Reddit Is America’s Unofficial Unemployment Hotline

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ella Koeze at The New York Times: “In early December, Alex Branch’s car broke down. A 23-year-old former arcade employee in southern Virginia, Mr. Branch had been receiving unemployment benefits since he was laid off in March, and figured he would have no problem paying for the repairs. But when he checked his bank account, he was troubled to find that the payments had stopped.

He had failed to get useful information from his state’s unemployment office before, so he turned to the one place he figured he could get an explanation: Reddit.

“I’m very confused and have no idea what to do,” Mr. Branch wrote on r/Unemployment, a Reddit forum whose popularity has skyrocketed during the pandemic.

The next day, another user commented on Mr. Branch’s post, using a common abbreviation for Extended Benefits, an emergency unemployment program. “Were you on EB? If so, EB was cut off Nov 21.”

Mr. Branch hadn’t realized he had been on Extended Benefits, which kicked in after he exhausted 26 weeks of regular unemployment plus 13 additional weeks granted in the March pandemic stimulus bill. Virginia stopped payments because the state’s unemployment rate had fallen under 5 percent, triggering an end to federal funding for the Extended Benefits program.

“I didn’t know about it,” he said in an interview. “That’s the biggest frustration that I had about it was the fact that I never received the email that it was going to be shut off.”

For many of the millions of Americans like Mr. Branch who lost jobs because of the coronavirus, the stress of being unemployed in a pandemic has been compounded by the difficulty of navigating disorganized and often antiquated state and federal unemployment systems. Information from overwhelmed state offices and websites is often confusing, and reaching an official who can answer questions nearly impossible….

Post after post on r/Unemployment conveys bureaucratic problems with endless variations: how to file a claim depending on your circumstances, what to do if you made a mistake on your claim, what different statuses on your claim might mean, how to navigate confusing and glitch-prone online portals and even how to speak to an actual person to get issues resolved….

Many people come to r/Unemployment to offer answers, not just find them.

Albert Peers, who had been working in a call center in San Diego until the pandemic, spends time every day trying to answer questions about California’s system. He lives alone and can’t easily return to work because he has a lowered immune system. After first visiting the site when he encountered a hitch in his own unemployment benefits, Mr. Peers, 56, was shocked by the number of people who had no idea what to do.

The thought that someone might go hungry or miss rent because they were simply stymied by the system was unacceptable to him. “At that point I just made a decision,” he said. “You know what, like a couple hours every day, because I just can’t turn away.”…(More)”.

Inside the ‘Wikipedia of Maps,’ Tensions Grow Over Corporate Influence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Corey Dickinson at Bloomberg: “What do Lyft, Facebook, the International Red Cross, the U.N., the government of Nepal and Pokémon Go have in common? They all use the same source of geospatial data: OpenStreetMap, a free, open-source online mapping service akin to Google Maps or Apple Maps. But unlike those corporate-owned mapping platforms, OSM is built on a network of mostly volunteer contributors. Researchers have described it as the “Wikipedia for maps.”

Since it launched in 2004, OpenStreetMap has become an essential part of the world’s technology infrastructure. Hundreds of millions of monthly users interact with services derived from its data, from ridehailing apps, to social media geotagging on Snapchat and Instagram, to humanitarian relief operations in the wake of natural disasters. 

But recently the map has been changing, due the growing impact of private sector companies that rely on it. In a 2019 paper published in the ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, a cross-institutional team of researchers traced how Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and other companies have gained prominence as editors of the map. Their priorities, the researchers say, are driving significant change to what is being mapped compared to the past. 

“OpenStreetMap’s data is crowdsourced, which has always made spectators to the project a bit wary about the quality of the data,” says Dipto Sarkar, a professor of geoscience at Carleton University in Ottawa, and one of the paper’s co-authors. “As the data becomes more valuable and is used for an ever-increasing list of projects, the integrity of the information has to be almost perfect. These companies need to make sure there’s a good map of the places they want to expand in, and nobody else is offering that, so they’ve decided to fill it in themselves.”…(More)”.

Governance for Innovation and Privacy: The Promise of Data Trusts and Regulatory Sandboxes

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Chantal Bernier: “Innovation feeds on data, both personal, identified data and de-identified data. To protect the data from increasing privacy risks, governance structures emerge to allow the use and sharing of data as necessary for innovation while addressing privacy risks. Two frameworks proposed to fulfill this purpose are data trusts and regulatory sandboxes.

The Government of Canada introduced the concept of “data trust” into the Canadian privacy law modernization discussion through Canada’s Digital Charter in Action: A Plan by Canadians, for Canadians, to “enable responsible innovation.” At a high level, a data trust may be defined, according to the Open Data Institute, as a legal structure that is appropriate to the data sharing it is meant to govern and that provides independent stewardship of data.

Bill C-11, known as the Digital Charter Implementation Act, 2020, and tabled on November 17, 2020, lays the groundwork for the possibility of creating data trusts for private organizations to disclose de-identified data to specific public institutions for “socially beneficial purposes.” In her recent article “Replacing Canada’s 20-Year-Old Data Protection Law,” Teresa Scassa provides a superb overview and analysis of the bill.

Another instrument for privacy protective innovation is referred to as the “regulatory sandbox.” The United Kingdom’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) provides a regulatory sandbox service that encourages organizations to submit innovative initiatives without fear of enforcement action. From there, the ICO sandbox team provides advice related to privacy risks and how to embed privacy protection.

Both governance measures may hold the future of privacy and innovation, provided that we accept this equation: De-identified data may no longer be considered irrevocably anonymous and therefore should not be released unconditionally, but the risk of re-identification is so remote that the data may be released under a governance structure that mitigates the residual privacy risk.  

Innovation Needs Identified Personal Data and De-identified Data   

The role of data in innovation does not need to be explained. Innovation requires a full understanding of what is, to project toward what could be. The need for personal data, however, calls for far more than an explanation. Its use must be justified. Applications abound, and they may not be obvious to the layperson. Researchers and statisticians, however, underline the critical role of personal data with one word: reliability.

Processing data that can be traced, either through identifiers or through pseudonyms, allows superior machine learning, longitudinal studies and essential correlations, which provide, in turn, better data in which to ground innovation. Statistics Canada has developed a “Continuum of Microdata Access” to its databases on the premise that “researchers require access to microdata at the individual business, household or person level for research purposes. To preserve the privacy and confidentiality of respondents, and to encourage the use of microdata, Statistics Canada offers a wide range of options through a series of online channels, facilities and programs.”

Since the first national census in 1871, Canada has put data — derived from personal data collected through the census and surveys — to good use in the public and private sectors alike. Now, new privacy risks emerge, as the unprecedented volume of data collection and the power of analytics bring into question the notion that the de-identification of data — and therefore its anonymization — is irreversible.

And yet, data to inform innovation for the good of humanity cannot exclude data about humans. So, we must look to governance measures to release de-identified data for innovation in a privacy-protective manner. …(More)”.

Introducing Fast Government, an exploration of innovation and talent in public service

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Fast Company: “Before he cofounded ride-sharing company Lyft, CEO Logan Green learned the intricacies of public transportation as a director on the Santa Barbara Metropolitan Transit District board. Venture capitalist Bradley Tusk worked as a communications director for Sen. Chuck Schumer and served as deputy governor of Illinois. Aerospace engineer Aisha Bowe says her six years working at NASA were “instrumental” to founding STEMBoard, a tech company that serves government and private-sector clients.

For these business leaders, “government service” isn’t a pejorative. Their work in the public sector helped shape their entrepreneurial journeys. And many executives from Silicon Valley to Wall Street have served at the highest levels in government, including Mike Bloomberg (a three-term mayor of New York), Megan Smith (former Google executive who served as Chief Technology Officer of the United States), and Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo, a former venture investor  nominated to be U.S. Secretary of Commerce.

Today Fast Company is launching an initiative called Fast Government that aims to examine the cross-pollination of talent and innovative ideas between the public and private sectors. It is a home for stories about leaders who are bringing entrepreneurial zeal to state, federal, and local agencies and offices. This section will also explore the ways government service helped shape the careers of business leaders at some of the world’s most innovative companies.

As Sean McManus and Brett Dobbs explain in this accompanying piece, the talent pipeline in government needs refreshing. A third of federal civilian employees are slated to retire in the next five years, and fewer than 6% are under the age of 30. Young leaders, especially purpose-driven individuals looking to make a difference, might perhaps want to consider a stint in fast government….(More)”.

N.Y.’s Vaccine Websites Weren’t Working. He Built a New One for $50.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Sharon Otterman at New York Times: “Huge Ma, a 31-year-old software engineer for Airbnb, was stunned when he tried to make a coronavirus vaccine appointment for his mother in early January and saw that there were dozens of websites to check, each with its own sign-up protocol. The city and state appointment systems were completely distinct.

“There has to be a better way,” he said he remembered thinking.

So, he developed one. In less than two weeks, he launched TurboVax, a free website that compiles availability from the three main city and state New York vaccine systems and sends the information in real time to Twitter. It cost Mr. Ma less than $50 to build, yet it offers an easier way to spot appointments than the city and state’s official systems do.

“It’s sort of become a challenge to myself, to prove what one person with time and a little motivation can do,” he said last week. “This wasn’t a priority for governments, which was unfortunate. But everyone has a role to play in the pandemic, and I’m just doing the very little that I can to make it a little bit easier.”

Supply shortages and problems with access to vaccination appointments have been some of the barriers to the equitable distribution of the vaccine in New York City and across the United States, officials have acknowledged….(More)”.

Citizen Scientists Are Filling Research Gaps Created by the Pandemic

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by  Theresa Crimmins, Erin Posthumus, and Kathleen Prudic: “The rapid spread of COVID-19 in 2020 disrupted field research and environmental monitoring efforts worldwide. Travel restrictions and social distancing forced scientists to cancel studies or pause their work for months. These limits measurably reduced the accuracy of weather forecasts and created data gaps on issues ranging from bird migration to civil rights in U.S. public schools.

Our work relies on this kind of information to track seasonal events in nature and understand how climate change is affecting them. We also recruit and train citizens for community science – projects that involve amateur or volunteer scientists in scientific research, also known as citizen science. This often involves collecting observations of phenomena such as plants and animals, daily rainfall totals, water quality or asteroids.

Participation in many community science programs has skyrocketed during COVID-19 lockdowns, with some programs reporting record numbers of contributors. We believe these efforts can help to offset data losses from the shutdown of formal monitoring activities….(More)”.

How a Google Street View image of your house predicts your risk of a car accident

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

MIT Technology Review: “Google Street View has become a surprisingly useful way to learn about the world without stepping into it. People use it to plan journeys, to explore holiday destinations, and to virtually stalk friends and enemies alike.

But researchers have found more insidious uses. In 2017 a team of researchers used the images to study the distribution of car types in the US and then used that data to determine the demographic makeup of the country. It turns out that the car you drive is a surprisingly reliable proxy for your income level, your education, your occupation, and even the way you vote in elections.

Street view of houses in Poland

Now a different group has gone even further. Łukasz Kidziński at Stanford University in California and Kinga Kita-Wojciechowska at the University of Warsaw in Poland have used Street View images of people’s houses to determine how likely they are to be involved in a car accident. That’s valuable information that an insurance company could use to set premiums.

The result raises important questions about the way personal information can leak from seemingly innocent data sets and whether organizations should be able to use it for commercial purposes.

Insurance data

The researchers’ method is straightforward. They began with a data set of 20,000 records of people who had taken out car insurance in Poland between 2013 and 2015. These were randomly selected from the database of an undisclosed insurance company.

Each record included the address of the policyholder and the number of damage claims he or she made during the 2013–’15 period. The insurer also shared its own prediction of future claims, calculated using its state-of-the-art risk model that takes into account the policyholder’s zip code and the driver’s age, sex, claim history, and so on.

The question that Kidziński and Kita-Wojciechowska investigated is whether they could make a more accurate prediction using a Google Street View image of the policyholder’s house….(More)”.

From Tech Critique to Ways of Living

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Alan Jacobs at The New Atlantis: “Neil Postman was right. So what? In the 1950s and 1960s, a series of thinkers, beginning with Jacques Ellul and Marshall McLuhan, began to describe the anatomy of our technological society. Then, starting in the 1970s, a generation emerged who articulated a detailed critique of that society. The critique produced by these figures I refer to in the singular because it shares core features, if not a common vocabulary. What Ivan Illich, Ursula Franklin, Albert Borgmann, and a few others have said about technology is powerful, incisive, and remarkably coherent. I am going to call the argument they share the Standard Critique of Technology, or SCT. The one problem with the SCT is that it has had no success in reversing, or even slowing, the momentum of our society’s move toward what one of their number, Neil Postman, called technopoly.

The basic argument of the SCT goes like this. We live in a technopoly, a society in which powerful technologies come to dominate the people they are supposed to serve, and reshape us in their image. These technologies, therefore, might be called prescriptive (to use Franklin’s term) or manipulatory (to use Illich’s). For example, social networks promise to forge connections — but they also encourage mob rule. Facial-recognition software helps to identify suspects — and to keep tabs on whole populations. Collectively, these technologies constitute the device paradigm (Borgmann), which in turn produces a culture of compliance (Franklin).

The proper response to this situation is not to shun technology itself, for human beings are intrinsically and necessarily users of tools. Rather, it is to find and use technologies that, instead of manipulating us, serve sound human ends and the focal practices (Borgmann) that embody those ends. A table becomes a center for family life; a musical instrument skillfully played enlivens those around it. Those healthier technologies might be referred to as holistic (Franklin) or convivial (Illich), because they fit within the human lifeworld and enhance our relations with one another. Our task, then, is to discern these tendencies or affordances of our technologies and, on both social and personal levels, choose the holistic, convivial ones.

The Standard Critique of Technology as thus described is cogent and correct. I have referred to it many times and applied it to many different situations. For instance, I have used the logic of the SCT to make a case for rejecting the “walled gardens” of the massive social media companies, and for replacing them with a cultivation of the “digital commons” of the open web.

But the number of people who are even open to following this logic is vanishingly small. For all its cogency, the SCT is utterly powerless to slow our technosocial momentum, much less to alter its direction. Since Postman and the rest made that critique, the social order has rushed ever faster toward a complete and uncritical embrace of the prescriptive, manipulatory technologies deceitfully presented to us as Liberation and Empowerment. So what next?…(More)”.

The Coup We Are Not Talking About

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Shoshana Zuboff in the New York Times: “Two decades ago, the American government left democracy’s front door open to California’s fledgling internet companies, a cozy fire lit in welcome. In the years that followed, a surveillance society flourished in those rooms, a social vision born in the distinct but reciprocal needs of public intelligence agencies and private internet companies, both spellbound by a dream of total information awareness. Twenty years later, the fire has jumped the screen, and on Jan. 6, it threatened to burn down democracy’s house.

I have spent exactly 42 years studying the rise of the digital as an economic force driving our transformation into an information civilization. Over the last two decades, I’ve observed the consequences of this surprising political-economic fraternity as those young companies morphed into surveillance empires powered by global architectures of behavioral monitoring, analysis, targeting and prediction that I have called surveillance capitalism. On the strength of their surveillance capabilities and for the sake of their surveillance profits, the new empires engineered a fundamentally anti-democratic epistemic coupmarked by unprecedented concentrations of knowledge about us and the unaccountable power that accrues to such knowledge.

In an information civilization, societies are defined by questions of knowledge — how it is distributed, the authority that governs its distribution and the power that protects that authority. Who knows? Who decides who knows? Who decides who decides who knows? Surveillance capitalists now hold the answers to each question, though we never elected them to govern. This is the essence of the epistemic coup. They claim the authority to decide who knows by asserting ownership rights over our personal information and defend that authority with the power to control critical information systems and infrastructures….(More)”.

Ten computer codes that transformed science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jeffrey M. Perkel at Nature: “From Fortran to arXiv.org, these advances in programming and platforms sent biology, climate science and physics into warp speed….In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope team gave the world the first glimpse of what a black hole actually looks like. But the image of a glowing, ring-shaped object that the group unveiled wasn’t a conventional photograph. It was computed — a mathematical transformation of data captured by radio telescopes in the United States, Mexico, Chile, Spain and the South Pole1. The team released the programming code it used to accomplish that feat alongside the articles that documented its findings, so the scientific community could see — and build on — what it had done.

It’s an increasingly common pattern. From astronomy to zoology, behind every great scientific finding of the modern age, there is a computer. Michael Levitt, a computational biologist at Stanford University in California who won a share of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on computational strategies for modelling chemical structure, notes that today’s laptops have about 10,000 times the memory and clock speed that his lab-built computer had in 1967, when he began his prizewinning work. “We really do have quite phenomenal amounts of computing at our hands today,” he says. “Trouble is, it still requires thinking.”

Enter the scientist-coder. A powerful computer is useless without software capable of tackling research questions — and researchers who know how to write it and use it. “Research is now fundamentally connected to software,” says Neil Chue Hong, director of the Software Sustainability Institute, headquartered in Edinburgh, UK, an organization dedicated to improving the development and use of software in science. “It permeates every aspect of the conduct of research.”

Scientific discoveries rightly get top billing in the media. But Nature this week looks behind the scenes, at the key pieces of code that have transformed research over the past few decades.

Although no list like this can be definitive, we polled dozens of researchers over the past year to develop a diverse line-up of ten software tools that have had a big impact on the world of science. You can weigh in on our choices at the end of the story….(More)”.