The Rise of the Worker Productivity Score

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jodi Kantor and Arya Sundaram in The New York Times: “Across industries and incomes, more employees are being tracked, recorded and ranked. What is gained, companies say, is efficiency and accountability. What is lost?…

In lower-paying jobs, the monitoring is already ubiquitous: not just at Amazon, where the second-by-second measurements became notorious, but also for Kroger cashiers, UPS drivers and millions of others. Eight of the 10 largest private U.S. employers track the productivity metrics of individual workers, many in real time, according to an examination by The New York Times.

Now digital productivity monitoring is also spreading among white-collar jobs and roles that require graduate degrees. Many employees, whether working remotely or in person, are subject to trackers, scores, “idle” buttons, or just quiet, constantly accumulating records. Pauses can lead to penalties, from lost pay to lost jobs.

Some radiologists see scoreboards showing their “inactivity” time and how their productivity stacks up against their colleagues’. At companies including J.P. Morgan, tracking how employees spend their days, from making phone calls to composing emails, has become routine practice. In Britain, Barclays Bank scrapped prodding messages to workers, like “Not enough time in the Zone yesterday,” after they caused an uproar. At UnitedHealth Group, low keyboard activity can affect compensation and sap bonuses. Public servants are tracked, too: In June, New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority told engineers and other employees they could work remotely one day a week if they agreed to full-time productivity monitoring.

Architects, academic administrators, doctors, nursing home workers and lawyers described growing electronic surveillance over every minute of their workday. They echoed complaints that employees in many lower-paid positions have voiced for years: that their jobs are relentless, that they don’t have control — and in some cases, that they don’t even have enough time to use the bathroom. In interviews and in hundreds of written submissions to The Times, white-collar workers described being tracked as “demoralizing,” “humiliating” and “toxic.” Micromanagement is becoming standard, they said.

But the most urgent complaint, spanning industries and incomes, is that the working world’s new clocks are just wrong: inept at capturing offline activity, unreliable at assessing hard-to-quantify tasks and prone to undermining the work itself…(More)”.

AI-powered cameras to enforce bus lanes

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Chris Teale: “New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority will use an automated camera system to ensure bus lanes in New York City are free from illegally parked vehicles.

The MTA is partnering with Hayden AI to deploy Automated Bus Lane Enforcement camera systems to 300 buses, which will be mounted on the interior of the windshield and powered by artificial intelligence. The agency has the option to add the cameras to 200 more buses if it chooses.

Chris Carson, Hayden AI’s CEO and co-founder, said when the cameras detect an encroachment on a bus lane, they use real-time automated license plate recognition and edge computing to compile a packet of evidence that includes the time, date and location of the offense, as well as a brief video that shows the violator’s license plate. 

That information is encrypted and sent securely to the cloud, where MTA officials can access and analyze it for violations. If there is no encroachment on a bus lane, the cameras do not record anything…

An MTA spokesperson said the agency will also use data from the system to identify locations that have the highest instances of vehicles blocking bus lanes. New York City has 140 miles of bus lanes and has plans to build 150 more miles in the next four years, but congestion and lane violations from other road users slows the speed of the buses. The city already uses cameras and police patrols to attempt to enforce proper bus lane use…(More)”.

How social media has undermined our constitutional architecture

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Danielle Allen: “Our politics are awful. On this we all agree. Often we feel there is nothing we can do. Yet there are steps to take. Before we can decide what to do, though, we have to face squarely the nature of the problem we are solving.

We face a crisis of representation. And — put bluntly — Facebook is the cause.

By crisis of representation, I do not mean that the other side’s representatives drive us all crazy. Of course, they do. I do not even mean that the incredibly negative nature of our political discourse is ruining the mental health of all of us. Of course, it is. What I mean is that the fundamental structural mechanism of our constitutional democracy is representation, and one of the pillars of the original design for that system has been knocked out from under us. As a result, the whole system no longer functions effectively.

Imagine that a truck has crashed into a supporting wall for your building. Your building is now structurally unsound and shifting dangerously in the wind. That’s the kind of situation I’m talking about.

In that abstract metaphor the building is our constitutional system, and social media is the truck. But explaining what I mean requires going back to the early design of our Constitution.

Ours is not the first era brought to its knees by polarization. After the Revolution, the nation was grinding to a halt under the Articles of Confederation. Congress couldn’t get a quorum. It couldn’t secure the revenue needed to pay war debts. Polarization — or as they called it — “faction” brought paralysis.

The whole point of writing the Constitution was to fix this aspect. James Madison made the case that the design of the Constitution would dampen factionalism. He argued this in the Federalist Papers,the famous op-eds that he, John Jay and Alexander Hamilton wrote advocating for the Constitution…

Madison couldn’t anticipate Facebook, and Facebook — with its historically unprecedented power to bind factions over great distances — knocked this pillar out from under us. In this sense, Facebook and the equally powerful social media platforms that followed it broke our democracy. They didn’t mean to. It’s like when your kid plays with a beach ball in the house and breaks your favorite lamp. But break it they did.

Now, the rest of us have to fix it.

Representation as designed cannot work under current conditions. We have no choice but to undertake a significant project of democracy renovation. We need an alternative to that original supporting wall to restore structural soundness to our institutions.

In coming columns, I will make the case for the recommendations that I consider most fundamental for a 21st-century system of representation that can address our needs. The goal should be responsive representation, which means representation that is inclusive of our extraordinary diversity and, of course, simultaneously effective. Our representatives get stuff done.

Increasing the size of the House of Representatives is one recommendation from a bipartisan commission on democracy renovation that I recently co-chaired. The report we produced is called Our Common Purpose. …(More)”

EU Court Expands Definition of Sensitive Data, Prompting Legal Concerns for Companies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Catherine Stupp: “Companies will be under increased pressure after Europe’s top court ruled they must apply special protections to data that firms previously didn’t consider sensitive.

Under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, information about health, religion, political views and sexual orientation are considered sensitive. Companies generally aren’t allowed to process it unless they apply special safeguards.

The European Court of Justice on Aug. 1 determined that public officials in Lithuania had their sensitive data revealed because their spouses’ names were published online, which could indicate their sexual orientation. Experts say the implications will extend to other types of potentially sensitive information.

Data that might be used to infer a sensitive piece of information about a person is also sensitive, the court said. That could include unstructured data—which isn’t organized in databases and is therefore more difficult to search through and analyze—such as surveillance camera footage in a hospital that indicates a person was treated there, legal experts say. Records of a special airplane meal might reveal religious views.

The court ruling “raises a lot of practical complexities and a lot of difficulty in understanding if the data [organizations] have is sensitive or not,” said Dr. Gabriela Zanfir-Fortuna, vice president for global privacy at the Future of Privacy Forum, a think tank based in Washington, D.C.

Many companies with large data sets may not know they hold details that indirectly relate to sensitive information, privacy experts say. Identifying where that data is and deciding whether it could reveal personal details about an individual would be a huge undertaking, said Tobias Judin, head of the international section at the Norwegian data protection regulator.

“You can’t really comply with the law if your data set becomes so big that you don’t really know what’s in it,” Mr. Judin said.

The GDPR says companies can only process sensitive data in a few circumstances, such as if a person gives explicit consent for it to be used for a specified purpose.

Regulators have been grappling with the question of how to determine what is sensitive data. The Norwegian regulator last year fined gay-dating app Grindr LLC 65 million kroner, equivalent to roughly $6.7 million The regulator said the user data was sensitive because use of the app indicated their sexual orientation.

Grindr said it doesn’t require users to share that data. The company appealed in February. Mr. Judin said his office is reviewing material submitted by the company as part of its appeal. Spain’s regulator came to a different conclusion in January, and found that data Grindr shared for advertising purposes wasn’t sensitive….(More)”.

Phones Know Who Went to an Abortion Clinic. Whom Will They Tell?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Patience Haggin at Wall Street Journal: “Concerns over collection and storage of reproductive health data is the latest challenge for the location-data industry, which over the past few years has faced scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators. Data-privacy laws in California and other states in recent years have placed new restrictions on the companies, such as requiring companies to give consumers the right to opt out of having their data sold.

The Federal Trade Commission last month said it would strictly enforce laws governing the collection, use and sharing of sensitive consumer data. “The misuse of mobile location and health information— including reproductive health data—exposes consumers to significant harm,” wrote Kristin Cohen, acting associate director for the commission’s division of privacy and identity protection.

Without clear regulations for the location-data industry’s data on abortion clinics, individual companies are determining how to respond to the implications of the Supreme Court ruling.

Alphabet Inc.’s Google recently said it would automatically delete visits to abortion clinics from its users’ location history.

Apple Inc. says it minimizes collection of personal data and that most location data is stored in ways the company can’t access. It has no way to access Health and Maps app data for people using updated operating systems, and can’t provide such data in response to government requests, the company says.

The vast location-data ecosystem includes many other lesser-known companies that are taking a different approach. A trade group for some of those firms, Network Advertising Initiative, announced a new set of voluntary standards for member companies in June, two days before the Dobbs ruling came out.

Participating companies, including Foursquare Labs Inc., Cuebiq Inc. and Precisely Inc.’s PlaceIQ, agreed not to use, sell or share precise location data about visits to sensitive locations—including abortion clinics—except to comply with a legal obligation…(More)”

Meet the new GDP prototype that tracks inequality

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Greg Rosalsky: “…Nearly a century after Kuznets pioneered the use of GDP, economists Thomas Blanchet, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman are trying to revolutionize it. In a new paper titled “Real-Time Inequality,” the economists imagine a new kind of GDP, one that isn’t merely a single number telling us about total economic growth, but a collection of numbers telling us where the gains from this growth are flowing. They already have a working prototype that they’ve published online, and it can provide some important insights about our economy right now…

Gabriel Zucman is an economist at UC Berkeley and the director of the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality. He has been working to transform government economic statistics — also called “national accounts” — for almost a decade. He says the national accounts offer the public valuable insights about economic growth. However, Zucman says, “The big problem is these data do not tell you who is benefiting from economic growth.”

America, of course, already has tons of data on inequality. The problem, Zucman says, is it usually takes a year or two for this data to be updated. “It’s not enough to come in two years after the policy battle, and say, ‘Look, this is what happened to inequality,'” Zucman says. “That’s too late.”

Their new project is an effort to fix this. Cobbling together data from a variety of official sources, Zucman and his colleagues have pioneered a method to compute in a more timely fashion how different income groups — like the working class and the middle class — are doing economically. They hope this prototype will inspire the federal government to follow suit and soon “produce numbers about how income is growing for each social group at the exact time when the Bureau of Economic Analysis releases its official GDP growth numbers.”

Zucman envisions a future where this data could inform and shape policy decisions. When considering policies like sending stimulus checks or providing tax relief, Zucman says, policymakers and voters need to know things like “which groups need more support, or whether the government may be actually overshooting, which might lead to inflation.”…(More)”.

Unsustainable Alarmism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Taylor Dotson: “Covid is far from the only global challenge we see depicted as a cataclysm in the making. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich predicted impending famine and social collapse driven by overpopulation. He compared the threat to a ticking bomb — the “population bomb.” And the claim that only a few years remain to prevent climate doom has become a familiar refrain. The recent film Don’t Look Up, about a comet barreling toward Earth, is obviously meant as an allegory for climate catastrophe.

But catastrophism fails to capture the complexities of problems that play out over a long time scale, like Covid and climate change. In a tornado or a flood, which are not only undeniably serious but also require immediate action to prevent destruction, people drop political disputes to do what is necessary to save lives. They bring their loved ones to higher ground. They stack sandbags. They gather in tornado shelters. They evacuate. Covid began as a flood in early 2020, but once a danger becomes long and grinding, catastrophism loses its purchase, and more measured public thinking is required.

Even if the extension of catastrophic rhetoric to longer-term and more complex problems is well-intentioned, it unavoidably implies that something is morally or mentally wrong with the people who fail to take heed. It makes those who are not already horrified, who do not treat the crisis as an undeniable, act-now-or-never calamity, harder to comprehend: What idiot wouldn’t do everything possible to avert catastrophe? This kind of thinking is why global challenges are no longer multifaceted dilemmas to negotiate together; they have become conflicts between those who recognize the self-evident truth and those who have taken flight from reality….(More)”.

How crowdfunding is shaping the war in Ukraine

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Economist: “This month Aerorozvidka, a Ukrainian drone unit, celebrated the acquisition of four Chinese-made DJI Phantom 3 drones, provided by a German donor. The group, founded in 2014 after the Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine and annexation of Crimea, is led by civilians. The gift is just one example of crowdfunding in Russia’s latest war against Ukraine. Citizens from both sides are supplying much-needed equipment to the front lines. What is the impact of these donations, and how do the two countries differ in their approach?

Private citizens have chipped in to help in times of war for centuries. A writing tablet found near Hadrian’s Wall in northern England mentions a gift of sandals, socks and underwear for Roman soldiers. During the first world war America’s government asked civilians to knit warm clothing for troops. But besides such small morale-boosting efforts, some schemes to rally civilians have proved strikingly productive. During the second world war Britain introduced a “Spitfire Fund”, encouraging civilian groups to raise the £12,600 (£490,000, or $590,000, in today’s money) needed to build the top-of-the-range fighter. Individual contributors could buy wings, machineguns or even a rivet, for six old pence (two and a half modern ones) apiece. The scheme raised around £13m in total—enough for more than 1,000 aircraft (of a total of 20,000 built)…(More)”.

Landsat turns 50: How satellites revolutionized the way we see – and protect – the natural world

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Stacy Morford: “Fifty years ago, U.S. scientists launched a satellite that dramatically changed how we see the world.

It captured images of Earth’s surface in minute detail, showing how wildfires burned landscapes, how farms erased forests, and many other ways humans were changing the face of the planet.

The first satellite in the Landsat series launched on July 23, 1972. Eight others followed, providing the same views so changes could be tracked over time, but with increasingly powerful instruments. Landsat 8 and Landsat 9 are orbiting the planet today, and NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey are planning a new Landsat mission.

The images and data from these satellites are used to track deforestation and changing landscapes around the world, locate urban heat islands, and understand the impact of new river dams, among many other projects. Often, the results help communities respond to risks that may not be obvious from the ground.

Here are three examples of Landsat in action, from The Conversation’s archive.

Tracking changes in the Amazon

When work began on the Belo Monte Dam project in the Brazilian Amazon in 2015, Indigenous tribes living along the Big Bend of the Xingu River started noticing changes in the river’s flow. The water they relied on for food and transportation was disappearing.

Upstream, a new channel would eventually divert as much as 80% of the water to the hydroelectric dam, bypassing the bend.

The consortium that runs the dam argued that there was no scientific proof that the change in water flow harmed fish.

But there is clear proof of the Belo Monte Dam project’s impact – from above, write Pritam Das, Faisal Hossain, Hörður Helgason and Shahzaib Khan at the University of Washington. Using satellite data from the Landsat program, the team showed how the dam dramatically altered the hydrology of the river…

It’s hot in the city – and even hotter in some neighborhoods

Landsat’s instruments can also measure surface temperatures, allowing scientists to map heat risk street by street within cities as global temperatures rise.

“Cities are generally hotter than surrounding rural areas, but even within cities, some residential neighborhoods get dangerously warmer than others just a few miles away,” writes Daniel P. Johnson, who uses satellites to study the urban heat island effect at Indiana University.

Neighborhoods with more pavement and buildings and fewer trees can be 10 degrees Fahrenheit (5.5 C) or more warmer than leafier neighborhoods, Johnson writes. He found that the hottest neighborhoods tend to be low-income, have majority Black or Hispanic residents and had been subjected to redlining, the discriminatory practice once used to deny loans in racial and ethnic minority communities…(More)”.

Digital Literacy Doesn’t Stop the Spread of Misinformation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by David Rand, and Nathaniel Sirlin: “There has been tremendous concern recently over misinformation on social media. It was a pervasive topic during the 2020 U.S. presidential election, continues to be an issue during the COVID-19 pandemic and plays an important part in Russian propaganda efforts in the war on Ukraine. This concern is plenty justified, as the consequences of believing false information are arguably shaping the future of nations and greatly affecting our individual and collective health.

One popular theory about why some people fall for misinformation they encounter online is that they lack digital literacy skills, a nebulous term that describes how a person navigates digital spaces. Someone lacking digital literacy skills, the thinking goes, may be more susceptible to believing—and sharing—false information. As a result, less digitally literate people may play a significant role in the spread of misinformation.

This argument makes intuitive sense. Yet very little research has actually investigated the link between digital literacy and susceptibility to believe false information. There’s even less understanding of the potential link between digital literacy and what people share on social media. As researchers who study the psychology of online misinformation, we wanted to explore these potential associations….

When we looked at the connection between digital literacy and the willingness to share false information with others through social media, however, the results were different. People who were more digitally literate were just as likely to say they’d share false articles as people who lacked digital literacy. Like the first finding, the (lack of) connection between digital literacy and sharing false news was not affected by political party affiliation or whether the topic was politics or the pandemic…(More)”