching, its terms of service and collection methods are highly readable and enables even disaffected users to resolve issues delightfully.

Ethics leaders also fight for users and workers, who can be forgotten. These leaders may champion enforceable consumer protections in the first place, before a crisis erupts. With social movements, leaders fight powerful actors preying on vulnerable communities or the public at large—and critically examines and ameliorates its own participation in systemic violence. As a result, instead of last-minute heroic efforts to change compromised operations, it’s been iterating all along.

Finally, ethics leaders empower their users and workers. With diverse communities and employees, they co-create new products that help improve basic needs and enable more, including the vulnerable, to increase their autonomy and their economic mobility. These entrepreneurial efforts validate new revenue streams and relationships while incubating next-generation workers who self-govern and push the company’s mission forward. Employees voice their values and diversify their relationships. Alison Taylor, the Executive Director of Ethical Systems, argues that internal processes should “improve [workers’] reasoning and creativity, instead of short-circuiting them.” Enabling this is a culture of psychological safety and training to engage kindly with divergent ideas.

These purpose-led strategies boost employee performance and retention, drive deep customer loyalty, and carve legacies.

To be clear, Apple may be implementing at least some of these strategies already—but perhaps not uniformly or transparently. For instance, Apple has implemented some provisions of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation for all US residents—not just EU and CA residents—including the ability to access and edit data. This expensive move, which goes beyond strict legal requirements, was implemented even without public pressure.

But ethics strategies have major limitations leaders must address

As demonstrated by the waves of ethical “principles” released by Fortune 500 companies and commissions, ethics programs can be murky, dominated by a white, male, and Western interpretation.

Furthermore, focusing purely on ethics gives companies an easy way to “free ride” off social goodwill, but ultimately stay unaccountable, given the lack of external oversight over ethics programs. When companies substitute unaccountable data ethics principles for thoughtful engagement with the enforceable data regulation principles, users will be harmed.

Long-term, without the ability to wave a $100 million fine with clear-cut requirements and lawyers trained to advocate for them internally, ethics leaders may face barriers to buy-in. Unlike their sales, marketing, or compliance counterparts, ethics programs do not directly add revenue or reduce costs. In recessions, these “soft” programs may be the first on the chopping block.

As a result of these factors, we will likely see a surge in ethics-washing: well-intentioned companies that talk ethics, but don’t walk it. More will view these efforts as PR-driven ethics stunts, which don’t deeply engage with actual ethical issues. If harmful business models do not change, ethics leaders will be fighting a losing battle….(More)”.

Tear down this wall: Microsoft embraces open data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Economist: “Two decades ago Microsoft was a byword for a technological walled garden. One of its bosses called free open-source programs a “cancer”. That was then. On April 21st the world’s most valuable tech firm joined a fledgling movement to liberate the world’s data. Among other things, the company plans to launch 20 data-sharing groups by 2022 and give away some of its digital information, including data it has aggregated on covid-19.

Microsoft is not alone in its newfound fondness for sharing in the age of the coronavirus. “The world has faced pandemics before, but this time we have a new superpower: the ability to gather and share data for good,” Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of Facebook, a social-media conglomerate, wrote in the Washington Post on April 20th. Despite the EU’s strict privacy rules, some Eurocrats now argue that data-sharing could speed up efforts to fight the coronavirus. 

But the argument for sharing data is much older than the virus. The OECD, a club mostly of rich countries, reckons that if data were more widely exchanged, many countries could enjoy gains worth between 1% and 2.5% of GDP. The estimate is based on heroic assumptions (such as putting a number on business opportunities created for startups). But economists agree that readier access to data is broadly beneficial, because data are “non-rivalrous”: unlike oil, say, they can be used and re-used without being depleted, for instance to power various artificial-intelligence algorithms at once. 

Many governments have recognised the potential. Cities from Berlin to San Francisco have “open data” initiatives. Companies have been cagier, says Stefaan Verhulst, who heads the Governance Lab at New York University, which studies such things. Firms worry about losing intellectual property, imperilling users’ privacy and hitting technical obstacles. Standard data formats (eg, JPEG images) can be shared easily, but much that a Facebook collects with its software would be meaningless to a Microsoft, even after reformatting. Less than half of the 113 “data collaboratives” identified by the lab involve corporations. Those that do, including initiatives by BBVA, a Spanish bank, and GlaxoSmithKline, a British drugmaker, have been small or limited in scope. 

Microsoft’s campaign is the most consequential by far. Besides encouraging more non-commercial sharing, the firm is developing software, licences and (with the Governance Lab and others) governance frameworks that permit firms to trade data or provide access to them without losing control. Optimists believe that the giant’s move could be to data what IBM’s embrace in the late 1990s of the Linux operating system was to open-source software. Linux went on to become a serious challenger to Microsoft’s own Windows and today underpins Google’s Android mobile software and much of cloud-computing…(More)”.