organization:mit

  • Intensive agriculture influences U.S. regional summer climate, study finds
    https://phys.org/news/2018-02-intensive-agriculture-regional-summer-climate.html

    Scientists agree that changes in land use such as deforestation, and not just greenhouse gas emissions, can play a significant role altering the world’s climate systems. Now, a new study by researchers at MIT and Dartmouth College reveals how another type of land use, intensive agriculture, can impact regional climate.

    The researchers show that in the last half of the 20th century, the midwestern U.S. went through an intensification of agricultural practices that led to dramatic increases in production of corn and soybeans. And, over the same period in that region, summers were significantly cooler and had greater rainfall than during the previous half-century. This effect, with regional cooling in a time of overall global warming, may have masked part of the warming effect that would have occurred over that period, and the new finding could help to refine global climate models by incorporating such regional effects.

    #climat #agroindustrie

  • “We’re in a diversity crisis”: cofounder of Black in AI on what’s poisoning algorithms in our lives MIT Tech Review, by JAckie SNow
    https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610192/were-in-a-diversity-crisis-black-in-ais-founder-on-whats-poisoning

    It’s really important to have the stand-alone conference [on Fairness and Transparency] because it needs to be worked on by people from many disciplines who talk to each other.

    Have a good idea, then put it in a box and let it sim with its pairs.
    And a bunch of white ass are gona debate on the colours of ethics.

    A boostrap issue.

  • Bonjour,

    Comme vous l’avez peut-être appris, John Perry Barlow est décédé le 7 février des suites de ses problèmes cardiaques. Personnage flamboyant, auteur de la "Déclaration d’indépendance du cyberespace" (8 février 1996, hasard des dates), Barlow occupe une place à part dans la "mythologie" de l’internet. Bien que l’on puisse contester ses idées et son approche libertarienne, il faut lui reconnaître une plume, un style, une énergie hors du commun, qui a marqué très largement les discours sur l’internet et le cyberespace.

    L’auteur de science-fiction cyberpunk Bruce Sterling décrit Barlow en 1992 comme « un pur extraterrestre de la pratique des réseaux informatiques. Il avait une écriture de poète, concise et imagée. Il avait également la perspicacité d’un journaliste, ainsi qu’un esprit loufoque et le sens profond de l’autodérision. Enfin, il était tout simplement doué d’un charme personnel phénoménal. »

    Il est donc tout naturel que John Perry Barlow, et notamment son texte « La déclaration d’indépendance du cyberespace », ait été commenté par les auteur·e·s de C&F éditions. Quelques extraits ci-dessous.

    Olivier Ertzscheid : "L’appétit des géants : pouvoir des algorithmes, ambitions des plateformes"
    https://cfeditions.com/geants

    danah boyd : "C’est compliqué : les vies numériques des adolescents"
    https://cfeditions.com/boyd

    Fred Turner : "Aux sources de l’utopie numérique : de la contre-culture à la cyberculture, Stewart Brand un homme d’influence"
    https://cfeditions.com/utopieNumerique

    Olivier Ertzscheid

    L’auteur de « L’appétit des géants » lui a rendu un hommage très particulier et significatif dans les colonnes de Libération du 9 février. Il propose de ré-écrire la « Déclaration d’indépendance du cyberespace » en version 2018... non plus en s’adressant aux tenants du monde industriel, comme le faisait Barlow en 1996, mais aux géants du monde numérique qui emprisonnent l’énergie des internautes dans leurs systèmes de contrôle et leurs espace privés.

    Extrait :

    « Plateformes aux tons pastels et aux logos colorés, vous géants fatigués aux CGU d’airain et aux algorithmes d’acier, je viens du temps des internets d’avant, où nous n’avions pas de "comptes" mais des pages, où chacun pouvait disposer d’une adresse et n’était pas contraint d’habiter par habitude et par lassitude sous le même grand F bleu qui orne votre jardin fermé, et de vivre dans cette fausse proximité que vous nous avez tant vanté et qui est d’abord une toxique promiscuité.

    Au nom du présent que vous avez institué, je vous demande à vous qui êtes désormais le passé, de nous laisser tranquilles. Vous n’êtes plus les bienvenus parmi nous. Vous avez trop de souveraineté pour que celle-ci ne soit pas enfin questionnée et abolie. »

    On peut retrouver le texte complet et l’introduction/hommage sur Libération (http://www.liberation.fr/debats/2018/02/09/une-nouvelle-declaration-d-independance-du-cyberespace_1628377) et sur le blog Affordance (http://affordance.typepad.com//mon_weblog/2018/02/nouvelle-declaration-independance-cyberespace-hommage-john-perry )

    danah boyd :

    C’est dans la « Déclaration d’indépendance du cyberespace » que John Perry Barlow utilisa le premier la notion de " digital natives ". Jeune geekette à l’époque de ce texte, danah boyd est resté frappée par la verve de Barlow... mais montre elle aussi combien les dynamiques ont changé, et combien cette notion de "digital natives" est devenu la tarte à la crème des spécialiste du marketing, mais ne représente rien pour les jeunes, ni pour les sociologues.

    extrait :

    « Des manifestes, à l’image de la "Déclaration d’indépendance du cyberespace" de John Perry Barlow en 1996, me parlaient profondément. Barlow disait alors devant les leaders économiques réunis au forum de Davos que la nouvelle « maison de l’Esprit » permettait des « identités sans corps ». J’étais fière d’être une de ces enfants dont il parlait, et qui se vivait comme « native » de cette nouvelle civilisation.

    Vingt ans après, les dynamiques de l’identité en ligne s’avèrent très largement différentes de ce que les premiers adeptes de l’internet avaient imaginé. Même si les jeux en ligne et les mondes virtuels sont populaires parmi certains groupes de jeunes, il existe une différence culturelle majeure entre les sites qui permettent d’endosser un rôle et les médias sociaux, largement plus fréquentés, qui tendent à encourager une atmosphère beaucoup moins fictionnelle. Même si les pseudonymes sont fréquents dans ces environnements, le type de travail de l’identité qui se déroule dans les médias sociaux tels Facebook est très différent de celui que Turkle avait imaginé au départ. De nombreux adolescents aujourd’hui vont en ligne pour socialiser avec des amis qu’ils connaissent dans le monde physique, et ils se définissent eux-mêmes dans des contextes en ligne qui interagissent fortement avec des communautés sociales non-médiées. Ces pratiques, qui encouragent une plus grande continuité entre les mondes en ligne et hors ligne des adolescents, étaient bien moins fréquentes quand j’étais jeune. »

    et

    « La notion de digital natives a des racines politiques, principalement issues du techno-idéalisme américain. Dans sa volonté de contraindre l’élite globale à reconnaître l’importance de la société numérique émergente, John Perry Barlow, un poète reconnu, par ailleurs cyberlibertarien notoire, a forgé ce concept pour diviser le monde entre « eux » et « nous ». Barlow, connu pour avoir été le parolier du groupe The Grateful Dead, savait facilement trouver des mots provocants pour exprimer ses opinions politiques. Ce manifeste lançait un défi explicite aux « gouvernements du monde industriel ». En plaçant ceux qui « venaient du cyberespace » en opposition au monde du passé, il organisait l’affrontement des « natifs » et des « immigrants ».

    Barlow n’était certainement pas le premier à suggérer que les jeunes sont, en raison de leur date de naissance, intimement partie prenante de ce paysage numérique émergent. Mais son langage poétique a mis en relief les craintes implicites d’une fracture générationnelle qui accompagnerait les technologies. En écrivant sa déclaration, il voulait susciter des réactions… et il y est parvenu. Mais beaucoup ont pris sa métaphore au premier degré. Il était fréquent de voir des discours publics mettre en avant l’idée que les « natifs » auraient des pouvoirs et des compétences techniques particulières. L’idée sous-jacente de ces lectures de Barlow est que les adultes doivent craindre ces jeunes qui auraient hérité d’un savoir à leur naissance. »

    Fred Turner

    C’est bien entendu l’historien de l’internet Fred Turner qui offre dans son livre « Aux sources de l’utopie numérique » les hommages comme les critiques les plus soutenues de l’oeuvre et de l’approche de John Perry Barlow.

    Extraits :

    « Barlow rappelait à ses lecteurs « Je vis à barlow@eff.org. C’est là où j’habite. C’est ma maison. Si vous voulez me parler, c’est le seul endroit où vous êtes sûrs de me trouver, à moins que vous ne soyez déjà en face de moi – physiquement. Il est impossible de savoir où je suis. Depuis avril, je ne suis pas resté plus de six jours dans un même lieu. » Dyson et Barlow s’étaient transformés en paquets d’informations, au sens métaphorique, naviguant de conseils d’administration en conférence et agences de presse. Leur perception de l’espace s’était disloquée et s’ils avaient toujours le sentiment d’avoir un foyer, ce dernier était devenu distribué, collant parfaitement à leur idée d’avoir une maison sur la toile.

    De prime abord, la représentation du monde en système d’information telle que le conçoit Kelly s’inscrit fortement dans la pensée d’une époque, celle des années quatre-vingt-dix. Une analogie entre réseaux d’entreprises et écosystèmes naturels sous-tend cette représentation. Une analogie qui imprègne la vision, commune à Barlow et Dyson, d’un monde libéré de sa bureaucratie et guéri de sa schizophrénie grâce à l’internet. Mais à y regarder de plus près, elle pose également une énigme historique. L’idée selon laquelle le monde matériel peut être comparé à un système d’information et modélisé par ordinateur ne date pas de l’internet, mais apparaît bien plus tôt, durant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, dans et autour des laboratoires de recherche financés par l’État, notamment le Radiation Laboratory du MIT. Ces laboratoires ont orienté le développement de l’informatique aux États-Unis.
    [...]
    En 1990, la technologie et les méthodes de management caractérisant le WELL, en sus des réseaux qui s’étaient regroupés autour du système et des organisations proches du Whole Earth, servirent de références pour redefinir le cyberespace lui-même. Cette année-là, John Perry Barlow, expert en informatique, fut unanimement désigné comme la première personne à avoir accolé le mot cyberespace à ce qui n’était encore que le croisement entre les télécommunications et les réseaux informatiques. Puisant largement dans son expérience du WELL, il décrivait ce nouveau cyberespace structuré autour de réseaux informatiques comme une « frontière électronique ». Ce faisant, il bousculait la représentation autrefois dystopienne d’une informatique interconnectée en un espace imaginé pour que les individus puissent se recréer et construire leurs communautés dans les termes provenant des idéaux néo-communalistes. À l’instar des territoires ruraux des années soixante, le cyberespace de Barlow demeurerait au-delà de tout contrôle gouvernemental. Et tout comme un happening ou un Acid Test, il fournirait le décor et les outils au travers desquels les individus entretiendraient des liens intimes et désincarnés entre eux. En invoquant l’image de la frontière électronique, Barlow métamorphosait les normes locales du WELL, notamment son éthique communautarienne dérivée du Whole Earth, son allégeance à une forme de gouvernance non hiérarchique et sa rhétorique cybernétique, en une métaphore universelle de l’informatique en réseau. Dès le milieu des années quatre-vingt-dix, l’image du cyberespace telle que dessinée par Barlow était sans nul doute devenue l’emblème le plus populaire non seulement des formes émergentes de communication via réseaux informatiques, mais également des formes horizontales d’organisation sociale ou encore des modèles dérégulés de transactions économiques.
    [...]

    Durant l’été 90, Barlow se rendit dans les bureaux du VPL Research de Jaron Lanier et endossa une paire de visiophones et de gants de données VPL. Il publia dans Mondo la description suivante de son expérience : « Soudain, je n’ai plus de corps. Tout ce qui reste du fatras vieillissant qui constitue la plupart du temps mon enveloppe corporelle, c’est une main auréolée d’or qui flotte devant moi telle la dague de Macbeth. Je pointe un doigt vers l’étagère de livres accrochée au mur du bureau et la parcours lentement de haut en bas sur toute sa hauteur... Dans cet environnement palpitant d’inconnu, j’ai été réduit à un seul point de vue. Le sujet “moi” bée intégralement dans un abîme de questions brûlantes. Un véritable Dysneyland pour épistémologues. » Barlow aurait très bien pu décrire là un trip sous acide. Malgré toutes les technologies numériques impliquées, l’expérience dont Barlow fait le récit appartient autant aux années soixante qu’aux années quatre-vingt-dix. Et au cas où le lecteur n’aurait pas percuté, Barlow cite Lanier : « Je pense que c’est le truc le plus incroyable depuis notre virée sur la lune » .

    Barlow qui s’était converti plutôt tardivement à la puissance des technologies numériques, était cependant un vieux briscard du mysticisme et du LSD. Fils de propriétaires de ranch dans le Wyoming, il avait été élevé dans un esprit Mormon, attaché au Parti Républicain. Il n’avait pas été autorisé à regarder la télévision avant l’âge de 11 ans et lorsqu’il le put, il regarda essentiellement des programmes de télévangélistes. À 14 ans, il fut envoyé dans une école catholique et, ironie du sort, c’est à ce moment-là qu’il commença à perdre la foi. À la n des années soixante, alors qu’il fréquentait l’Université de Wesleyan dans le Connecticut, il prit régulièrement part aux activités du groupe de Timothy Leary situé à Millbrook, dans l’État de New York. Sa foi refit surface à l’issue de son premier voyage sous acide. « Le sentiment qu’il y avait quelque chose de sacré dans l’univers m’animait de nouveau », raconta-t-il plus tard. Mais cette présence sacrée ne pouvait être contenue dans un dogme en particulier. Barlow se tourna plutôt vers les inclinations mystiques de Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, prêtre catholique dont il avait découvert les œuvres lorsqu’il était à l’université, et de Gregory Bateson, dont il avait lu Steps to an Ecology of Mind au début des années soixante-dix.
    [...]

    Au début du mois de juin, peu de temps après avoir lu le récit de Barlow sur le WELL, dans un geste qui est depuis entré dans la légende de la cyberculture, Kapor qui se trouvait à proximité de Pinedale, Wyoming, à bord de son jet privé, appela Barlow depuis son avion et lui demanda s’il pouvait faire halte chez lui. Ils s’étaient rencontrés auparavant tant socialement que professionnellement (Barlow avait interviewé Kapor pour le compte d’un magazine informatique) mais ne se connaissaient pas vraiment pour autant. Cet après-midi-là, assis dans la cuisine de Barlow, ils échangèrent sur les différentes opérations répressives menées alors par le gouvernement. Ils décidèrent ensemble de créer une organisation nommée la Computer Liberty Foundation. [...]
    La première et la plus influente des métaphores auxquelles se référait Barlow fut celle de la « frontière électronique ». Kapor et Barlow, tous deux maîtres incontestés de la mise en réseau, obtinrent rapidement une couverture médiatique pour leur nouvelle organisation ainsi que des propositions de financement en provenance de Steve Wozniak, cofon- dateur d’Apple, et de John Gilmore de Sun Microsystems. Ils initièrent une conférence sur le WELL et recrutèrent Stewart Brand pour étoffer le conseil d’administration de la fondation
    [...]

    Tous ceux qui étaient présents au dîner s’accordèrent sur l’idée que l’informatique en réseau était selon les propres termes de Barlow « d’authentiques confins ». « J’ai proposé Electronic Frontier Foundation durant le repas », se souvint Barlow, « et tout le monde semblait trouver ça bien. »

    En dépit de leur orientation libertarienne, les plumes d’Esther Dyson, de John Perry Barlow et de Kevin Kelly exhalaient un parfum de nostalgie d’un monde égalitaire. Pour ces auteurs, et pour ceux que leurs écrits auront guidé, l’internet public des premiers temps semblait préfigurer et aider à faire naître un monde dans lequel chaque individu pourrait agir dans son propre intérêt et dans le même temps produire une sphère sociale unifiée, un monde dans lequel nous serions « tous un ». Cette sphère ne serait pas gouvernée par les décisions de politiques agonistiques, mais s’en détournerait pour suivre le chemin de la prise de pouvoir individuelle assistée par les technologies et l’établissement d’agoras en pair à pair. Pour les prophètes de l’internet, comme pour celles et ceux qui s’en retournèrent à la terre quelque trente ans plus tôt, c’était le gouvernement, imaginé en colosse bureaucratique écrasant, qui menaçait de détruire l’individu ; l’information, la technologie et le marché représentaient alors le salut. »

    La boucle est bouclée. Du Barlow prestidigitateur du discours de l’internet à la situation de concentration et de dépendance actuelle de l’internet à une poignée de géants, il était temps de faire revivre des utopies positives pour que l’internet redevienne ce compagnon de la liberté et de l’action collective. Ce qu’Olivier Ertzscheid a tenté de faire dans son hommage/pastiche de la « Déclaration d’indépendance du cyberespace - V2.0 »

    Bonnes lectures à vous.

    Hervé Le Crosnier

    #John_Perry_Barlow #Fred_Turner #danah_boyd #Olivier_Ertzscheid #C&F_éditions

  • Une étude démontre les biais de la reconnaissance faciale, plus efficace sur les hommes blancs
    http://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2018/02/12/une-etude-demontre-les-biais-de-la-reconnaissance-faciale-plus-efficace-sur-

    Lorsqu’il s’agit de reconnaître le genre d’un homme blanc, des logiciels affichent un taux de réussite de 99 %. La tâche se complique lorsque la peau d’une personne est plus foncée, ou s’il s’agit d’une femme. Les logiciels de reconnaissance faciale sont efficaces pour déterminer le genre d’une personne… à condition d’être un homme et d’avoir la peau blanche, à en croire une étude publiée jeudi 8 février sur le site du MIT Media Lab. A l’origine de cette étude, la chercheuse Joy Buolamwini du prestigieux (...)

    #Google #Microsoft #algorithme #biométrie #facial #discrimination #Massachusetts_Institute_of_Technology_(MIT) #IBM (...)

    ##Massachusetts_Institute_of_Technology__MIT_ ##Face++

  • Study finds gender and skin-type bias in commercial artificial-intelligence systems
    http://news.mit.edu/2018/study-finds-gender-skin-type-bias-artificial-intelligence-systems-0212

    Examination of facial-analysis software shows error rate of 0.8 percent for light-skinned men, 34.7 percent for dark-skinned women. Three commercially released facial-analysis programs from major technology companies demonstrate both skin-type and gender biases, according to a new paper researchers from MIT and Stanford University will present later this month at the Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. In the researchers’ experiments, the three programs’ error rates in (...)

    #algorithme #biométrie #facial #discrimination

  • What the hell is a climate model—and why does it matter? - MIT Technology Review
    https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610225/what-the-hell-is-a-climate-modeland-why-does-it-matter

    Climate models are sophisticated computer simulations that approximate how the planet responds to various forces, like surges in carbon dioxide. They break down the oceans, surface, and atmosphere into 3-D boxes and calculate how shifting conditions track across time and space.

    Basic gains in computing power have driven many of the improvements. Those boxes were about 500 square kilometers in 1990. For some of today’s highest-resolution models, including the Department of Energy’s E3SM, Japan’s MRI, and China’s FGOALS, they are under 25 square kilometers. The resolution gets higher still for specific applications, such as modeling hurricanes.

    In addition, the earliest climate models in the 1960s were focused on the atmosphere, but now they take into account land surfaces, sea ice, aerosols, the carbon cycle, vegetation, and atmospheric chemistry. More recently, models have started to incorporate the ways that human behavior shifts in response to climate change, including migration and deforestation.

    #modélisation #climat

  • The doctor responsible for gene therapy’s greatest setback is sounding a new alarm - MIT Technology Review
    https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610141/the-doctor-responsible-for-gene-therapys-greatest-setback-is-sound

    To attack the disease, researchers replace patients’ damaged copies of a gene called dystrophin by introducing viral particles that carry a correct copy. Reaching the countless muscle cells in a boy’s body requires extremely high doses of these particles—400 trillion or more per pound of body weight.

    That’s where the danger could come in, says Wilson. At those doses, he says, his team found that two different viruses caused extreme and sudden immunological effects, including damage to the liver and blood vessels.

    [...] The general type of #virus implicated, called an AAV, is widely used and considered safe. More than 2,000 people have been treated with AAVs, which have been used in successful tests of gene-therapy treatments for hemophilia and blindness.

    Thanks to those successes, gene therapy has been racing forward, building toward ever more dramatic cures. The latest tests move into unknown territory because they involve much higher doses (which are needed to reach muscles or brain cells) and because the subjects are children.

    #thérapie_génique #myopathie

  • Bitcoin and Ethereum have a hidden power structure, and it’s just been revealed - MIT Technology Review
    https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610018/bitcoin-and-ethereum-have-a-hidden-power-structure-and-its-just-be

    Perhaps the most striking finding is that the process of verifying transactions and securing a blockchain ledger against attack, called mining, is not actually that decentralized in either system. Bitcoin and Ethereum are open blockchain systems, meaning that in principle anyone can be a miner (see “What Bitcoin Is, and Why It Matters”). But organizations have formed to pool mining resources. The researchers found that the top four Bitcoin-mining operations had more than 53 percent of the system’s average mining capacity, measured on a weekly basis. Mining for Ethereum was even more consolidated: three miners accounted for 61 percent of the system’s average weekly capacity.

    They also found that 56 percent of Bitcoin’s “nodes,” the computers around the world running its software (not all of them engage in mining), are located in data centers, versus 28 percent for Ethereum. That might indicate that Bitcoin is more corporatized, Gün Sirer says. Overall, the group concluded that neither network “has strictly better properties than the other.”

    Discussions of decentralization may seem esoteric, but anyone interested in the future of cryptocurrency should try to follow along. Part of the vision sold by the technology’s biggest promoters is that it can help solve problems of financial inequality created in part by traditional, centralized institutions. If digital currency allows wealth and power to pool in the hands of a few, that’s not so revolutionary.

    #Bitcoin #Etherum #Crypto_monnaies #Pouvoir #Monnaie_numérique

  • The doctor responsible for gene therapy’s greatest setback is sounding a new alarm - MIT Technology Review
    https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610141/the-doctor-responsible-for-gene-therapys-greatest-setback-is-sound

    James Wilson of the University of Pennsylvania reported this week that monkeys and pigs given super-high doses of gene therapy died or suffered disturbing behavioral changes.

    “What is remarkable is we have not seen it before,” says Wilson. “We were surprised but shouldn’t have been. If you push the dose of anything high enough, you are going to see toxicity.”

    The warning comes amidst a scramble by three companies—Sarepta Therapeutics, Pfizer, and Solid Biosciences—to be the first to use the technique to cure muscular dystrophy. That disease strikes young boys, destroys their muscles, and kills them by their 20s.

    To attack the disease, researchers replace patients’ damaged copies of a gene called dystrophin by introducing viral particles that carry a correct copy. Reaching the countless muscle cells in a boy’s body requires extremely high doses of these particles—400 trillion or more per pound of body weight.

    R. Jude Samulski, who studies viral gene therapy at the University of North Carolina and is involved with Pfizer’s project, says that because Wilson’s viruses were slightly different from those being used in trials, it is not known whether his findings apply to the studies under way.

    However, Samulski says the mixture of scientific ambition, technological advances, desperate patients, and potential financial windfalls could be combustible.

    “It would be very naïve for our community to assume we won’t have toxic effects,” he says. “People get comfortable, saying, ‘Hey, let’s do it—there is nothing lose.’ Well, it’s out there waiting. But when it’s going to happen, why it’s going to happen—nobody knows.“

    #Médecine #Gene_therapy #Thérapie_génique #Néolibéralisme

  • Solar eclipse caused bow waves in Earth’s atmosphere | MIT News
    http://news.mit.edu/2018/solar-eclipse-caused-bow-waves-earths-atmosphere-0119

    The celebrated Great American Eclipse of August 2017 crossed the continental U.S. in 90 minutes, and totality lasted no longer than a few minutes at any one location. The event is well in the rear-view mirror now, but scientific investigation into the effects of the moon’s shadow on the Earth’s atmosphere is still being hotly pursued, and interesting new findings are surfacing at a rapid pace. These include significant observations by scientists at MIT’s Haystack Observatory in Westford, Massachusetts.
    […]
    One kind of these new waves, known as #ionospheric_bow_waves, has been predicted for more than 40 years to exist in the wake of an eclipse passage. Researchers at MIT’s Haystack Observatory and the University of Tromsø in Norway confirmed the existence of ionospheric bow waves definitively for the first time during the August 2017 event. An international team led by Haystack Observatory scientists studied ionospheric electron content data collected by a network of more than 2,000 GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) receivers across the nation. Based on this work, Haystack’s Shunrong Zhang and colleagues published an article in December in the journal Geophysical Research Letters on the results showing the newly detected ionospheric bow waves.

    #éclipse_solaire #vague_d'étrave_ionosphérique

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vivMEVBwys


    The moon’s shadow created ionospheric “bow waves” in its wake during the August eclipse, as shown in this animation of total electron content measurements.
    Haystack Observatory

  • Authoritarianism in a Global Age

    We are investigating changes in the sustainability and nature of authoritarian rule induced by globalisation. Thematically, the project investigates how authoritarianism is affected by and responding to global information and communication technology and to movement of people. Spatially, it studies subnational authoritarianism, extraterritorial authoritarianism, and multilateral authoritarianism. Conceptually, it focuses on authoritarian practices, defined as sabotage of accountability. The project transcends the theoretical and empirical separation between globalisation studies, which have neglected authoritarian contexts, and authoritarianism studies, which have taken little notice of the effects of globalisation.

    http://www.authoritarianism-global.uva.nl
    #autoritarisme #université #recherche #académie #globalisation #mondialisation #projet #Amsterdam #Université_d'Amsterdam #migrations #frontières #information #technologie #autoritarisme_extra-territorial #extra-territorialité #autoritarisme_sub-national #autoritarisme_multilatéral

    Ici les publications du projet :

    Glasius, M., de Lange, M., Bartman, J., Dalmasso E., Del Sordi, A., Lv, A., Michaelsen, M., Ruijgrok, K. (2017) ’Research, Ethics and Risk in the Authoritarian Field.’ Palgrave Pivot.
    Glasius, M. ( 2017) ’Extraterritorial authoritarian practices: a framework.’ Globalizations.
    Del Sordi, A. (2017) ’Sponsoring student mobility for development and authoritarian stability: Kazakhstan’s Bolashak programm.’ Globalizations.
    Wrighton, S. ( 2017) ’Authoritarian regime stabilization through legitimation, popular co-optation, and exclusion: Russian pasportizatsiya strategies in Crimea.’ Globalizations.
    Dalmasso, E. (2017) ’Participation without representation: Moroccans abroad at a time of unstable authoritarian rule.’ Globalizations.
    Michaelsen, M. (2017). ’Far Away, So Close: Transnational Activism, Digital Surveillance and Authoritarian Control in Iran.’ Surveillance & Society.
    Dalmasso, E., Del Sordi, A., Glasius, M., Hirt, N., Michaelsen, M., Mohammad, A. S. & Moss, D. (2017). Intervention: ’Extraterritorial authoritarian power’. Political Geography.
    Del Sordi, A. ( 2017). ’Kazakhstan 2015-2016: Balancing regime stability amidst local and global challenges.’ In M. Torri & N. Mocci (Eds.) The End of the Obama Era in Asia, Asia Maior. Vol. XXVII / 2016.
    Michaelsen, M. (2016). ’Exit and Voice in a Digital Age: Iran’s Exiled Activists and the Authoritarian State.’ Globalizations.
    Ruijgrok, K. (2016). ’From the web to the streets: #internet and protests under authoritarian regimes.’ Democratization.
    Del Sordi, A. (2016). ’Legitimation and the Party of Power in Kazakhstan.’ In M. Brusis, J. Ahrens, & M. Schulze Wessel (Eds.), Politics and legitimacy in post-Soviet Eurasia.
    Michaelsen, M. (2015). ’Beyond the ‘#Twitter Revolution’: Digital Media and Political Change in #Iran.' In P. Weibel (Ed.), Global Activism. Art and Conflict in the 21st Century. MIT Press.
    Glasius, M., et.al. (2015). ’Reconceptualizing Authoritarianism’ APSA-Comparative Democratization-Newsletter.
    Clark, J. A., & Dalmasso, E. (2015). ’State actor-social movement coalitions and policy-making under authoritarianism: the Moroccan Party of Justice and development in the urban municipality of #Kenitra.' Middle East Law and Governance.
    Harbers, I. and Ingram, M.C. (2014). ‘Democratic Institutions Beyond the Nation State: Measuring Institutional Dissimilarity in Federal Countries’. Government and Opposition.
    Harbers, I. (2014). ’States and Strategy in New Federal Democracies: Competitiveness and Intra-Party Resource Allocation in Mexico’, Party Politics.

    http://www.authoritarianism-global.uva.nl/publications
    #Crimée #Kazakhstan #Maroc #Mexique #activisme #activisme_global #réseaux_sociaux

    Un #livre, qui peut être téléchargé gratuitement :

    Research, Ethics and Risk in the Authoritarian Field


    https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-68966-1
    #recherche #éthique #risques #méthodologie #fieldwork #terrain

  • Soft skills can come the hard way

    500,000 refugees in Germany are seeking employment.

    Since 2015, more than 1 million refugees have entered Germany. Even though these refugees had proven their skills the hard way,
    by escaping dangerous lands, only 4 had been employed by DAX-listed companies by 2016. Thus breaking their previous promises and commitments to this cause.

    http://employ-refugees.de/#soft-skills
    #soft_skills #résilience #intégration #intégration_professionnelle #compétences #réfugiés #asile #migrations #team-oriented
    #campagne #Allemagne #travail #resilient #résilience #stress-resistant #solution_oriented

    I’m a team player. “I survived crossing the ocean in a small rubber boat with 85 other people.”

  • Boîte à outils pour Gitlab-CI
    https://linuxfr.org/news/boite-a-outils-pour-gitlab-ci

    Le projet que je vais développer ici est une boîte à outils pour Gitlab-CI publié sous licence GNU GPLv3, dont la fonction principale est d’exécuter les tâche Gitlab manuellement, individuellement et simplement sur votre station de développement. J’ai commencé son développement début 2017 dans le cadre de ma mission chez ERCOM, et, à ce jour, il a atteint un bon stade de maturité. Il est désormais utilisé par deux équipes sur au moins une dizaine de projets.GitLab (Community Edition) est un logiciel libre, sous licence MIT. Il s’agit d’une forge logicielle équivalente à GitHub et la partie mentionnée, Gitlab-CI, est une fonctionnalité d’intégration continue équivalente au service Travis-CIlien n°1 : Page du projetlien n°2 : GitLab-CIlien n°3 : Page Wikipedia de GitLab CElien n°4 : GitlabSommaire (...)

  • Les ordinateurs les plus intelligents ne savent toujours pas comprendre
    https://www.lenouveleconomiste.fr/financial-times/les-ordinateurs-les-plus-intelligents-ne-savent-toujours-pas-comp

    Dans son livre, Max Tegmark rappelle la distinction que les philosophes établissent entre les concepts latins de “sapience” (la capacité de penser de façon intelligente) et “sentience” (la capacité d’apprécier des expériences subjectives).
    Selon ce professeur de physique qui enseigne au MIT, à un moment donné de ce siècle, l’intelligence électronique pourrait bien supplanter l’intelligence humaine et démolir notre prétention d’‘Homo sapiens’, l’entité la plus intelligente de la planète.
    Mais l’acquisition de la conscience électronique, qui produit le sens, sera un événement encore plus déterminant, si elle se produit un jour. Pour Max Tegmark, si nous, les humains, souhaitons étendre notre “exceptionnalisme”, alors peut-être le moment est-il venu de nous réinventer en tant que ‘Homo sentiens’.

  • Tracim, socle libre du travail en équipe, sort en v1.0
    https://linuxfr.org/news/tracim-socle-libre-du-travail-en-equipe-sort-en-v1-0

    Tracim propose un outil intégré, simple d’utilisation et unique, adressant les besoins classiques de collaboration : discussion, partage de fichiers, documentation, calendrier.

    Tracim, outil libre sous licence MIT, est une alternative aux outils traditionnels tels que mailing-list, wikis, gestion électronique de document, partages de fichiers, partages de calendriers…

    La majorité des gens n’a pas besoin des fonctionnalités avancées de chaque outil spécifique. De plus, la plupart du temps, intégrer des nouveaux collaborateurs nécessite l’apprentissage de chacun des outils utilisés par l’entreprise, l’association ou pour le projet. Tracim se positionne sur ce créneau : proposer les fonctionnalités attendues, épurées, avec une logique d’interaction systématique et une intégration naturelle avec les (...)

  • Before Self-Driving Cars Become Real, They Face These Challenges | WIRED
    https://www.wired.com/story/self-driving-cars-challenges

    OH, THE UNTAINTED optimism of 2014. In the spring of that year, the good Swedes at Volvo introduced Drive Me, a program to get regular Josefs, Frejas, Joeys, and Fayes into autonomous vehicles. By 2017, Volvo executives promised, the company would distribute 100 self-driving SUVs to families in Gothenburg, Sweden. The cars would be able to ferry their passengers through at least 30 miles of local roads, in everyday driving conditions—all on their own. “The technology, which will be called Autopilot, enables the driver to hand over the driving to the vehicle, which takes care of all driving functions,” said Erik Coelingh, a technical lead at Volvo.

    Now, in the waning weeks of 2017, Volvo has pushed back its plans. By four years. Automotive News reports the company now plans to put 100 people in self-driving cars by 2021, and “self-driving” might be a stretch. The guinea pigs will start off testing the sort of semi-autonomous features available to anyone willing to pony up for a new Volvo (or Tesla, Cadillac, Nissan, or Mercedes).

    “On the journey, some of the questions that we thought were really difficult to answer have been answered much faster than we expected,” Marcus Rothoff, the carmaker’s autonomous driving program director, told the publication. “And in some areas, we are finding that there were more issues to dig into and solve than we expected.” Namely, price. Rothoff said the company was loath to nail down the cost of its sensor set before it knew how it would work, so Volvo couldn’t quite determine what people would pay for the privilege in riding in or owning one. CEO Hakan Samuelsson has said self-driving functionality could add about $10,000 to the sticker price.

    Volvo’s retreat is just the latest example of a company cooling on optimistic self-driving car predictions. In 2012, Google CEO Sergey Brin said even normies would have access to autonomous vehicles in fewer than five years—nope. Those who shelled out an extra $3,000 for Tesla’s Enhanced Autopilot are no doubt disappointed by its non-appearance, nearly six months after its due date. New Ford CEO Jim Hackett recently moderated expectations for the automaker’s self-driving service, which his predecessor said in 2016 would be deployed at scale by 2021. “We are going to be in the market with products in that time frame,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle. “But the nature of the romanticism by everybody in the media about how this robot works is overextended right now.”

    The scale-backs haven’t dampened the enthusiasm for money-throwing. Venture capital firm CB Insights estimates self-driving car startups—ones building autonomous driving software, driver safety tools, and vehicle-to-vehicle communications, and stockpiling and crunching data while doing it—have sucked in more than $3 billion in funding this year.

    To track the evolution of any major technology, research firm Gartner’s “hype cycle” methodology is a handy guide. You start with an “innovation trigger,” the breakthrough, and soon hit the “peak of inflated expectations,” when the money flows and headlines blare.

    And then there’s the trough of disillusionment, when things start failing, falling short of expectations, and hoovering up less money than before. This is where the practical challenges and hard realities separate the vaporware from the world-changers. Self-driving, it seems, is entering the trough. Welcome to the hard part.

    Technical Difficulties
    “Autonomous technology is where computing was in the 60s, meaning that the technology is nascent, it’s not modular, and it is yet to be determined how the different parts will fit together,” says Shahin Farshchi, a partner at the venture capital firm Lux Capital, who once built hybrid electric vehicles for General Motors, and has invested in self-driving startup Zoox, as well as sensor-builder Aeva.)

    Turns out building a self-driving car takes more than strapping sensors and software onto a set of wheels. In an almost startlingly frank Medium post, Bryan Salesky, who heads up Ford-backed autonomous vehicle outfit Argo AI, laid out the hurdles facing his team.

    First, he says, came the sensor snags. Self-driving cars need at least three kinds to function—lidar, which can see clearly in 3-D; cameras, for color and detail; and radar, with can detect objects and their velocities at long distances. Lidar, in particular, doesn’t come cheap: A setup for one car can cost $75,000. Then the vehicles need to take the info from those pricey sensors and fuse it together, extracting what they need to operate in the world and discarding what they doesn’t.

    “Developing a system that can be manufactured and deployed at scale with cost-effective, maintainable hardware is… challenging,” Salesky writes. (Argo AI bought a lidar company called Princeton Lightwave in October.)

    Salesky cites other problems, minor technological quandaries that could prove disastrous once these cars are actually moving through 3-D space. Vehicles need to be able to see, interpret, and predict the behavior of human drivers, human cyclists, and human pedestrians—perhaps even communicate with them. The cars must understand when they’re in another vehicle’s blind spot and drive extra carefully. They have to know (and see, and hear) when a zooming ambulance needs more room.

    “Those who think fully self-driving vehicles will be ubiquitous on city streets months from now or even in a few years are not well connected to the state of the art or committed to the safe deployment of the technology,” Salesky writes.

    He’s not the only killjoy. “Technology developers are coming to appreciate that the last 1 percent is harder than the first 99 percent,” says Karl Iagnemma, CEO of Nutonomy, a Boston-based self-driving car company acquired by automotive supplier Delphi this fall. “Compared to last 1 percent, the first 99 percent is a walk in the park.”

    The smart companies, Iagnemma says, are coming up with comprehensive ways to deal with tricky edge cases, not patching them over with the software equivalent of tape and chewing gum. But that takes time.

    Money Worries
    Intel estimates self-driving cars could add $7 trillion to the economy by 2050, $2 trillion in the US alone—and that’s not counting the impact the tech could have on trucking or other fields. So it’s curious that no one seems quite sure how to make money off this stuff yet. “The emphasis has shifted as much to the product and the business model as pure technology development,” says Iagnemma.

    Those building the things have long insisted you’ll first interact with a self-driving car through a taxi-like service. The tech is too expensive, and will at first be too dependent on weather conditions, topography, and high-quality mapping, to sell straight to consumers. But they haven’t sorted out the user experience part of this equation. Waymo is set to launch a limited, actually driver-free service in Phoenix, Arizona, next year, and says it has come up with a way for passengers to communicate they want to pull over. But the company didn’t let reporters test the functionality during a test drive at its test facility this fall, so you’ll have to take its word for it.

    Other questions loom: How do you find your vehicle? Ensure that you’re in the right one? Tell it that you’re having an emergency, or that you’ve had a little accident inside and need a cleanup ASAP? Bigger picture: How does a company even start to recoup its huge research and development budget? How much does it charge per ride? What happens when there’s a crash? Who’s liable, and how much do they have to pay in insurance?

    One path forward, money-wise, seems to be shaking hands with enemies. Companies including Waymo, GM, Lyft, Uber, and Intel, and even seemingly extinction-bound players like the car rental firm Avis, have formed partnerships with potential rivals, sharing data and services in the quest to build a real autonomous vehicle, and the infrastructure that will support it.

    Still, if you ask an autonomous car developer whether it should be going at it alone—trying to build out sensors, mapping, perception, testing capabilities, plus the car itself—expect a shrug. While a few big carmakers like General Motors clearly seem to think vertical integration is the path to a win (it bought the self-driving outfit Cruise Automation last year, and lidar company Strobe in October), startups providing à la carte services continue to believe they are part of the future. “There are plenty of people quietly making money supplying to automakers,” says Forrest Iandola, the CEO of the perception company DeepScale, citing the success of more traditional automotive suppliers like Bridgestone.

    Other companies seize upon niche markets in the self-driving space, betting specific demographics will help them make cash. The self-driving shuttle company Voyage has targeted retirement communities. Optimus Ride, an MIT spinoff, recently announced a pilot project in a new developed community just outside of Boston, and says it’s focused on building software with riders with disabilities in mind.

    “We think that kind off approach, providing mobility to those who are not able-bodied, is actually going to create a product that’s much more robust in the end,” says CEO Ryan Chin. Those companies are raising money. (Optimus Ride just came off an $18 million Series A funding round, bringing its cash pull to $23.25 million.) But are theirs viable strategies to survive in the increasingly crowded self-driving space?

    The Climb
    OK, so you won’t get a fully autonomous car in your driveway anytime soon. Here’s what you can expect, in the next decade or so: Self-driving cars probably won’t operate where you live, unless you’re the denizen of a very particular neighborhood in a big city like San Francisco, New York, or Phoenix. These cars will stick to specific, meticulously mapped areas. If, by luck, you stumble on an autonomous taxi, it will probably force you to meet it somewhere it can safely and legally pull over, instead of working to track you down and assuming hazard lights grant it immunity wherever it stops. You might share that ride with another person or three, à la UberPool.

    The cars will be impressive, but not infallible. They won’t know how to deal with all road situations and weather conditions. And you might get some human help. Nissan, for example, is among the companies working on a stopgap called teleoperations, using remote human operators to guide AVs when they get stuck or stumped.

    And if you’re not lucky enough to catch a ride, you may well forget about self-driving cars for a few years. You might joke with your friends about how silly you were to believe the hype. But the work will go on quietly, in the background. The news will quiet down as developers dedicate themselves to precise problems, tackling the demons in the details.

    The good news is that there seems to be enough momentum to carry this new industry out of the trough and onto what Gartner calls the plateau of productivity. Not everyone who started the journey will make the climb. But those who do, battered and a bit bloody, may just find the cash up there is green, the robots good, and the view stupendous.

    #Uber #disruption

    • « La justice ne consiste pas à se soumettre à des lois injustes, il est temps de sortir de l’ombre et, dans la grande tradition de la désobéissance civile, d’affirmer notre opposition à la confiscation criminelle de la culture publique. Lorsque nous serons assez nombreux de part le monde, nous n’enverrons pas seulement un puissant message de l’opposition à la privatisation de la connaissance, nous ferons en sorte que cette privatisation appartienne au passé. Serez-vous des nôtres ? »

      #université #édition_scientifique #articles_scientifiques #sci-hub #inégalités #partage #vidéo #film #culture_publique #désobéissance_civile #injustice #open_access #résistance #Carl_Malamud #jstor #MIT

      –-

      ajouté à la métaliste sur l’éditions scientifique :
      https://seenthis.net/messages/1036396

    • Petit message à celles et ceux qui ont mis une petite étoile à ce post (grand #merci @val_k d’avoir signalé cette vidéo !)... j’ai moi-même (et d’autres bien entendu) pas mal posté d’articles et documents sur l’édition scientifique sur seenthis, vous les retrouvez avec le tag #édition_scientifique. J’ai aussi du matériel stocké dans mon ordi, si jamais quelqu’un a envie de se pencher sur cette question qui devrait plus largement être débattue publiquement... A bon entendeur...

    • #Guerilla_Open_Access_Manifesto

      Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for
      themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries
      in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of
      private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the
      sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.

      There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought
      valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure
      their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But
      even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future.
      Everything up until now will have been lost.

      That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their
      colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them?
      Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to
      children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable.

      “I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they
      make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal —
      there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we can, something that’s
      already being done: we can fight back.

      Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been
      given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world
      is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for
      yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords
      with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.

      Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been
      sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by
      the publishers and sharing them with your friends.

      But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or
      piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a
      ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative. Only
      those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

      Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate
      require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they
      have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who
      can make copies.

      There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the
      grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public
      culture.

      We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with
      the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need
      to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific
      journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open
      Access.

      With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the
      privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?

      Aaron Swartz

      July 2008, Eremo, Italy

      https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt

      En français, notamment ici:
      https://framablog.org/2013/01/14/manifeste-guerilla-libre-acces-aaron-swartz

    • #Celui_qui_pourrait_changer_le_monde

      Aaron Swartz (1986-2013) était programmeur informatique, essayiste et hacker-activiste. Convaincu que l’accès à la connaissance constitue le meilleur outil d’émancipation et de justice, il consacra sa vie à la défense de la « culture libre ». Il joua notamment un rôle décisif dans la création de Reddit, des flux RSS, dans le développement des licences Creative Commons ou encore lors des manifestations contre le projet de loi SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act), qui visait à restreindre les libertés sur Internet. Au fil de ses différents combats, il rédigea une impressionnante quantité d’articles, de textes de conférences et de pamphlets politiques, dont une partie est rassemblée ici. L’adolescent, qui était déjà un libre-penseur brillant, laisse progressivement place à l’adulte, toujours plus engagé, se prononçant sur des sujets aussi variés que la politique, l’informatique, la culture ou l’éducation, et annonçant nombre de questions débattues aujourd’hui. Tiraillé entre ses idéaux et les lois relatives à la propriété intellectuelle aux États-Unis, harcelé par le FBI à la suite d’un procès intenté à son encontre, Aaron Swartz a mis fin à ses jours à l’âge de 26 ans.

      http://editions-b42.com/books/celui-qui-pourrait-changer-le-monde
      #livre

      Avec cet intéressant débat sur seenthis : pourquoi ce livre n’est pas en open access ? Débat introduit par la question de @supergeante : « ça ne choque personne ? »
      http://seen.li/cpal

    • #Alexandra_Elbakyan, la Kazakhe pirate d’articles scientifiques

      Rebelles high-tech (4/6). L’ancienne étudiante en neurosciences a créé un site Web de mise à disposition illégale de rapports de recherche. Le monde entier y a accès, au détriment des éditeurs.

      En ce jour ensoleillé de juin, le parc boisé du -musée Kolomenskoïe, à Moscou, accueille le Geek Picnic, un festival techno artistique en plein air. Parmi la foule, une jeune femme ronde et souriante, à l’allure sage et modeste, parle devant une caméra pour une interview qui sera diffusée sur YouTube. Elle explique, une fois de plus, le fonctionnement de Sci-Hub, son site Internet de publication d’articles scientifiques gratuit et ouvert à tous. Alexandra Elbakyan, 28 ans, originaire du Kazakhstan, est inconnue du grand public. Mais sur les campus et dans les labos de recherche de nombreux pays, c’est une star.
      Avec 62 millions d’articles stockés et référencés, près de 700 000 téléchargements quotidiens et des millions de visiteurs réguliers sur tous les continents, Sci-Hub s’est imposé comme une source majeure de documentation scientifique. Dans les pays pauvres, c’est un outil quotidien pour les chercheurs qui n’ont pas les moyens de se payer les abonnements coûteux des services des grands éditeurs. Dans les pays riches, des chercheurs ayant accès aux services payants utilisent Sci-Hub car il est simple et accessible de partout, sans formalités. Seul problème : Sci-Hub est un site pirate, qui vole les articles aux éditeurs et enfreint toute une série de lois sur la propriété intellectuelle et la sécurité des réseaux. Alexandra Elbakyan est poursuivie par la justice américaine.
      La création de Sci-Hub remonte à 2011. Alors étudiante en neuro-sciences, Alexandra se fait remarquer pour ses recherches sur les ondes cérébrales, ce qui lui vaut d’être invitée à aller étudier en Europe et en Amérique. Mais lorsqu’elle rentre au Kazakhstan, elle n’a plus accès aux textes scientifiques dont elle a besoin – un seul article peut coûter entre 30 et 40 dollars (entre 25 et 35 euros). Un jour, elle s’aperçoit que des biologistes russes s’entraident discrètement et s’échangent des articles sans se soucier des problèmes de copyright. Elle décide d’étendre et d’industrialiser cette pratique en créant un serveur de stockage et de distribution pour toutes les disciplines. Très vite, elle reçoit le soutien de chercheurs occidentaux : des partisans du mouvement « Open Access », militant pour la libre circulation intégrale de l’information scientifique, ainsi que des auteurs s’estimant victimes du modèle commercial dominant (dans le monde scientifique, les auteurs donnent leurs articles gratuitement aux éditeurs privés, qui les revendent très cher aux autres chercheurs).
      Complicités et marché noir
      Parmi les admirateurs d’Alexandra, beaucoup travaillent pour des universités abonnées aux services payants, et certains décident de transmettre discrètement leurs identifiants et leurs mots de passe à Sci-Hub, qui peut ainsi récupérer des articles en se faisant passer pour eux. Quand un lecteur demande un article présent dans ses serveurs, il le reçoit aussitôt. Si Sci-Hub ne possède pas l’article, il va le chercher chez un éditeur grâce à un complice, l’envoie au demandeur, puis l’archive dans la base. Bien sûr, rien n’est simple. Alexandra Elbakyan reconnaît que « Sci-Hub se procure des mots de passe de nombreuses sources différentes », ce qui laisse supposer qu’elle s’approvisionne aussi auprès de hackeurs, qui savent subtiliser des mots de passe sans l’accord de leur propriétaire… Elle a également travaillé en liaison avec un site russe, LibGen, qui distribue toutes sortes de produits piratés, mais elle affirme que, désormais, elle est autonome : « J’ai passé un temps considérable à monter mes propres serveurs, pour stocker et envoyer les articles. »
      Une fois son site lancé, Alexandra entame des études d’économie et de droit : « Un temps, j’ai envisagé de travailler pour le gouvernement, afin de changer les lois sur le copyright. » Puis elle se tourne vers l’informatique et décroche un poste de recherche qui lui laisse le temps de se consacrer à son site : « A partir de 2014, j’ai réécrit tout le code et analysé les statistiques (…). J’ai noté quels étaient les éditeurs les plus demandés, et j’ai chargé tout leur contenu. » Côté finances, Alexandra reçoit des dons anonymes de la part de lecteurs reconnaissants. Par ailleurs, elle a découvert très tôt le bitcoin, et a su spéculer sur cette nouvelle crypto-monnaie : « J’ai acheté des bitcoins quand ils valaient 20 dollars, et, aujourd’hui, ils valent cent fois plus. Cela me permet de me financer. »
      Cela dit, Sci-Hub suscite l’hostilité de nombreux universitaires, bibliothécaires ou conservateurs qui font la chasse aux tricheurs : quand un compte se met soudain à charger de gros volumes de documents, il attire l’attention des administrateurs, qui peuvent intervenir. D’autre part, et surtout, les éditeurs ont déclaré la guerre à Sci-Hub, devenu pour eux une menace existentielle. Le plus actif est le groupe anglo-hollandais Elsevier, leader mondial du secteur. En 2015, Elsevier porte plainte contre Sci-Hub devant un tribunal fédéral new-yorkais. Sans se soucier des questions de territorialité, la justice américaine s’empare de l’affaire et accuse Alexandra de piratage, un crime puni d’emprisonnement. Le juge commence par bloquer l’adresse Sci-hub.org, qui dépend d’un prestataire américain, ce qui oblige Alexandra Elbakyan à créer une série de nouvelles adresses.
      « Proche de l’idéal communiste »
      Convoquée à New York par le juge, elle refuse de s’y rendre. Elle envoie au tribunal une lettre provocatrice, et décide de ne plus aller dans les pays susceptibles de l’extrader vers les Etats-Unis. Elle cache son lieu de résidence, délaisse les réseaux sociaux américains comme Facebook et se rabat sur le réseau russe VKontakte. En revanche, elle participe, par Skype, à des colloques organisés par des universités occidentales. Peu à peu, elle en vient à contester la propriété sous toutes ses formes : « Je me sens proche de l’idéal communiste. Chez les scientifiques, on peut clairement distinguer deux classes : ceux qui travaillent, les chercheurs, et ceux qui les exploitent, les éditeurs. La théorie communiste explique comment cela fonctionne, et pourquoi une révolution est nécessaire. »
      Le procès décuple la célébrité d’Alexandra. Des universitaires consacrent des thèses à Sci-Hub, des comités de soutien se forment sur Internet, des députés européens prennent sa défense. En décembre 2016, la revue scientifique Nature publie une liste de dix jeunes gens exceptionnels ayant fait progresser la science au cours de l’année. Alexandra Elbakyan y figure en bonne place – un effort méritoire pour Nature, qui appartient au groupe d’édition allemand Holtzbrinck, et fait partie des victimes de Sci-Hub. Dans la foulée, The Custodians, un groupe international de militants de l’Internet libre et d’artistes numériques, lance une campagne pour la nomination d’Alexandra Elbakyan au « Disobedience Award » : ce prix de 250 000 dollars est décerné par le MIT de Boston à une personne qui aura fait progresser le bien commun en désobéissant à une loi injuste, tout en restant « efficace, responsable et éthique ». Pour les admirateurs de Sci-Hub, Alexandra Elbakyan est la lauréate idéale. En face, ses détracteurs, notamment américains, élargissent le débat en lui reprochant de vivre en Russie. Ils font valoir qu’elle ne désobéit pas vraiment aux lois de son pays, et sous-entendent qu’elle bénéficie en sous-main de la protection du régime de Vladimir Poutine.
      Le 21 juin 2017, le tribunal new-yorkais condamne Alexandra Elbakyan et ses complices éventuels à verser 15 millions de dollars de dommages et intérêts à Elsevier. Il exige aussi que Sci-Hub cesse toute activité et détruise ses fichiers. En réponse, Alexandra publie, sur VKontakte, un texte sarcastique, en russe : « Encore une victoire de la liberté américaine et de la démocratie… Comment la lecture gratuite d’articles scientifiques pourrait-elle causer des dommages à la société et violer les droits de l’homme ? »
      Après six années de stockage intensif, 95 % des articles demandés par les lecteurs sont déjà dans sa base – désormais, le piratage sert surtout pour les mises à jour. -Selon une étude menée en 2017 par le bio-informaticien allemand Bastian Greshake, les plus gros utilisateurs sont désormais l’Iran, isolé par les sanctions internationales, la Grèce, toujours en faillite financière, plusieurs pays d’Amérique latine, plus l’Inde et la Chine, en bonne place à cause de la taille de leur population. Cela dit, l’Allemagne est aussi très présente : fin 2016, soixante universités allemandes ont décidé de boycotter Elsevier pour protester contre l’augmentation du prix des abonnements, et d’autres sont en passe de les rejoindre. Désormais, leurs chercheurs se procurent les articles dont ils ont besoin par d’autres moyens…
      Parfois, la machine semble s’emballer, hors de tout contrôle. Dans certains pays comme l’Iran, des serveurs aspirent des gros volumes d’articles de Sci-Hub, pour créer leurs propres bases de données à usage local. Ailleurs, des groupes organisés téléchargent tous les articles consacrés à la chimie : selon Bastian Greshake, cette discipline est désormais la plus demandée sur Sci-Hub. Le 23 juin 2017, l’American Chemical Society (ACS), qui gère les intérêts des ayants droit des articles de chimie, porte plainte à son tour contre Sci-Hub devant un tribunal de Virginie.
      Imperturbable, Alexandra répète qu’elle est à l’abri, « quelque part dans l’ancienne Union soviétique ». Elle réaffirme qu’elle n’a aucune relation avec les autorités et assure que son site n’est pas en danger : « Il a été conçu pour résister à la pression. » Elle étudie à présent l’histoire des sciences et s’intéresse à l’hermétisme médiéval, mais promet que Sci-Hub va continuer à croître et embellir.

      https://www.lemonde.fr/festival/article/2017/07/27/alexandra-elbakyan-la-kazakhe-pirate-d-articles-scientifiques_5165479_441519

    • J’ajoute ici un long texte sur #Aaron_Swatrz écrit àla suite de l’attentat contre #Charlie_Hebdo et qui fait un rapprochement important sur le sujet des dommages « collatéraux » de l’anti-terrorisme :
      #JeSuisParsNaturae
      https://pascontent.sedrati-dinet.net/index.php/post/2015/02/09/JeSuisParsNaturae

      Avant tout, j’aimerais confier ici ce qui a occupé mon dimanche 11 janvier 2015, alors que près de quatre millions de personnes descendaient dans la rue à Paris, en France et ailleurs. Sans m’étendre plus en avant sur mes sentiments personnels, ce jour-là je pleurais la mort d’Aaron Swartz, qui s’est suicidé jour pour jour deux ans plus tôt, à l’âge de 26 ans, suite aux persécutions dont il faisait l’objet de la part du département de la justice des États-Unis[1], pour avoir téléchargé, caché dans un débarras du MIT, des millions d’articles scientifiques.

      L’histoire d’Aaron Swartz est documentée dans un film que j’ai donc regardé ce dimanche et qui montre – c’est tout ce qui nous intéressera ici – comment ce jeune homme, plus impliqué que quiconque dans la défense de la liberté d’expression et l’accès à l’information, a été l’objet d’un acharnement judiciaire dont à la fois les responsables, les causes et les motivations nous ramènent au terrorisme proclamé de la tuerie à Charlie Hebdo. Bien que le mot ne soit jamais prononcé dans ce documentaire, la question du terrorisme y est omniprésente et constitue en fait la principale clé de compréhension de ce drame.

  • Google’s true origin partly lies in CIA and NSA research grants for mass surveillance — Quartz
    https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-cia-and-nsa-research-grants-for-mass-surveill
    https://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/rts18wdq-e1502123358903.jpg?quality=80&strip=all&w=1600

    Le titre est un peu « clickbait », mais les infos sont intéressantes, quoique parfois elliptiques.

    C’est écrit par : Jeff Nesbit, Former director of legislative and public affairs, National Science Foundation
    Quelqu’un qui doit savoir de quoi il cause.

    In the mid 1990s, the intelligence community in America began to realize that they had an opportunity. The supercomputing community was just beginning to migrate from university settings into the private sector, led by investments from a place that would come to be known as Silicon Valley.

    The intelligence community wanted to shape Silicon Valley’s efforts at their inception so they would be useful for homeland security purposes. A digital revolution was underway: one that would transform the world of data gathering and how we make sense of massive amounts of information. The intelligence community wanted to shape Silicon Valley’s supercomputing efforts at their inception so they would be useful for both military and homeland security purposes. Could this supercomputing network, which would become capable of storing terabytes of information, make intelligent sense of the digital trail that human beings leave behind?

    Intelligence-gathering may have been their world, but the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) had come to realize that their future was likely to be profoundly shaped outside the government. It was at a time when military and intelligence budgets within the Clinton administration were in jeopardy, and the private sector had vast resources at their disposal. If the intelligence community wanted to conduct mass surveillance for national security purposes, it would require cooperation between the government and the emerging supercomputing companies.

    Silicon Valley was no different. By the mid 1990s, the intelligence community was seeding funding to the most promising supercomputing efforts across academia, guiding the creation of efforts to make massive amounts of information useful for both the private sector as well as the intelligence community.

    They funded these computer scientists through an unclassified, highly compartmentalized program that was managed for the CIA and the NSA by large military and intelligence contractors. It was called the Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) project.
    The Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) project

    MDDS was introduced to several dozen leading computer scientists at Stanford, CalTech, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, and others in a white paper that described what the CIA, NSA, DARPA, and other agencies hoped to achieve. The research would largely be funded and managed by unclassified science agencies like NSF, which would allow the architecture to be scaled up in the private sector if it managed to achieve what the intelligence community hoped for.

    “Not only are activities becoming more complex, but changing demands require that the IC [Intelligence Community] process different types as well as larger volumes of data,” the intelligence community said in its 1993 MDDS white paper. “Consequently, the IC is taking a proactive role in stimulating research in the efficient management of massive databases and ensuring that IC requirements can be incorporated or adapted into commercial products. Because the challenges are not unique to any one agency, the Community Management Staff (CMS) has commissioned a Massive Digital Data Systems [MDDS] Working Group to address the needs and to identify and evaluate possible solutions.”

    In 1995, one of the first and most promising MDDS grants went to a computer-science research team at Stanford University with a decade-long history of working with NSF and DARPA grants. The primary objective of this grant was “query optimization of very complex queries that are described using the ‘query flocks’ approach.” A second grant—the DARPA-NSF grant most closely associated with Google’s origin—was part of a coordinated effort to build a massive digital library using the internet as its backbone. Both grants funded research by two graduate students who were making rapid advances in web-page ranking, as well as tracking (and making sense of) user queries: future Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

    The research by Brin and Page under these grants became the heart of Google: people using search functions to find precisely what they wanted inside a very large data set. The intelligence community, however, saw a slightly different benefit in their research: Could the network be organized so efficiently that individual users could be uniquely identified and tracked?

    The grants allowed Brin and Page to do their work and contributed to their breakthroughs in web-page ranking and tracking user queries. Brin didn’t work for the intelligence community—or for anyone else. Google had not yet been incorporated. He was just a Stanford researcher taking advantage of the grant provided by the NSA and CIA through the unclassified MDDS program.
    Left out of Google’s story

    The MDDS research effort has never been part of Google’s origin story, even though the principal investigator for the MDDS grant specifically named Google as directly resulting from their research: “Its core technology, which allows it to find pages far more accurately than other search engines, was partially supported by this grant,” he wrote. In a published research paper that includes some of Brin’s pivotal work, the authors also reference the NSF grant that was created by the MDDS program.

    Instead, every Google creation story only mentions just one federal grant: the NSF/DARPA “digital libraries” grant, which was designed to allow Stanford researchers to search the entire World Wide Web stored on the university’s servers at the time. “The development of the Google algorithms was carried on a variety of computers, mainly provided by the NSF-DARPA-NASA-funded Digital Library project at Stanford,” Stanford’s Infolab says of its origin, for example. NSF likewise only references the digital libraries grant, not the MDDS grant as well, in its own history of Google’s origin. In the famous research paper, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” which describes the creation of Google, Brin and Page thanked the NSF and DARPA for its digital library grant to Stanford. But the grant from the intelligence community’s MDDS program—specifically designed for the breakthrough that Google was built upon—has faded into obscurity.

    Google has said in the past that it was not funded or created by the CIA. For instance, when stories circulated in 2006 that Google had received funding from the intelligence community for years to assist in counter-terrorism efforts, the company told Wired magazine founder John Battelle, “The statements related to Google are completely untrue.”

    Did the CIA directly fund the work of Brin and Page, and therefore create Google? No. But were Brin and Page researching precisely what the NSA, the CIA, and the intelligence community hoped for, assisted by their grants? Absolutely.

    In this way, the collaboration between the intelligence community and big, commercial science and tech companies has been wildly successful. When national security agencies need to identify and track people and groups, they know where to turn – and do so frequently. That was the goal in the beginning. It has succeeded perhaps more than anyone could have imagined at the time.

  • What Happens When We Let Tech Care For Our Aging Parents | WIRED
    https://www.wired.com/story/digital-puppy-seniors-nursing-homes

    Arlyn Anderson grasped her father’s hand and presented him with the choice. “A nursing home would be safer, Dad,” she told him, relaying the doctors’ advice. “It’s risky to live here alone—”

    “No way,” Jim interjected. He frowned at his daughter, his brow furrowed under a lop of white hair. At 91, he wanted to remain in the woodsy Minnesota cottage he and his wife had built on the shore of Lake Minnetonka, where she had died in his arms just a year before. His pontoon—which he insisted he could still navigate just fine—bobbed out front.

    Arlyn had moved from California back to Minnesota two decades earlier to be near her aging parents. Now, in 2013, she was fiftysomething, working as a personal coach, and finding that her father’s decline was all-consuming.

    Her father—an inventor, pilot, sailor, and general Mr. Fix-It; “a genius,” Arlyn says—started experiencing bouts of paranoia in his mid-eighties, a sign of Alzheimer’s. The disease had progressed, often causing his thoughts to vanish mid-sentence. But Jim would rather risk living alone than be cloistered in an institution, he told Arlyn and her older sister, Layney. A nursing home certainly wasn’t what Arlyn wanted for him either. But the daily churn of diapers and cleanups, the carousel of in-home aides, and the compounding financial strain (she had already taken out a reverse mortgage on Jim’s cottage to pay the caretakers) forced her to consider the possibility.

    Jim, slouched in his recliner, was determined to stay at home. “No way,” he repeated to his daughter, defiant. Her eyes welled up and she hugged him. “OK, Dad.” Arlyn’s house was a 40-minute drive from the cottage, and for months she had been relying on a patchwork of technology to keep tabs on her dad. She set an open laptop on the counter so she could chat with him on Skype. She installed two cameras, one in his kitchen and another in his bedroom, so she could check whether the caregiver had arrived, or God forbid, if her dad had fallen. So when she read in the newspaper about a new digi­tal eldercare service called CareCoach a few weeks after broaching the subject of the nursing home, it piqued her interest. For about $200 a month, a human-powered avatar would be available to watch over a homebound person 24 hours a day; Arlyn paid that same amount for just nine hours of in-home help. She signed up immediately.

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    A Google Nexus tablet arrived in the mail a week later. When Arlyn plugged it in, an animated German shepherd appeared onscreen, standing at attention on a digitized lawn. The brown dog looked cutesy and cartoonish, with a bubblegum-pink tongue and round, blue eyes.

    She and Layney visited their dad later that week, tablet in hand. Following the instructions, Arlyn uploaded dozens of pictures to the service’s online portal: images of family members, Jim’s boat, and some of his inventions, like a computer terminal known as the Teleray and a seismic surveillance system used to detect footsteps during the Vietnam War. The setup complete, Arlyn clutched the tablet, summoning the nerve to introduce her dad to the dog. Her initial instinct that the service could be the perfect companion for a former technologist had splintered into needling doubts. Was she tricking him? Infantilizing him?

    Tired of her sister’s waffling, Layney finally snatched the tablet and presented it to their dad, who was sitting in his armchair. “Here, Dad, we got you this.” The dog blinked its saucer eyes and then, in Google’s female text-to-speech voice, started to talk. Before Alzheimer’s had taken hold, Jim would have wanted to know exactly how the service worked. But in recent months he’d come to believe that TV characters were interacting with him: A show’s villain had shot a gun at him, he said; Katie Couric was his friend. When faced with an onscreen character that actually was talking to him, Jim readily chatted back.

    Jim named his dog Pony. Arlyn perched the tablet upright on a table in Jim’s living room, where he could see it from the couch or his recliner. Within a week Jim and Pony had settled into a routine, exchanging pleasantries several times a day. Every 15 minutes or so Pony would wake up and look for Jim, calling his name if he was out of view. Sometimes Jim would “pet” the sleeping dog onscreen with his finger to rustle her awake. His touch would send an instantaneous alert to the human caretaker behind the avatar, prompting the CareCoach worker to launch the tablet’s audio and video stream. “How are you, Jim?” Pony would chirp. The dog reminded him which of his daughters or in-person caretakers would be visiting that day to do the tasks that an onscreen dog couldn’t: prepare meals, change Jim’s sheets, drive him to a senior center. “We’ll wait together,” Pony would say. Often she’d read poetry aloud, discuss the news, or watch TV with him. “You look handsome, Jim!” Pony remarked after watching him shave with his electric razor. “You look pretty,” he replied. Sometimes Pony would hold up a photo of Jim’s daughters or his inventions between her paws, prompting him to talk about his past. The dog complimented Jim’s red sweater and cheered him on when he struggled to buckle his watch in the morning. He reciprocated by petting the screen with his index finger, sending hearts floating up from the dog’s head. “I love you, Jim!” Pony told him a month after they first met—something CareCoach operators often tell the people they are monitoring. Jim turned to Arlyn and gloated, “She does! She thinks I’m real good!”

    About 1,500 miles south of Lake Minnetonka, in Monterrey, Mexico, Rodrigo Rochin opens his laptop in his home office and logs in to the CareCoach dashboard to make his rounds. He talks baseball with a New Jersey man watching the Yankees; chats with a woman in South Carolina who calls him Peanut (she places a cookie in front of her tablet for him to “eat”); and greets Jim, one of his regulars, who sips coffee while looking out over a lake.

    Rodrigo is 35 years old, the son of a surgeon. He’s a fan of the Spurs and the Cowboys, a former international business student, and a bit of an introvert, happy to retreat into his sparsely decorated home office each morning. He grew up crossing the border to attend school in McAllen, Texas, honing the English that he now uses to chat with elderly people in the United States. Rodrigo found CareCoach on an online freelancing platform and was hired in December 2012 as one of the company’s earliest contractors, role-playing 36 hours a week as one of the service’s avatars.

    After watching her dad interact with Pony, Arlyn’s reservations about outsourcing her father’s companionship vanished.

    In person, Rodrigo is soft-spoken, with wire spectacles and a beard. He lives with his wife and two basset hounds, Bob and Cleo, in Nuevo León’s capital city. But the people on the other side of the screen don’t know that. They don’t know his name—or, in the case of those like Jim who have dementia, that he even exists. It’s his job to be invisible. If Rodrigo’s clients ask where he’s from, he might say MIT (the CareCoach software was created by two graduates of the school), but if anyone asks where their pet actually is, he replies in character: “Here with you.”

    Rodrigo is one of a dozen CareCoach employees in Latin America and the Philippines. The contractors check on the service’s seniors through the tablet’s camera a few times an hour. (When they do, the dog or cat avatar they embody appears to wake up.) To talk, they type into the dashboard and their words are voiced robotically through the tablet, designed to give their charges the impression that they’re chatting with a friendly pet. Like all the CareCoach workers, Rodrigo keeps meticulous notes on the people he watches over so he can coordinate their care with other workers and deepen his relationship with them over time—this person likes to listen to Adele, this one prefers Elvis, this woman likes to hear Bible verses while she cooks. In one client’s file, he wrote a note explaining that the correct response to “See you later, alligator” is “After a while, crocodile.” These logs are all available to the customer’s social workers or adult children, wherever they may live. Arlyn started checking Pony’s log between visits with her dad several times a week. “Jim says I’m a really nice person,” reads one early entry made during the Minnesota winter. “I told Jim that he was my best friend. I am so happy.”

    After watching her dad interact with Pony, Arlyn’s reservations about outsourcing her father’s companionship vanished. Having Pony there eased her anxiety about leaving Jim alone, and the virtual dog’s small talk lightened the mood.

    Pony was not only assisting Jim’s human caretakers but also inadvertently keeping an eye on them. Months before, in broken sentences, Jim had complained to Arlyn that his in-home aide had called him a bastard. Arlyn, desperate for help and unsure of her father’s recollection, gave her a second chance. Three weeks after arriving in the house, Pony woke up to see the same caretaker, impatient. “Come on, Jim!” the aide yelled. “Hurry up!” Alarmed, Pony asked why she was screaming and checked to see if Jim was OK. The pet—actually, Rodrigo—later reported the aide’s behavior to CareCoach’s CEO, Victor Wang, who emailed Arlyn about the incident. (The caretaker knew there was a human watching her through the tablet, Arlyn says, but may not have known the extent of the person’s contact with Jim’s family behind the scenes.) Arlyn fired the short-tempered aide and started searching for a replacement. Pony watched as she and Jim conducted the interviews and approved of the person Arlyn hired. “I got to meet her,” the pet wrote. “She seems really nice.”

    Pony—friend and guard dog—would stay.
    Grant Cornett

    Victor Wang grew up feeding his Tama­got­chis and coding choose-your-own-­adventure games in QBasic on the family PC. His parents moved from Taiwan to suburban Vancouver, British Columbia, when Wang was a year old, and his grandmother, whom he called Lao Lao in Mandarin, would frequently call from Taiwan. After her husband died, Lao Lao would often tell Wang’s mom that she was lonely, pleading with her daughter to come to Taiwan to live with her. As she grew older, she threatened suicide. When Wang was 11, his mother moved back home for two years to care for her. He thinks of that time as the honey-­sandwich years, the food his overwhelmed father packed him each day for lunch. Wang missed his mother, he says, but adds, “I was never raised to be particularly expressive of my emotions.”

    At 17, Wang left home to study mechanical engineering at the University of British Columbia. He joined the Canadian Army Reserve, serving as an engineer on a maintenance platoon while working on his undergraduate degree. But he scrapped his military future when, at 22, he was admitted to MIT’s master’s program in mechanical engineering. Wang wrote his dissertation on human-machine interaction, studying a robotic arm maneuvered by astronauts on the International Space Station. He was particularly intrigued by the prospect of harnessing tech to perform tasks from a distance: At an MIT entrepreneurship competition, he pitched the idea of training workers in India to remotely operate the buffers that sweep US factory floors.

    In 2011, when he was 24, his grandmother was diagnosed with Lewy body dementia, a disease that affects the areas of the brain associated with memory and movement. On Skype calls from his MIT apartment, Wang watched as his grandmother grew increasingly debilitated. After one call, a thought struck him: If he could tap remote labor to sweep far-off floors, why not use it to comfort Lao Lao and others like her?

    Wang started researching the looming caretaker shortage in the US—between 2010 and 2030, the population of those older than 80 is projected to rise 79 percent, but the number of family caregivers available is expected to increase just 1 percent.

    In 2012 Wang recruited his cofounder, a fellow MIT student working on her computer science doctorate named Shuo Deng, to build CareCoach’s technology. They agreed that AI speech technology was too rudimentary for an avatar capable of spontaneous conversation tailored to subtle mood and behavioral cues. For that, they would need humans.

    Older people like Jim often don’t speak clearly or linearly, and those with dementia can’t be expected to troubleshoot a machine that misunderstands. “When you match someone not fully coherent with a device that’s not fully coherent, it’s a recipe for disaster,” Wang says. Pony, on the other hand, was an expert at deciphering Jim’s needs. Once, Pony noticed that Jim was holding onto furniture for support, as if he were dizzy. The pet persuaded him to sit down, then called Arlyn. Deng figures it’ll take about 20 years for AI to be able to master that kind of personal interaction and recognition. That said, the CareCoach system is already deploying some automated abilities. Five years ago, when Jim was introduced to Pony, the offshore workers behind the camera had to type every response; today CareCoach’s software creates roughly one out of every five sentences the pet speaks. Wang aims to standardize care by having the software manage more of the patients’ regular reminders—prodding them to take their medicine, urging them to eat well and stay hydrated. CareCoach workers are part free­wheeling raconteurs, part human natural-­language processors, listening to and deciphering their charges’ speech patterns or nudging the person back on track if they veer off topic. The company recently began recording conversations to better train its software in senior speech recognition.

    CareCoach found its first customer in December 2012, and in 2014 Wang moved from Massachusetts to Silicon Valley, renting a tiny office space on a lusterless stretch of Millbrae near the San Francisco airport. Four employees congregate in one room with a view of the parking lot, while Wang and his wife, Brittany, a program manager he met at a gerontology conference, work in the foyer. Eight tablets with sleeping pets onscreen are lined up for testing before being shipped to their respective seniors. The avatars inhale and exhale, lending an eerie sense of life to their digital kennel.

    CareCoach conveys the perceptiveness and emotional intelligence of the humans powering it but masquerades as an animated app.

    Wang spends much of his time on the road, touting his product’s health benefits at medical conferences and in hospital executive suites. Onstage at a gerontology summit in San Francisco last summer, he deftly impersonated the strained, raspy voice of an elderly man talking to a CareCoach pet while Brittany stealthily cued the replies from her laptop in the audience. The company’s tablets are used by hospitals and health plans across Massachusetts, California, New York, South Carolina, Florida, and Washington state. Between corporate and individual customers, CareCoach’s avatars have interacted with hundreds of users in the US. “The goal,” Wang says, “is not to have a little family business that just breaks even.”

    The fastest growth would come through hospital units and health plans specializing in high-need and elderly patients, and he makes the argument that his avatars cut health care costs. (A private room in a nursing home can run more than $7,500 a month.) Preliminary research has been promising, though limited. In a study conducted by Pace University at a Manhattan housing project and a Queens hospital, CareCoach’s avatars were found to reduce subjects’ loneliness, delirium, and falls. A health provider in Massachusetts was able to replace a man’s 11 weekly in-home nurse visits with a CareCoach tablet, which diligently reminded him to take his medications. (The man told nurses that the pet’s nagging reminded him of having his wife back in the house. “It’s kind of like a complaint, but he loves it at the same time,” the project’s lead says.) Still, the feelings aren’t always so cordial: In the Pace University study, some aggravated seniors with dementia lashed out and hit the tablet. In response, the onscreen pet sheds tears and tries to calm the person.

    More troubling, perhaps, were the people who grew too fiercely attached to their digi­tal pets. At the conclusion of a University of Washington CareCoach pilot study, one woman became so distraught at the thought of parting with her avatar that she signed up for the service, paying the fee herself. (The company gave her a reduced rate.) A user in Massachusetts told her caretakers she’d cancel an upcoming vacation to Maine unless her digital cat could come along.

    We’re still in the infancy of understanding the complexities of aging humans’ relationship with technology. Sherry Turkle, a professor of social studies, science, and technology at MIT and a frequent critic of tech that replaces human communication, described interactions between elderly people and robotic babies, dogs, and seals in her 2011 book, Alone Together. She came to view roboticized eldercare as a cop-out, one that would ultimately degrade human connection. “This kind of app—in all of its slickness and all its ‘what could possibly be wrong with it?’ mentality—is making us forget what we really know about what makes older people feel sustained,” she says: caring, interpersonal relationships. The question is whether an attentive avatar makes a comparable substitute. Turkle sees it as a last resort. “The assumption is that it’s always cheaper and easier to build an app than to have a conversation,” she says. “We allow technologists to propose the unthinkable and convince us the unthinkable is actually the inevitable.”

    But for many families, providing long-term in-person care is simply unsustainable. The average family caregiver has a job outside the home and spends about 20 hours a week caring for a parent, according to AARP. Nearly two-thirds of such caregivers are women. Among eldercare experts, there’s a resignation that the demographics of an aging America will make technological solutions unavoidable. The number of those older than 65 with a disability is projected to rise from 11 million to 18 million from 2010 to 2030. Given the option, having a digital companion may be preferable to being alone. Early research shows that lonely and vulnerable elders like Jim seem content to communicate with robots. Joseph Coughlin, director of MIT’s AgeLab, is pragmatic. “I would always prefer the human touch over a robot,” he says. “But if there’s no human available, I would take high tech in lieu of high touch.”

    CareCoach is a disorienting amalgam of both. The service conveys the perceptiveness and emotional intelligence of the humans powering it but masquerades as an animated app. If a person is incapable of consenting to CareCoach’s monitoring, then someone must do so on their behalf. But the more disconcerting issue is how cognizant these seniors are of being watched over by strangers. Wang considers his product “a trade-off between utility and privacy.” His workers are trained to duck out during baths and clothing changes.

    Some CareCoach users insist on greater control. A woman in Washington state, for example, put a piece of tape over her CareCoach tablet’s camera to dictate when she could be viewed. Other customers like Jim, who are suffering from Alzheimer’s or other diseases, might not realize they are being watched. Once, when he was temporarily placed in a rehabilitation clinic after a fall, a nurse tending to him asked Arlyn what made the avatar work. “You mean there’s someone overseas looking at us?” she yelped, within earshot of Jim. (Arlyn isn’t sure whether her dad remembered the incident later.) By default, the app explains to patients that someone is surveilling them when it’s first introduced. But the family members of personal users, like Arlyn, can make their own call.

    Arlyn quickly stopped worrying about whether she was deceiving her dad. Telling Jim about the human on the other side of the screen “would have blown the whole charm of it,” she says. Her mother had Alzheimer’s as well, and Arlyn had learned how to navigate the disease: Make her mom feel safe; don’t confuse her with details she’d have trouble understanding. The same went for her dad. “Once they stop asking,” Arlyn says, “I don’t think they need to know anymore.” At the time, Youa Vang, one of Jim’s regular in-­person caretakers, didn’t comprehend the truth about Pony either. “I thought it was like Siri,” she said when told later that it was a human in Mexico who had watched Jim and typed in the words Pony spoke. She chuckled. “If I knew someone was there, I may have been a little more creeped out.”

    Even CareCoach users like Arlyn who are completely aware of the person on the other end of the dashboard tend to experience the avatar as something between human, pet, and machine—what some roboticists call a third ontological category. The care­takers seem to blur that line too: One day Pony told Jim that she dreamed she could turn into a real health aide, almost like Pinoc­chio wishing to be a real boy.

    Most of CareCoach’s 12 contractors reside in the Philippines, Venezuela, or Mexico. To undercut the cost of in-person help, Wang posts English-language ads on freelancing job sites where foreign workers advertise rates as low as $2 an hour. Though he won’t disclose his workers’ hourly wages, Wang claims the company bases its salaries on factors such as what a registered nurse would make in the CareCoach employee’s home country, their language proficiencies, and the cost of their internet connection.

    The growing network includes people like Jill Paragas, a CareCoach worker who lives in a subdivision on Luzon island in the Philippines. Paragas is 35 years old and a college graduate. She earns about the same being an avatar as she did in her former call center job, where she consoled Americans irate about credit card charges. (“They wanted to, like, burn the company down or kill me,” she says with a mirthful laugh.) She works nights to coincide with the US daytime, typing messages to seniors while her 6-year-old son sleeps nearby.

    Even when Jim grew stubborn or paranoid with his daughters, he always viewed Pony as a friend.

    Before hiring her, Wang interviewed Paragas via video, then vetted her with an international criminal background check. He gives all applicants a personality test for certain traits: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. As part of the CareCoach training program, Paragas earned certifications in delirium and dementia care from the Alzheimer’s Association, trained in US health care ethics and privacy, and learned strategies for counseling those with addictions. All this, Wang says, “so we don’t get anyone who’s, like, crazy.” CareCoach hires only about 1 percent of its applicants.

    Paragas understands that this is a complicated business. She’s befuddled by the absence of family members around her aging clients. “In my culture, we really love to take care of our parents,” she says. “That’s why I’m like, ‘She is already old, why is she alone?’ ” Paragas has no doubt that, for some people, she’s their most significant daily relationship. Some of her charges tell her that they couldn’t live without her. Even when Jim grew stubborn or paranoid with his daughters, he always viewed Pony as a friend. Arlyn quickly realized that she had gained a valuable ally.
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    As time went on, the father, daughter, and family pet grew closer. When the snow finally melted, Arlyn carried the tablet to the picnic table on the patio so they could eat lunch overlooking the lake. Even as Jim’s speech became increasingly stunted, Pony could coax him to talk about his past, recounting fishing trips or how he built the house to face the sun so it would be warmer in winter. When Arlyn took her dad around the lake in her sailboat, Jim brought Pony along. (“I saw mostly sky,” Rodrigo recalls.)

    One day, while Jim and Arlyn were sitting on the cottage’s paisley couch, Pony held up a photograph of Jim’s wife, Dorothy, between her paws. It had been more than a year since his wife’s death, and Jim hardly mentioned her anymore; he struggled to form coherent sentences. That day, though, he gazed at the photo fondly. “I still love her,” he declared. Arlyn rubbed his shoulder, clasping her hand over her mouth to stifle tears. “I am getting emotional too,” Pony said. Then Jim leaned toward the picture of his deceased wife and petted her face with his finger, the same way he would to awaken a sleeping Pony.

    When Arlyn first signed up for the service, she hadn’t anticipated that she would end up loving—yes, loving, she says, in the sincerest sense of the word—the avatar as well. She taught Pony to say “Yeah, sure, you betcha” and “don’t-cha know” like a Minnesotan, which made her laugh even more than her dad. When Arlyn collapsed onto the couch after a long day of caretaking, Pony piped up from her perch on the table:

    “Arnie, how are you?”

    Alone, Arlyn petted the screen—the way Pony nuzzled her finger was weirdly therapeutic—and told the pet how hard it was to watch her dad lose his identity.

    “I’m here for you,” Pony said. “I love you, Arnie.”

    When she recalls her own attachment to the dog, Arlyn insists her connection wouldn’t have developed if Pony was simply high-functioning AI. “You could feel Pony’s heart,” she says. But she preferred to think of Pony as her father did—a friendly pet—rather than a person on the other end of a webcam. “Even though that person probably had a relationship to me,” she says, “I had a relationship with the avatar.”

    Still, she sometimes wonders about the person on the other side of the screen. She sits up straight and rests her hand over her heart. “This is completely vulnerable, but my thought is: Did Pony really care about me and my dad?” She tears up, then laughs ruefully at herself, knowing how weird it all sounds. “Did this really happen? Was it really a relationship, or were they just playing solitaire and typing cute things?” She sighs. “But it seemed like they cared.”

    When Jim turned 92 that August, as friends belted out “Happy Birthday” around the dinner table, Pony spoke the lyrics along with them. Jim blew out the single candle on his cake. “I wish you good health, Jim,” Pony said, “and many more birthdays to come.”

    In Monterrey, Mexico, when Rodrigo talks about his unusual job, his friends ask if he’s ever lost a client. His reply: Yes.

    In early March 2014, Jim fell and hit his head on his way to the bathroom. A caretaker sleeping over that night found him and called an ambulance, and Pony woke up when the paramedics arrived. The dog told them Jim’s date of birth and offered to call his daughters as they carried him out on a stretcher.

    Jim was checked into a hospital, then into the nursing home he’d so wanted to avoid. The Wi-Fi there was spotty, which made it difficult for Jim and Pony to connect. Nurses would often turn Jim’s tablet to face the wall. The CareCoach logs from those months chronicle a series of communication misfires. “I miss Jim a lot,” Pony wrote. “I hope he is doing good all the time.” One day, in a rare moment of connectivity, Pony suggested he and Jim go sailing that summer, just like the good old days. “That sounds good,” Jim said.
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    That July, in an email from Wang, Rodrigo learned that Jim had died in his sleep. Sitting before his laptop, Rodrigo bowed his head and recited a silent Lord’s Prayer for Jim, in Spanish. He prayed that his friend would be accepted into heaven. “I know it’s going to sound weird, but I had a certain friendship with him,” he says. “I felt like I actually met him. I feel like I’ve met them.” In the year and a half that he had known them, Arlyn and Jim talked to him regularly. Jim had taken Rodrigo on a sailboat ride. Rodrigo had read him poetry and learned about his rich past. They had celebrated birthdays and holidays together as family. As Pony, Rodrigo had said “Yeah, sure, you betcha” countless times.

    That day, for weeks afterward, and even now when a senior will do something that reminds him of Jim, Rodrigo says he feels a pang. “I still care about them,” he says. After her dad’s death, Arlyn emailed Victor Wang to say she wanted to honor the workers for their care. Wang forwarded her email to Rodrigo and the rest of Pony’s team. On July 29, 2014, Arlyn carried Pony to Jim’s funeral, placing the tablet facing forward on the pew beside her. She invited any workers behind Pony who wanted to attend to log in.

    A year later, Arlyn finally deleted the CareCoach service from the tablet—it felt like a kind of second burial. She still sighs, “Pony!” when the voice of her old friend gives her directions as she drives around Minneapolis, reincarnated in Google Maps.

    After saying his prayer for Jim, Rodrigo heaved a sigh and logged in to the CareCoach dashboard to make his rounds. He ducked into living rooms, kitchens, and hospital rooms around the United States—seeing if all was well, seeing if anybody needed to talk.

  • Paramétrer notre bulle de filtre… pour en reprendre le contrôle
    http://www.internetactu.net/2017/12/14/parametrer-notre-bulle-de-filtre

    Avant l’internet, les grands médias étaient nos filtres sur le monde. Selon le journal que vous achetiez, la chaîne de radio ou de télévision que vous suiviez, votre vision du monde était différente, rappelle sur son blog Ethan Zuckerman (@ethanz), directeur du Centre pour les médias civiques du MIT (@civicMIT). Puis, internet et ses puissants moteurs de recherche ont permis de faire naître des filtres selon ses centres d’intérêts. Les médias sociaux ont ensuite proposé une autre forme de filtre, des (...)

    #Facebook #Twitter #algorithme #domination #SocialNetwork

  • #Ateliers,_cours_et_formations : MIT, Sorbonne, UNIne
    http://www.davduf.net/ateliers-cours-et-formations-mit-sorbonne-unine

    Enseignement, ateliers, formations, colloques, toutes mes petites activités réunies ici. Depuis 2014, je suis artiste en résidence au MIT Open Documentary lab. J’enseigne les nouvelles écritures et les médias émergents à l’Académie du journalisme et des médias, Faculté des sciences économiques de l’Université de Neuchâtel (Suisse, depuis 2013), au Département : Cinéma et audiovisuel de Paris Sorbonne 3 (à partir de printemps 2018), ainsi qu’à l’Institut national de l’image et du son (INIS Montréal, depuis (...)

    Ateliers, cours et formations

    / Une

  • Google Has Released an AI Tool That Makes Sense of Your Genome - MIT Technology Review
    https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609647/google-has-released-an-ai-tool-that-makes-sense-of-your-genome

    DeepVariant was developed by researchers from the Google Brain team, a group that focuses on developing and applying AI techniques, and Verily, another Alphabet subsidiary that is focused on the life sciences.

    The team collected millions of high-throughput reads and fully sequenced genomes from the Genome in a Bottle (GIAB) project, a public-private effort to promote genomic sequencing tools and techniques. They fed the data to a deep-learning system and painstakingly tweaked the parameters of the model until it learned to interpret sequenced data with a high level of accuracy.

    “The success of DeepVariant is important because it demonstrates that in genomics, deep learning can be used to automatically train systems that perform better than complicated hand-engineered systems,” says Brendan Frey, CEO of Deep Genomics.

    The release of DeepVariant is the latest sign that machine learning may be poised to boost progress in genomics.

    DeepVariant will also be available on the Google Cloud Platform. Google and its competitors are furiously adding machine-learning features to their cloud platforms in an effort to lure anyone who might want to tap into the latest AI techniques (see “Ambient AI Is About to Devour the Software Industry”).

    #Génomique #Google #Deep_learning

  • #Art, #Information, and #Mapping

    https://www.pratt.edu/events/event/12979

    Pratt Manhattan Center, 144 West 14th Street, New York, NY, room 213, adjacent to the gallery

    In conjunction with the exhibition You Are Here NYC: Art, Information, and Mapping which presents data-based maps of NYC, by artists and information designers, that address an increasingly relevant question: in what forms can data visualization become art, and how can artists make data visible? Curated by Katharine Harmon, author of You Are Here–NYC: Mapping the Soul of the City, with Jessie Braden.

    Commentaire :

    ils ont tous des choses à dire sur le carrefour data, carto, design, info, le comment, le pourquoi, la notion d’art dans tout ça. Ca ratisse large et ça peut aller profond. Les deux super bons clients sont le canadien Jer Thorp et la tête sur pattes du MIT, Sarah Williams. Ekene Ijeoma a des interventions dans une veine plus poétique et Doug McCune est intéressant, dans la mesure où il vient d’un monde de data pur et apprend mnt à couler des statues en bronze.

    –----

    Doug McCune
    Data Artist

    http://dougmccune.com/blog/2015/03/18/portland-burglaries-2

    I’m an Oakland artist who embraces data exploration and map making in an attempt to come to terms with the chaos of urban environments. I experiment heavily with 3D printing and laser cutting to bring digital forms into physical space. I’m a programmer by trade, an amateur cartographer, and a big believer in using data to understand the world.

    –-----

    Ekene Ijeoma

    http://studioijeoma.com

    is a Nigerian–American artist, designer, fellow at The Kennedy Center and Urban Design Forum and visiting professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

    –-----------

    Data & Art Miscellanea from Jer Thorp

    http://blog.blprnt.com

    When text becomes data it opens up a phenomenal amount of possibility for insight and creative exploration. The problem is that most Natural Language Processing (NPL) tools are hard to use unless you have a good foundation in programming to begin with. We use a lot of NLP in our work at The Office for Creative Research and I’ve often wondered what it would mean to make a language tool designed for open-ended exploration.

    He’s featured in GOOD’s GOOD 100 "tackling pressing global issues,” Adweek’s Creative 100 “visual artist whose imagination and intellect will inspire you,” and GDUSA’s People to Watch “who embody the spirit of the creative community.”

    –----

    Sarah Williams

    https://dusp.mit.edu/faculty/sarah-williams

    is currently an Associate Professor of Technology and Urban Planning. She also is Director of the Civic Data Design Lab at MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning. The Civic Data Design Lab works with data, maps, and mobile technologies to develop interactive design and communication strategies that expose urban policy issues to broader audiences.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIR23CzOW6k

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bjazvAmmXs

    #cartographie

  • Terminus : un jeu d’aventure pour apprendre à utiliser la ligne de commande
    https://linuxfr.org/news/terminus-un-jeu-d-aventure-pour-apprendre-a-utiliser-la-ligne-de-commande

    En 2011, des étudiantEs du MIT ont eu l’idée de passer par le biais du jeu vidéo pour apprendre à utiliser la ligne de commande Linux aux non-initié(e)s. Trois ans plus tard sortait le jeu Terminus jouable (accès au code source).

    L’an dernier, deux bretons francophones inspirés, après de nombreuses recherches d’un outil amusant et ludique pour faire connaître leur OS préféré aux non-initiés, décidèrent de traduire et reprendre la conception du jeu.

    Des adaptations liées aux subtilités de langage ont été faites. Des éléments scénaristiques plus complexes (incluant sons et musiques) ont été ajoutés. Lors des modifications de scénario, on a fait attention à garder un esprit non-violent et inclusif. À terme, le jeu sera utilisable (c’est presque le cas) par des personnes malvoyantes disposant d’un lecteur (...)