Instant Meshes algorithm — an interview with Dr Wenzel Jakob
▻https://www.foundry.com/%20insights/vr-ar-mr/mitsuba-renderer-instant-meshes
« An interview with assistant professor Dr Wenzel, leading the Realistic Graphics Lab at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland; his research revolves around rendering, appearance modeling, and geometry processing. […] »
Last Suspect Freed in Kim Jong-un’s Brother’s Murder Case | News | teleSUR English
▻https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Last-Suspect-Freed-in-Kim-Jong-uns-Brothers-Murder-Case-20190504-000
There are no other suspects held in custody now that Huong has been released, and it is expected that the case will not reach a conviction.
Doan Thi Huong, the Vietnamese woman accused of assassinating North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un’s brother, Kim Jong Nam, has been released from a Malaysian prison after being held for over two years.
Huong was accused of murdering Kim Jong Nam using the highly toxic VH nerve agent. After being released, Huong was taken into immigration custody until her scheduled flight to Hanoi. The formerly jailed woman stated that she wishes to pursue a career in acting and singing once she returns home.
There are no other suspects held in custody now that Huong has been released, and it is expected that the case will not reach a conviction, considering Malaysia and Vietnam are attempting to normalize tense bilateral ties.
Critics believe that the release of Huong will prevent Malaysia from raising further questions.
On April 1, Vietnam successfully convinced Malaysian prosecutors to drop the murder charge against Huong. Vietnam increase lobbying efforts after the Indonesian government successfully negotiated with Vietnam to release the other suspect, Siti Aisyah, involved in the case.
Aisyah was released and returned to Indonesia on March 11.
Both governments used either good or improving intergovernmental relations to convince Malaysia to release the accused women, who maintain that they were tricked by North Korean agents into thinking their act was a harmless prank for a hidden camera TV show.
The remaining suspects, four Korean nationals who boarded flights out of Kuala Lumpur International Airport, were also allowed to leave Malaysia in order to maintain relations with North Korea.
“The best the two suspects could have pleaded guilty for is involuntary manslaughter. Instead, they both walk off free,” Sung-Yoon Lee, the assistant professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, stated and added that someone should have been held culpable for the death of Kim Jong Nam.
Warnings of a Dark Side to A.I. in Health Care - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/science/health-medicine-artificial-intelligence.html
Similar forms of artificial intelligence are likely to move beyond hospitals into the computer systems used by health care regulators, billing companies and insurance providers. Just as A.I. will help doctors check your eyes, lungs and other organs, it will help insurance providers determine reimbursement payments and policy fees.
Ideally, such systems would improve the efficiency of the health care system. But they may carry unintended consequences, a group of researchers at Harvard and M.I.T. warns.
In a paper published on Thursday in the journal Science, the researchers raise the prospect of “adversarial attacks” — manipulations that can change the behavior of A.I. systems using tiny pieces of digital data. By changing a few pixels on a lung scan, for instance, someone could fool an A.I. system into seeing an illness that is not really there, or not seeing one that is.
_ Software developers and regulators must consider such scenarios, as they build and evaluate A.I. technologies in the years to come, the authors argue. The concern is less that hackers might cause patients to be misdiagnosed, although that potential exists. More likely is that doctors, hospitals and other organizations could manipulate the A.I. in billing or insurance software in an effort to maximize the money coming their way. _
In turn, changing such diagnoses one way or another could readily benefit the insurers and health care agencies that ultimately profit from them. Once A.I. is deeply rooted in the health care system, the researchers argue, business will gradually adopt behavior that brings in the most money.
The end result could harm patients, Mr. Finlayson said. Changes that doctors make to medical scans or other patient data in an effort to satisfy the A.I. used by insurance companies could end up on a patient’s permanent record and affect decisions down the road.
Already doctors, hospitals and other organizations sometimes manipulate the software systems that control the billions of dollars moving across the industry. Doctors, for instance, have subtly changed billing codes — for instance, describing a simple X-ray as a more complicated scan — in an effort to boost payouts.
Hamsa Bastani, an assistant professor at the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania, who has studied the manipulation of health care systems, believes it is a significant problem. “Some of the behavior is unintentional, but not all of it,” she said.
#Intelligence_Artificielle #Médecine #Manipulation #Economie_santé
The Female Fossilist Who Became a Jurassic Period Expert | JSTOR Daily
▻https://daily.jstor.org/the-female-fossilist-who-became-a-jurassic-period-expert
In the early 1800s, visitors to the English coastal town of Lyme Regis may have been stopped by a curious sight—a young lady climbing the steep cliffs. Dressed in a petticoat and bonnet, she held a hammer in her hand, chiseling things out of the cliffs.
The lady’s name was Mary Anning, and she was one of the first female fossilists—what we would now call a paleontologist. Anning was looking for remains of prehistoric creatures in the cliffs of Lyme Regis, which harbor marine fossil beds from the Jurassic period.
Anning inherited her interest in bone collecting from her father. Also a fossil collector, he unearthed the “curiosities,” which he then polished and sold to the tourists visiting the area. He died young, and Mary, along with her mother and brother, had to continue their fossil business to survive. For Anning, however, fossil hunting was more than a way to make ends meet. Over time, she became an expert in describing and classifying fossils.
This was not an obvious career path for a woman of her era. Throughout history, women have had to overcome numerous barriers in their pursuit of scientific disciplines. But for those interested in natural sciences, the bar was even higher. Unlike in more traditional fields like nursing or midwifery where women operated within the secure confines of homes and estates, pursuing field sciences meant venturing outdoors to all the hazards it harbored—from natural perils to man-made dangers.
“Nursing historically has fit with traditional gender expectations for women and their role as caregivers,” says Jenna Tonn, visiting assistant professor at Boston College. Tonn’s research focuses on the history of women and gender in modern science. “Many women had their medicinal gardens and they were in charge of making medicines to treat their family.” But pursuing science outside of the socially-accepted norms was more difficult. Even women’s fashion at the time wasn’t conducive to outdoor exploration. Corsets made bending difficult. Puffy bloated petticoats were a nuisance. Fluffy bonnets restricted visibility. Ankle boots weren’t made for climbing precipices—and especially not the crumbling Lyme Regis’s reefs, known for falling rocks and sudden mudslides. And yet, Mary excelled at finding fossils and recovering them from the crumbling cliffs.
Anning made several important paleontological discoveries. In 1812, she and her brother Joseph unearthed a nearly-complete skeleton of a prehistoric marine reptile that looked like a cross between a dolphin and a lizard. Henry Hoste Henley, Lord of the Manor of Colway, bought the skeleton and sent it to the then-new London Museum, where it quickly became one of the most popular items, inspiring learned men to debate whether it had been a fish, crocodile, or a “lizard porpoise.” Today the creature is classified as the ichthyosaur, which roamed the seas for 150 million years.
Letter concerning the discovery of plesiosaurus, from Mary Anning
Letter from Mary Anning concerning the discovery of plesiosaurus via Wikimedia Commons
In December 1823, Anning dug up another ancient swimming reptile that had a body “shaped like a turtle’s, but without a shell,” with a tiny head and a thin neck that was as long as the rest of the body. The Geological Society of London called it a “magnificent specimen.” It was later dubbed the plesiosaurus.
Five years later, Anning made another great discovery. She found the first skeleton of a pterosaur or the “winged-lizard.” The Geological Society described it as an “unknown species. . .a monster resembling nothing that ever been seen or heard-of upon earth.” The creature was so unlike anything previously found that it made waves among the fossilists. French naturalist and zoologist Georges Cuvier, who is often called the founding father of paleontology, wrote that “of all the ancient beings which have been discovered, these were undeniably the most extraordinary, and those which, if one could see them alive, would seem the most unlike anything.”
But perhaps Anning’s most interesting discovery was a creature that looked like a cross between a reptile and a bird. After debating for four years, scholars finally deemed it a fish, calling it Squaloraja—a transitional animal between sharks and rays. But when Anning dissected a modern ray, she realized her find was a creature of an entirely different species. “It is quite unique, analogous to nothing,” she wrote—and after quarreling amongst themselves, the best scientific minds of the time finally agreed with her.
More than once, Anning escaped a narrow death from the falling rocks or surging waves. In one accident, an avalanche of collapsing rocks crushed her dog, missing Anning by a miracle. But nothing could stop her digging. By the time she died in 1847, she had found hundreds, if not thousands, of prehistoric bones, advancing human knowledge of natural history.
Tonn says that Anning’s contributions to the field of paleontology may have been even greater than we know. Unlike gentlewomen of a higher societal statue, who had better resources and access to books and educational materials, Anning came from a working-class family. While Mary Somerset, the British botanist who preserved her life-long efforts in a twelve-volume herbarium, lived comfortably as a duchess, Anning had to make a living. She therefore sold most of the fossils she found, and while many of her specimens ultimately landed at museums or private collections, her name was rarely, if ever, included on the specimen lists. For this reason, according to Tonn, “it’s much harder to reconstruct her contribution to the field.”
Ajouter à la compilation #archéologie :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/633249
Ajouter aussi à la liste des #femmes victimes de l’#effet_Matilda #sexisme #discrimination #invisibilisation #science #historicisation
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China Uses DNA to Track Its People, With the Help of American Expertise - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/business/china-xinjiang-uighur-dna-thermo-fisher.html
Collecting genetic material is a key part of China’s campaign, according to human rights groups and Uighur activists. They say a comprehensive DNA database could be used to chase down any Uighurs who resist conforming to the campaign.
Police forces in the United States and elsewhere use genetic material from family members to find suspects and solve crimes. Chinese officials, who are building a broad nationwide database of DNA samples, have cited the crime-fighting benefits of China’s own genetic studies.
To bolster their DNA capabilities, scientists affiliated with China’s police used equipment made by Thermo Fisher, a Massachusetts company. For comparison with Uighur DNA, they also relied on genetic material from people around the world that was provided by Kenneth Kidd, a prominent Yale University geneticist.
On Wednesday, Thermo Fisher said it would no longer sell its equipment in Xinjiang, the part of China where the campaign to track Uighurs is mostly taking place. The company said separately in an earlier statement to The New York Times that it was working with American officials to figure out how its technology was being used.
Dr. Kidd said he had been unaware of how his material and know-how were being used. He said he believed Chinese scientists were acting within scientific norms that require informed consent by DNA donors.
China’s campaign poses a direct challenge to the scientific community and the way it makes cutting-edge knowledge publicly available. The campaign relies in part on public DNA databases and commercial technology, much of it made or managed in the United States. In turn, Chinese scientists have contributed Uighur DNA samples to a global database, potentially violating scientific norms of consent.
Cooperation from the global scientific community “legitimizes this type of genetic surveillance,” said Mark Munsterhjelm, an assistant professor at the University of Windsor in Ontario who has closely tracked the use of American technology in Xinjiang.
New report exposes global reach of powerful governments who equip, finance and train other countries to spy on their populations
Privacy International has today released a report that looks at how powerful governments are financing, training and equipping countries — including authoritarian regimes — with surveillance capabilities. The report warns that rather than increasing security, this is entrenching authoritarianism.
Countries with powerful security agencies are spending literally billions to equip, finance, and train security and surveillance agencies around the world — including authoritarian regimes. This is resulting in entrenched authoritarianism, further facilitation of abuse against people, and diversion of resources from long-term development programmes.
The report, titled ‘Teach ’em to Phish: State Sponsors of Surveillance’ is available to download here.
Examples from the report include:
In 2001, the US spent $5.7 billion in security aid. In 2017 it spent over $20 billion [1]. In 2015, military and non-military security assistance in the US amounted to an estimated 35% of its entire foreign aid expenditure [2]. The report provides examples of how US Departments of State, Defense, and Justice all facilitate foreign countries’ surveillance capabilities, as well as an overview of how large arms companies have embedded themselves into such programmes, including at surveillance training bases in the US. Examples provided include how these agencies have provided communications intercept and other surveillance technology, how they fund wiretapping programmes, and how they train foreign spy agencies in surveillance techniques around the world.
The EU and individual European countries are sponsoring surveillance globally. The EU is already spending billions developing border control and surveillance capabilities in foreign countries to deter migration to Europe. For example, the EU is supporting Sudan’s leader with tens of millions of Euros aimed at capacity building for border management. The EU is now looking to massively increase its expenditure aimed at building border control and surveillance capabilities globally under the forthcoming Multiannual Financial Framework, which will determine its budget for 2021–2027. Other EU projects include developing the surveillance capabilities of security agencies in Tunisia, Burkina Faso, Somalia, Iraq and elsewhere. European countries such as France, Germany, and the UK are sponsoring surveillance worldwide, for example, providing training and equipment to “Cyber Police Officers” in Ukraine, as well as to agencies in Saudi Arabia, and across Africa.
Surveillance capabilities are also being supported by China’s government under the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ and other efforts to expand into international markets. Chinese companies have reportedly supplied surveillance capabilities to Bolivia, Venezuela, and Ecuador [3]. In Ecuador, China Electronics Corporation supplied a network of cameras — including some fitted with facial recognition capabilities — to the country’s 24 provinces, as well as a system to locate and identify mobile phones.
Edin Omanovic, Privacy International’s Surveillance Programme Lead, said
“The global rush to make sure that surveillance is as universal and pervasive as possible is as astonishing as it is disturbing. The breadth of institutions, countries, agencies, and arms companies that are involved shows how there is no real long-term policy or strategic thinking driving any of this. It’s a free-for-all, where capabilities developed by some of the world’s most powerful spy agencies are being thrown at anyone willing to serve their interests, including dictators and killers whose only goal is to cling to power.
“If these ‘benefactor’ countries truly want to assist other countries to be secure and stable, they should build schools, hospitals, and other infrastructure, and promote democracy and human rights. This is what communities need for safety, security, and prosperity. What we don’t need is powerful and wealthy countries giving money to arms companies to build border control and surveillance infrastructure. This only serves the interests of those powerful, wealthy countries. As our report shows, instead of putting resources into long-term development solutions, such programmes further entrench authoritarianism and spur abuses around the world — the very things which cause insecurity in the first place.”
▻https://privacyinternational.org/press-release/2161/press-release-new-report-exposes-global-reach-powerful-governm
#surveillance #surveillance_de_masse #rapport
Pour télécharger le rapport “Teach ’em to Phish: State Sponsors of Surveillance”:
▻https://privacyinternational.org/sites/default/files/2018-07/Teach-em-to-Phish-report.pdf
ping @fil
China Uses DNA to Track Its People, With the Help of American Expertise
The Chinese authorities turned to a Massachusetts company and a prominent Yale researcher as they built an enormous system of surveillance and control.
The authorities called it a free health check. Tahir Imin had his doubts.
They drew blood from the 38-year-old Muslim, scanned his face, recorded his voice and took his fingerprints. They didn’t bother to check his heart or kidneys, and they rebuffed his request to see the results.
“They said, ‘You don’t have the right to ask about this,’” Mr. Imin said. “‘If you want to ask more,’ they said, ‘you can go to the police.’”
Mr. Imin was one of millions of people caught up in a vast Chinese campaign of surveillance and oppression. To give it teeth, the Chinese authorities are collecting DNA — and they got unlikely corporate and academic help from the United States to do it.
China wants to make the country’s Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group, more subservient to the Communist Party. It has detained up to a million people in what China calls “re-education” camps, drawing condemnation from human rights groups and a threat of sanctions from the Trump administration.
Collecting genetic material is a key part of China’s campaign, according to human rights groups and Uighur activists. They say a comprehensive DNA database could be used to chase down any Uighurs who resist conforming to the campaign.
Police forces in the United States and elsewhere use genetic material from family members to find suspects and solve crimes. Chinese officials, who are building a broad nationwide database of DNA samples, have cited the crime-fighting benefits of China’s own genetic studies.
To bolster their DNA capabilities, scientists affiliated with China’s police used equipment made by Thermo Fisher, a Massachusetts company. For comparison with Uighur DNA, they also relied on genetic material from people around the world that was provided by #Kenneth_Kidd, a prominent #Yale_University geneticist.
On Wednesday, #Thermo_Fisher said it would no longer sell its equipment in Xinjiang, the part of China where the campaign to track Uighurs is mostly taking place. The company said separately in an earlier statement to The New York Times that it was working with American officials to figure out how its technology was being used.
Dr. Kidd said he had been unaware of how his material and know-how were being used. He said he believed Chinese scientists were acting within scientific norms that require informed consent by DNA donors.
China’s campaign poses a direct challenge to the scientific community and the way it makes cutting-edge knowledge publicly available. The campaign relies in part on public DNA databases and commercial technology, much of it made or managed in the United States. In turn, Chinese scientists have contributed Uighur DNA samples to a global database, potentially violating scientific norms of consent.
Cooperation from the global scientific community “legitimizes this type of genetic surveillance,” said Mark Munsterhjelm, an assistant professor at the University of Windsor in Ontario who has closely tracked the use of American technology in Xinjiang.
Swabbing Millions
In Xinjiang, in northwestern China, the program was known as “#Physicals_for_All.”
From 2016 to 2017, nearly 36 million people took part in it, according to Xinhua, China’s official news agency. The authorities collected DNA samples, images of irises and other personal data, according to Uighurs and human rights groups. It is unclear whether some residents participated more than once — Xinjiang has a population of about 24.5 million.
In a statement, the Xinjiang government denied that it collects DNA samples as part of the free medical checkups. It said the DNA machines that were bought by the Xinjiang authorities were for “internal use.”
China has for decades maintained an iron grip in Xinjiang. In recent years, it has blamed Uighurs for a series of terrorist attacks in Xinjiang and elsewhere in China, including a 2013 incident in which a driver struck two people in Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
In late 2016, the Communist Party embarked on a campaign to turn the Uighurs and other largely Muslim minority groups into loyal supporters. The government locked up hundreds of thousands of them in what it called job training camps, touted as a way to escape poverty, backwardness and radical Islam. It also began to take DNA samples.
In at least some of the cases, people didn’t give up their genetic material voluntarily. To mobilize Uighurs for the free medical checkups, police and local cadres called or sent them text messages, telling them the checkups were required, according to Uighurs interviewed by The Times.
“There was a pretty strong coercive element to it,” said Darren Byler, an anthropologist at the University of Washington who studies the plight of the Uighurs. “They had no choice.”
Calling Dr. Kidd
Kenneth Kidd first visited China in 1981 and remained curious about the country. So when he received an invitation in 2010 for an expenses-paid trip to visit Beijing, he said yes.
Dr. Kidd is a major figure in the genetics field. The 77-year-old Yale professor has helped to make DNA evidence more acceptable in American courts.
His Chinese hosts had their own background in law enforcement. They were scientists from the Ministry of Public Security — essentially, China’s police.
During that trip, Dr. Kidd met Li Caixia, the chief forensic physician of the ministry’s Institute of Forensic Science. The relationship deepened. In December 2014, Dr. Li arrived at Dr. Kidd’s lab for an 11-month stint. She took some DNA samples back to China.
“I had thought we were sharing samples for collaborative research,” said Dr. Kidd.
Dr. Kidd is not the only prominent foreign geneticist to have worked with the Chinese authorities. Bruce Budowle, a professor at the University of North Texas, says in his online biography that he “has served or is serving” as a member of an academic committee at the ministry’s Institute of Forensic Science.
Jeff Carlton, a university spokesman, said in a statement that Professor Budowle’s role with the ministry was “only symbolic in nature” and that he had “done no work on its behalf.”
“Dr. Budowle and his team abhor the use of DNA technology to persecute ethnic or religious groups,” Mr. Carlton said in the statement. “Their work focuses on criminal investigations and combating human trafficking to serve humanity.”
Dr. Kidd’s data became part of China’s DNA drive.
In 2014, ministry researchers published a paper describing a way for scientists to tell one ethnic group from another. It cited, as an example, the ability to distinguish Uighurs from Indians. The authors said they used 40 DNA samples taken from Uighurs in China and samples from other ethnic groups from Dr. Kidd’s Yale lab.
In patent applications filed in China in 2013 and 2017, ministry researchers described ways to sort people by ethnicity by screening their genetic makeup. They took genetic material from Uighurs and compared it with DNA from other ethnic groups. In the 2017 filing, researchers explained that their system would help in “inferring the geographical origin from the DNA of suspects at crime scenes.”
For outside comparisons, they used DNA samples provided by Dr. Kidd’s lab, the 2017 filing said. They also used samples from the 1000 Genomes Project, a public catalog of genes from around the world.
Paul Flicek, member of the steering committee of the 1000 Genomes Project, said that its data was unrestricted and that “there is no obvious problem” if it was being used as a way to determine where a DNA sample came from.
The data flow also went the other way.
Chinese government researchers contributed the data of 2,143 Uighurs to the Allele Frequency Database, an online search platform run by Dr. Kidd that was partly funded by the United States Department of Justice until last year. The database, known as Alfred, contains DNA data from more than 700 populations around the world.
This sharing of data could violate scientific norms of informed consent because it is not clear whether the Uighurs volunteered their DNA samples to the Chinese authorities, said Arthur Caplan, the founding head of the division of medical ethics at New York University’s School of Medicine. He said that “no one should be in a database without express consent.”
“Honestly, there’s been a kind of naïveté on the part of American scientists presuming that other people will follow the same rules and standards wherever they come from,” Dr. Caplan said.
Dr. Kidd said he was “not particularly happy” that the ministry had cited him in its patents, saying his data shouldn’t be used in ways that could allow people or institutions to potentially profit from it. If the Chinese authorities used data they got from their earlier collaborations with him, he added, there is little he can do to stop them.
He said he was unaware of the filings until he was contacted by The Times.
Dr. Kidd also said he considered his collaboration with the ministry to be no different from his work with police and forensics labs elsewhere. He said governments should have access to data about minorities, not just the dominant ethnic group, in order to have an accurate picture of the whole population.
As for the consent issue, he said the burden of meeting that standard lay with the Chinese researchers, though he said reports about what Uighurs are subjected to in China raised some difficult questions.
“I would assume they had appropriate informed consent on the samples,” he said, “though I must say what I’ve been hearing in the news recently about the treatment of the Uighurs raises concerns.”
Machine Learning
In 2015, Dr. Kidd and Dr. Budowle spoke at a genomics conference in the Chinese city of Xi’an. It was underwritten in part by Thermo Fisher, a company that has come under intense criticism for its equipment sales in China, and Illumina, a San Diego company that makes gene sequencing instruments. Illumina did not respond to requests for comment.
China is ramping up spending on health care and research. The Chinese market for gene-sequencing equipment and other technologies was worth $1 billion in 2017 and could more than double in five years, according to CCID Consulting, a research firm. But the Chinese market is loosely regulated, and it isn’t always clear where the equipment goes or to what uses it is put.
Thermo Fisher sells everything from lab instruments to forensic DNA testing kits to DNA mapping machines, which help scientists decipher a person’s ethnicity and identify diseases to which he or she is particularly vulnerable. China accounted for 10 percent of Thermo Fisher’s $20.9 billion in revenue, according to the company’s 2017 annual report, and it employs nearly 5,000 people there.
“Our greatest success story in emerging markets continues to be China,” it said in the report.
China used Thermo Fisher’s equipment to map the genes of its people, according to five Ministry of Public Security patent filings.
The company has also sold equipment directly to the authorities in Xinjiang, where the campaign to control the Uighurs has been most intense. At least some of the equipment was intended for use by the police, according to procurement documents. The authorities there said in the documents that the machines were important for DNA inspections in criminal cases and had “no substitutes in China.”
In February 2013, six ministry researchers credited Thermo Fisher’s Applied Biosystems brand, as well as other companies, with helping to analyze the DNA samples of Han, Uighur and Tibetan people in China, according to a patent filing. The researchers said understanding how to differentiate between such DNA samples was necessary for fighting terrorism “because these cases were becoming more difficult to crack.”
The researchers said they had obtained 95 Uighur DNA samples, some of which were given to them by the police. Other samples were provided by Uighurs voluntarily, they said.
Thermo Fisher was criticized by Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, and others who asked the Commerce Department to prohibit American companies from selling technology to China that could be used for purposes of surveillance and tracking.
On Wednesday, Thermo Fisher said it would stop selling its equipment in Xinjiang, a decision it said was “consistent with Thermo Fisher’s values, ethics code and policies.”
“As the world leader in serving science, we recognize the importance of considering how our products and services are used — or may be used — by our customers,” it said.
Human rights groups praised Thermo Fisher’s move. Still, they said, equipment and information flows into China should be better monitored, to make sure the authorities elsewhere don’t send them to Xinjiang.
“It’s an important step, and one hopes that they apply the language in their own statement to commercial activity across China, and that other companies are assessing their sales and operations, especially in Xinjiang,” said Sophie Richardson, the China director of Human Rights Watch.
American lawmakers and officials are taking a hard look at the situation in Xinjiang. The Trump administration is considering sanctions against Chinese officials and companies over China’s treatment of the Uighurs.
China’s tracking campaign unnerved people like Tahir Hamut. In May 2017, the police in the city of Urumqi in Xinjiang drew the 49-year-old Uighur’s blood, took his fingerprints, recorded his voice and took a scan of his face. He was called back a month later for what he was told was a free health check at a local clinic.
Mr. Hamut, a filmmaker who is now living in Virginia, said he saw between 20 to 40 Uighurs in line. He said it was absurd to think that such frightened people had consented to submit their DNA.
“No one in this situation, not under this much pressure and facing such personal danger, would agree to give their blood samples for research,” Mr. Hamut said. “It’s just inconceivable.”
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/business/china-xinjiang-uighur-dna-thermo-fisher.html?action=click&module=MoreInSect
#USA #Etats-Unis #ADN #DNA #Ouïghours #université #science #génétique #base_de_données
Legos have a surprisingly high price on the second-hand market - Vox
▻https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/1/29/18202463/lego-resale-market-high-return-rate
Comment je suis devenu un ultra-riche
According to research from Russia’s Higher School of Economics, Lego boasts an extremely high value when sold secondhand — and it actually has a higher rate of return than gold, bonds, and stocks.
The study, published last month by assistant professor Victoria Dobrynskaya, is titled “The Toy of Smart Investors.” Dobrynskaya studied 2,000 Lego sets that were released between 1980 to 2014. She then compared their retail cost to how much they’d yield on the secondhand market in 2015. Dobrynskaya was surprised to find that plenty of Lego sets yielded a return rate of 11 percent, while others could be flipped at a whopping 613 percent.
#lego
Fires in the Void : The Need for Migrant Solidarity
For most, Barcelona’s immigrant detention center is a difficult place to find. Tucked away in the Zona Franca logistics and industrial area, just beyond the Montjuïc Cemetery, it is shrouded in an alien stillness. It may be the quietest place in the city on a Saturday afternoon, but it is not a contemplative quiet. It is a no-one-can-hear-you-scream quiet.
The area is often described as a perfect example of what anthropologist Marc Augé calls a non-place: neither relational nor historical, nor concerned with identity. Yet this opaque institution is situated in the economic motor of the city, next to the port, the airport, the public transportation company, the wholesale market that provides most of the city’s produce and the printing plant for Spain’s most widely read newspaper. The detention center is a void in the heart of a sovereign body.
Alik Manukyan died in this void. On the morning of December 3, 2013, officers found the 32-year-old Armenian dead in his isolation cell, hanged using his own shoelaces. Police claimed that Manukyan was a “violent” and “conflictive” person who caused trouble with his cellmates. This account of his alleged suicide was contradicted, however, by three detainees. They claimed Alik had had a confrontation with some officers, who then entered the cell, assaulted him and forced him into isolation. They heard Alik scream and wail all through the night. Two of these witnesses were deported before the case made it to court. An “undetectable technical error” prevented the judge from viewing any surveillance footage.
The void extends beyond the detention center. In 2013, nearly a decade after moving to Spain, a young Senegalese man named #Alpha_Pam died of tuberculosis. When he went to a hospital for treatment, Pam was denied medical attention because his papers were not in order. His case was a clear example of the apartheid logic underlying a 2012 decree by Mariano Rajoy’s right-wing government, which excluded undocumented people from Spain’s once-universal public health care system. As a result, the country’s hospitals went from being places of universal care to spaces of systematic neglect. The science of healing, warped by nationalist politics.
Not that science had not played a role in perpetuating the void before. In 2007, during the Socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, #Osamuyi_Aikpitanyi died during a deportation flight after being gagged and restrained by police escorts. The medical experts who investigated Aikpitanyi’s death concluded that the Nigerian man had died due to a series of factors they called “a vicious spiral”. There was an increase in catecholamine, a neurotransmitter related to stress, fear, panic and flight instincts. This was compounded by a lack of oxygen due to the flight altitude and, possibly, the gag. Ultimately, these experts could not determine what percentage of the death had been directly caused by the gag, and the police were fined 600 euros for the non-criminal offense of “light negligence”.
The Romans had a term for lives like these, lives that vanish in the void. That term was #homo_sacer, the “sacred man”, who one could kill without being found guilty of murder. An obscure figure from archaic law revived by the philosopher #Giorgio_Agamben, it was used to incorporate human life, stripped of personhood, into the juridical order. Around this figure, a state of exception was produced, in which power could be exercised in its crudest form, opaque and unaccountable. For Agamben, this is the unspoken ground upon which modern sovereignty stands. Perhaps the best example of it is the mass grave that the Mediterranean has become.
Organized Hypocrisy
Its name suggests that the Mediterranean was once the world’s center. Today it is its deadliest divide. According to the International Organization for Migration, over 9,000 people died trying to cross the sea between January 1, 2014 and July 5, 2018. A conservative estimate, perhaps. The UN Refugee Agency estimates that the number of people found dead or missing during this period is closer to 17,000.
Concern for the situation peaks when spectacular images make the horror unavoidable. A crisis mentality takes over, and politicians make sweeping gestures with a solemn sense of urgency. One such gesture was made after nearly 400 people died en route to Lampedusa in October 2013. The Italian government responded by launching Operation #Mare_Nostrum, a search-and-rescue program led by the country’s navy and coast guard. It cost €11 million per month, deploying 34 warships and about 900 sailors per working day. Over 150,000 people were rescued by the operation in one year.
Despite its cost, Mare Nostrum was initially supported by much of the Italian public. It was less popular, however, with other European member states, who accused the mission of encouraging “illegal” migration by making it less deadly. Within a year, Europe’s refusal to share the responsibility had produced a substantial degree of discontent in Italy. In October 2014, Mare Nostrum was scrapped and replaced by #Triton, an operation led by the European border agency #Frontex.
With a third of Mare Nostrum’s budget, Triton was oriented not towards protecting lives but towards surveillance and border control. As a result, the deadliest incidents in the region’s history occurred less than half a year into the operation. Between April 13 and April 19, 2015, over one thousand people drowned in the waters abandoned by European search and rescue efforts. Once again, the images produced a public outcry. Once again, European leaders shed crocodile tears for the dead.
Instead of strengthening search and rescue efforts, the EU increased Frontex’s budget and complemented Triton with #Operation_Sophia, a military effort to disrupt the networks of so-called “smugglers”. #Eugenio_Cusumano, an assistant professor of international relations at the University of Leiden, has written extensively on the consequences of this approach, which he describes as “organized hypocrisy”. In an article for the Cambridge Review of International Affairs (▻https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0010836718780175), Cusumano shows how the shortage of search and rescue assets caused by the termination of Mare Nostrum led non-governmental organizations to become the main source of these activities off the Libyan shore. Between 2014 and 2017, NGOs aided over 100,000 people.
Their efforts have been admirable. Yet the precariousness of their resources and their dependence on private donors mean that NGOs have neither the power nor the capacity to provide aid on the scale required to prevent thousands of deaths at the border. To make matters worse, for the last several months governments have been targeting NGOs and individual activists as smugglers or human traffickers, criminalizing their solidarity. It is hardly surprising, then, that the border has become even deadlier in recent years. According to the UN Refugee Agency, although the number of attempted crossings has fallen over 80 percent from its peak in 2015, the percentage of people who have died or vanished has quadrupled.
It is not my intention, with the litany of deaths described here, to simply name some of the people killed by Europe’s border regime. What I hope to have done instead is show the scale of the void at its heart and give a sense of its ruthlessness and verticality. There is a tendency to refer to this void as a gap, as a space beyond the reach of European institutions, the European gaze or European epistemologies. If this were true, the void could be filled by simply extending Europe’s reach, by producing new concepts, mapping new terrains, building new institutions.
But, in fact, Europe has been treating the void as a site of production all along. As political theorist #Sandro_Mezzadra writes, the border is the method through which the sovereign machine of governmentality was built. Its construction must be sabotaged, subverted and disrupted at every level.
A Crisis of Solidarity
When the ultranationalist Italian interior minister Matteo Salvini refused to allow the MV #Aquarius to dock in June 2018, he was applauded by an alarmingly large number of Italians. Many blamed his racism and that of the Italians for putting over 600 lives at risk, including those of 123 unaccompanied minors, eleven young children and seven pregnant women.
Certainly, the willingness to make a political point by sacrificing hundreds of migrant lives confirms that racism. But another part of what made Salvini’s gesture so horrifying was that, presumably, many of those who had once celebrated increasing search and rescue efforts now supported the opposite. Meanwhile, many of the same European politicians who had refused to share Italy’s responsibilities five years earlier were now expressing moral outrage over Salvini’s lack of solidarity.
Once again, the crisis mode of European border politics was activated. Once again, European politicians and media talked about a “migrant crisis”, about “flows” of people causing unprecedented “pressure” on the southern border. But attempted crossings were at their lowest level in years, a fact that led many migration scholars to claim this was not a “migrant crisis”, but a crisis of solidarity. In this sense, Italy’s shift reflects the nature of the problem. By leaving it up to individual member states, the EU has made responding to the deaths at the border a matter of national conviction. When international solidarity is absent, national self-interest takes over.
Fortunately, Spain’s freshly sworn-in Socialist Party government granted the Aquarius permission to dock in the Port of #Valencia. This happened only after Mayor Ada Colau of Barcelona, a self-declared “City of Refuge”, pressured Spanish President Pedro Sánchez by publicly offering to receive the ship at the Port of Barcelona. Party politics being as they are, Sánchez authorized a port where his party’s relationship with the governing left-wing platform was less conflictive than in Barcelona.
The media celebrated Sánchez’s authorization as an example of moral virtue. Yet it would not have happened if solidarity with refugees had not been considered politically profitable by institutional actors. In Spain’s highly fractured political arena, younger left-wing parties and the Catalan independence movement are constantly pressuring a weakened Socialist Party to prove their progressive credentials. Meanwhile, tireless mobilization by social movements has made welcoming refugees a matter of common sense and basic human decency.
The best known example of this mobilization was the massive protest that took place in February 2017, when 150,000 people took to the streets of Barcelona to demand that Mariano Rajoy’s government take in more refugees and migrants. It is likely because of actions like these that, according to the June 2018 Eurobarometer, over 80 percent of people in Spain believe the country should help those fleeing disaster.
Yet even where the situation might be more favorable to bottom-up pressure, those in power will not only limit the degree to which demands are met, but actively distort those demands. The February 2017 protest is a good example. Though it also called for the abolition of detention centers, racial profiling and Spain’s racist immigration law, the march is best remembered for the single demand of welcoming refugees.
The adoption of this demand by the Socialist Party was predictably cynical. After authorizing the Aquarius, President Sánchez used his momentarily boosted credibility to present, alongside Emmanuel Macron, a “progressive” European alternative to Salvini’s closed border. It involved creating detention centers all over the continent, with the excuse of determining people’s documentation status. Gears turn in the sovereign machine of governmentality. The void expands.
Today the border is a sprawling, parasitic entity linking governments, private companies and supranational institutions. It is not enough for NGOs to rescue refugees, when their efforts can be turned into spot-mopping for the state. It is not enough for social movements to pressure national governments to change their policies, when individual demands can be distorted to mean anything. It is not enough for cities to declare themselves places of refuge, when they can be compelled to enforce racist laws. It is not enough for political parties to take power, when they can be conditioned by private interests, the media and public opinion polls.
To overcome these limitations, we must understand borders as highly vertical transnational constructions. Dismantling those constructions will require organization, confrontation, direct action, sabotage and, above all, that borderless praxis of mutual aid and solidarity known as internationalism. If we truly hope to abolish the border, we must start fires in the void.
▻https://roarmag.org/magazine/migrant-solidarity-fires-in-the-void
#solidarité #frontières #migrations #réfugiés #asile #détention_administrative #rétention #Barcelone #non-lieu #Espagne #mourir_en_détention_administrative #mort #décès #mourir_en_rétention #Alik_Manukyan #renvois #expulsions #vie_nue #Méditerranée #hypocrisie #hypocrisie_organisée #ONG #sauvetage #sabotage #nationalisme #crise #villes-refuge #Valence #internationalisme #ouverture_des_frontières #action_directe
signalé par @isskein
How Borders Are Constructed in West Africa
The E.U. has led an expensive and often contradictory effort to modernize African borders. Author #Philippe_Frowd looks at the gap between policy and outcomes.
Over the past 15 years there has been a surge in E.U. spending on borders outside Europe. The impact of this funding on West Africa has received little attention until recently.
A new book by Philippe M. Frowd, an expert on the politics of borders, migration and security intervention, seeks to correct this. In “Security at the Borders: Transnational Practices and Technologies in West Africa,” Frowd details both the high politics and everyday culture clashes that have shaped European interventions and the way they have been received in countries like Senegal.
An assistant professor in the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa, Frowd coins the term “border work” to denote how everything from training to technology to migration deals work in combination with each other. Here in conversation with Refugees Deeply, he shares some of his main observations.
Refugees Deeply: You talk about tracing the “who” of border work in West Africa. Can you explain your findings?
Philippe Frowd: One of my book’s points is to use the term “border work” to identify how seemingly disparate practices such as negotiating migrant readmission agreements, deploying citizen identification technologies, funding border management projects and routine police cooperation actually combine. To try and make sense of what seems to be a bewildering but also often opaque set of actors operating at the intersection of these fields in West Africa specifically.
One of the most striking developments of the past 10-15 years has been the phenomenal growth of E.U. border security-related spending, much of it in “third countries,” mainly in Africa. This has gone hand in hand with a growing salience of “border security” on the part of many African states as a way of understanding flows at borders.
One of my main findings was the sheer diversity of actors involved in determining policies, experiences and practices of borders in the region. The African Union is the successor to the Organisation of African Unity which accepted Africa’s inherited borders in 1964, and the A.U. continues to provide assistance for demarcation of borders and dispute resolution. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) is one of the guarantors of free movement in the region and generally pursues an ambitious agenda of greater harmonization (e.g., of visa policy).
Yet other actors, such as the E.U. and U.N. specialized agencies (such as the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime), tend to have agendas driven by primarily Western security concerns. Then there are the more immediately visible police and gendarmeries who directly enact border controls. More recently, the G5 Sahel force consistently invokes border security and transnational crime.
Beyond simply tracing who does what, there is tracing the interconnections and tensions between these different institutions. Looking sociologically at the diverse range of actors, we can see how knowledge is a crucial part of the equation: What is the vision of borders, security and migration each actor puts forward? On one hand, institutions like ECOWAS are focused on legal mobility rights while those such as Interpol envision mobility as a regulated, digitally legible practice. The range of actors who contribute to this border work is often a patchwork in which uneasy bedfellows co-exist. E.U. funding, for instance, goes to supporting free movement projects at the ECOWAS level but also to train and equip the security forces of states like Niger to crack down on irregular migration routes. West African borders are the product of the balance of forces between this range of competing visions.
Refugees Deeply: Can you talk us through the way in which border practices move between different regions. Is there a model for the process of emulation?
Frowd: Border security is made up of everyday routines but also of various digital and other technologies, both of which are potentially mobile. I point to a couple of ways that these tools of doing border security can travel: One of these is emulation of existing (often Western) methods and standards, but this also goes alongside what I describe as “pedagogy” and the role of exemplars.
“West African borders are the product of the balance of forces between this range of competing visions.”
All of these interact in some way. As an example, a border management project led by the IOM [International Organization for Migration] might include training sessions during which members of the local police and gendarmerie learn about key principles of border management illustrated by best practices from elsewhere. Emulation is the desired outcome of many of these trainings, which are the backbone of international border security assistance. The EUCAP Sahel missions, for example, put a heavy emphasis on training rather than equipping so there is a strong faith that mentalities matter more than equipment.
Equipment also matters and plays its part in shaping how border security works. Biometrics, which aim to verify identification using some kind of body measurement, require ways of reading the body and storing data about it. Senegal adopted, in one decade, a range of biometric technologies for national I.D. cards and controls at borders. There is a very obvious mobility of technology here (a Malaysian company providing e-Passport infrastructure, a Belgian company providing visa systems) but movement of border practices is also about ideas. The vision of biometrics as effective in the first place is one that I found, from interviews with Senegalese police commanders, was strongly tied to emulating ideals of modern and selective borders found elsewhere.
Refugees Deeply: In your work you identify some of the gaps between policy goals and to actual outcomes and practices. Can you talk us through the greatest discrepancies?
Frowd: Some of the discrepancies I found showed some interesting underlying factors. One of these was the shifting role of global private sector companies in frustrating public policy goals. Not through deliberate sabotage or state capture, but rather through the diverging incentives around doing border work. In the case of Senegal’s biometric systems, the state has been keen to make as coherent an infrastructure as possible, with connections between various elements such as biometric passport issuance, automated airport arrivals for holders of this passport and systems such as the national I.D. card. Given the need for private companies to compete based on technological advantage, rival systems made by rival companies could not interconnect and share data without sharing of valuable corporate information.
Another underlying factor for the discrepancies I point to is that, once again, the sociological dynamics of the people doing the border work come into play. Many border management projects bring together a diverse range of actors who can have competing visions of how security is to be performed and achieved. For instance the ways police and gendarmerie competed over border post data in Mauritania leading to separate databases. It can also happen at a larger scale through the lack of integration across the donor community, which leads to a huge amount of duplication.
Refugees Deeply: You spent a section of your book on Spanish-African police cooperation to show the limits of European knowledge and technology. You mention a clash of cultures, can you elaborate?
Frowd: This is a particularly salient point today for two reasons. First because we are hearing more elite (e.g., Frontex) discourse about the “reopening” of a migration route to Spain. Second because Spain itself is increasingly active in E.U. projects across the Sahel. My book tells some of the story of Spanish security ambitions in Africa. But these ambitions, and those of other Western partners, have hard limits. Some of these limits are quite straightforward: Climate is often a barrier to the functioning of surveillance technologies and some countries (like Mauritania) are harder to recruit international experts for if they cannot or do not bring their families along.
In terms of Spanish-African cooperation, much of the narrative about clashes of cultures comes down to perceptions. One of the elements of the clash is a temporal one, with Spanish security officials often considering local partners as existing at a completely different stage of progress.
More broadly in terms of the limits of knowledge itself, the ambitions of experts to implicitly recreate aspects of European best practice are flawed. Part of this form of border security knowledge involves supporting technological solutions to make African mobility more legible to states. This comes up against the reality that movement in West Africa is already quite free but highly informalized. European experts are well aware of this reality but seek to formalize these flows. A police expert I spoke to recently suggested co-located border posts, and many international funders are supportive of specific I.D. cards for residents of border regions. This is not to impede movement, but rather to rationalize it – in much the same way that common I.D. standards and databases underpin free movement within Europe.
▻https://www.newsdeeply.com/refugees/community/2018/07/18/how-borders-are-constructed-in-west-africa
#externalisation #asile #migrations #réfugiés #frontières #Mauritanie #Sénégal
Security at the Borders. Transnational Practices and Technologies in West Africa
Borders are not just lines in the sand, but increasingly globalised spaces of practice. This is the case in West Africa, where a growing range of local and international officials are brought together by ambitious security projects around common anxieties. These projects include efforts to stop irregular migration by sea through international police cooperation, reinforcing infrastructures at border posts, and the application of new digital identification tools to identify and track increasingly mobile citizens. These interventions are driven by global and local security agendas, by biometric passport rules as much as competition between local security agencies. This book draws on the author’s multi-sited ethnography in Mauritania and Senegal, showing how border security practices and technologies operate to build state security capacity, transform how state agencies work, and produce new forms of authority and expertise.
Who writes history? The fight to commemorate a massacre by the Texas #rangers
In 1918, a state-sanctioned vigilante force killed 15 unarmed Mexicans in #Porvenir. When their descendants applied for a historical marker a century later, they learned that not everyone wants to remember one of Texas’ darkest days.
The name of the town was Porvenir, or “future.” In the early morning hours of January 28, 1918, 15 unarmed Mexicans and Mexican Americans were awakened by a state-sanctioned vigilante force of Texas Rangers, U.S. Army cavalry and local ranchers. The men and boys ranged in age from 16 to 72. They were taken from their homes, led to a bluff over the Rio Grande and shot from 3 feet away by a firing squad. The remaining residents of the isolated farm and ranch community fled across the river to Mexico, where they buried the dead in a mass grave. Days later, the cavalry returned to burn the abandoned village to the ground.
These, historians broadly agree, are the facts of what happened at Porvenir. But 100 years later, the meaning of those facts remains fiercely contested. In 2015, as the centennial of the massacre approached, a group of historians and Porvenir descendants applied for and was granted a Texas Historical Commission (THC) marker. After a three-year review process, the THC approved the final text in July. A rush order was sent to the foundry so that the marker would be ready in time for a Labor Day weekend dedication ceremony planned by descendants. Then, on August 3, Presidio County Historical Commission Chair Mona Blocker Garcia sent an email to the THC that upended everything. Though THC records show that the Presidio commission had been consulted throughout the marker approval process, Garcia claimed to be “shocked” that the text was approved. She further asserted, without basis, that “the militant Hispanics have turned this marker request into a political rally and want reparations from the federal government for a 100-year-old-plus tragic event.”
Four days later, Presidio County Attorney Rod Ponton sent a follow-up letter. Without identifying specific errors in the marker text, he demanded that the dedication ceremony be canceled and the marker’s production halted until new language could be agreed upon. Ponton speculated, falsely, that the event was planned as a “major political rally” for Beto O’Rourke with the participation of La Raza Unida founding member José Ángel Gutiérrez, neither of whom was involved. Nonetheless, THC History Programs Director Charles Sadnick sent an email to agency staff the same day: “After getting some more context about where the marker sponsor may be coming from, we’re halting production on the marker.”
The American Historical Association quickly condemned the THC’s decision, as did the office of state Senator José Rodríguez, a Democrat whose district includes both Presidio County and El Paso, where the ceremony was to be held. Historians across the country also spoke out against the decision. Sarah Zenaida Gould, director of the Museo del Westside in San Antonio and cofounder of Latinos in Heritage Conservation, responded in an email to the agency that encapsulates the views of many of the historians I interviewed: “Halting the marker process to address this statement as though it were a valid concern instead of a dog whistle is insulting to all people of color who have personally or through family history experienced state violence.”
How did a last-gasp effort, characterized by factual errors and inflammatory language, manage to convince the state agency for historic preservation to reverse course on a marker three years in the making and sponsored by a young Latina historian with an Ivy League pedigree and Texas-Mexico border roots? An Observer investigation, involving dozens of interviews and hundreds of emails obtained through an open records request, reveals a county still struggling to move on from a racist and violent past, far-right amateur historians sowing disinformation and a state agency that acted against its own best judgment.
The Porvenir massacre controversy is about more than just the fate of a single marker destined for a lonely part of West Texas. It’s about who gets to tell history, and the continuing relevance of the border’s contested, violent and racist past to events today.
–
Several rooms in Benita Albarado’s home in Uvalde are almost overwhelmed by filing cabinets and stacks of clipboards, the ever-growing archive of her research into what happened at Porvenir. For most of her life, Benita, 74, knew nothing about the massacre. What she did know was that her father, Juan Flores, had terrible nightmares, and that in 1950 he checked himself in to a state mental hospital for symptoms that today would be recognized as PTSD. When she asked her mother what was wrong with him, she always received the same vague response: “You don’t understand what he’s been through.”
In 1998, Benita and her husband, Buddy, began tracing their family trees. Benita was perplexed that she couldn’t find any documentation about her grandfather, Longino Flores. Then she came across the archival papers of Harry Warren, a schoolteacher, lawyer and son-in-law of Tiburcio Jáquez, one of the men who was murdered. Warren had made a list of the victims, and Longino’s name was among them. Warren also described how one of his students from Porvenir had come to his house the next morning to tell him what happened, and then traveled with him to the massacre site to identify the bodies, many of which were so mutilated as to be virtually unrecognizable. Benita immediately saw the possible connection. Her father, 12 at the time, matched Warren’s description of the student.
Benita and Buddy drove from Uvalde to Odessa, where her father lived, with her photocopied papers. “Is that you?” she asked. He said yes. Then, for the first time in 80 years, he began to tell the story of how he was kidnapped with the men, but then sent home because of his age; he was told that the others were only going to be questioned. To Benita and Buddy’s amazement, he remembered the names of 12 of the men who had been murdered. They were the same as those in Harry Warren’s papers. He also remembered the names of the ranchers who had shown up at his door. Some of those, including the ancestors of prominent families still in Presidio County, had never been found in any document.
Talking about the massacre proved healing for Flores. His nightmares stopped. In 2000, at age 96, he decided that he wanted to return to Porvenir. Buddy drove them down an old mine road in a four-wheel-drive truck. Flores pointed out where his old neighbors used to live, even though the buildings were gone. He guided Buddy to the bluff where the men were killed — a different location than the one commonly believed by local ranchers to be the massacre site. His memory proved to be uncanny: At the bluff, the family discovered a pre-1918 military bullet casing, still lying on the Chihuahuan desert ground.
Benita and Buddy began advocating for a historical marker in 2000, soon after their trip to Porvenir. “A lot of people say that this was a lie,” Buddy told me. “But if you’ve got a historical marker, the state has to acknowledge what happened.” Their efforts were met by resistance from powerful ranching families, who held sway over the local historical commission. The Albarados had already given up when they met Monica Muñoz Martinez, a Yale graduate student from Uvalde, who interviewed them for her dissertation. In 2013, Martinez, by then an assistant professor at Brown University, co-founded Refusing to Forget, a group of historians aiming to create broader public awareness of border violence, including Porvenir and other extrajudicial killings of Mexicans by Texas Rangers during the same period. The most horrific of these was La Matanza, in which dozens of Mexicans and Mexican Americans were murdered in the Rio Grande Valley in 1915.
In 2006, the THC created the Undertold Markers program, which seemed tailor-made for Porvenir. According to its website, the program is designed to “address historical gaps, promote diversity of topics, and proactively document significant underrepresented subjects or untold stories.” Unlike the agency’s other marker programs, anyone can apply for an undertold marker, not just county historical commissions. Martinez’s application for a Porvenir massacre marker was accepted in 2015.
Though the approval process for the Porvenir marker took longer than usual, by the summer of 2018 everything appeared to be falling into place. On June 1, Presidio County Historical Commission chair Garcia approved the final text. (Garcia told me that she thought she was approving a different text. Her confusion is difficult to understand, since the text was attached to the digital form she submitted approving it.) Martinez began coordinating with the THC and Arlinda Valencia, a descendant of one of the victims, to organize a dedication ceremony in El Paso.
“They weren’t just simple farmers. I seriously doubt that they were just killed for no reason.”
In mid-June, Valencia invited other descendants to the event and posted it on Facebook. She began planning a program to include a priest’s benediction, a mariachi performance and brief remarks by Martinez, Senator Rodríguez and a representative from the THC. The event’s climax would be the unveiling of the plaque with the names of the 15 victims.
Then the backlash began.
–
“Why do you call it a massacre?” is the first thing Jim White III said over the phone when I told him I was researching the Porvenir massacre. White is the trustee of the Brite Ranch, the site of a cross-border raid by Mexicans on Christmas Day 1917, about a month before the Porvenir massacre. When I explained that the state-sanctioned extrajudicial execution of 15 men and boys met all the criteria I could think of for a massacre, he shot back, “It sounds like you already have your opinion.”
For generations, ranching families like the Brites have dominated the social, economic and political life of Presidio County. In a visit to the Marfa & Presidio County Museum, I was told that there were almost no Hispanic surnames in any of the exhibits, though 84 percent of the county is Hispanic. The Brite family name, however, was everywhere.
White and others in Presidio County subscribe to an alternative history of the Porvenir massacre, centering on the notion that the Porvenir residents were involved in the bloody Christmas Day raid.
“They weren’t just simple farmers,” White told me, referring to the victims. “I seriously doubt that they were just killed for no reason.” Once he’d heard about the historical marker, he said, he’d talked to everyone he knew about it, including former Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson and Mona Blocker Garcia.
I visited Garcia at her Marfa home, an 1886 adobe that’s the same age as the venerable Marfa County Courthouse down the street. Garcia, 82, is Anglo, and married to a former oil executive whose ancestry, she explained, is Spanish and French Basque. A Houston native, she retired in the 1990s to Marfa, where she befriended the Brite family and became involved in local history. She told me that she had shared a draft text of the marker with the Brites, and they had agreed that it was factually inaccurate.
Garcia cited a story a Brite descendant had told her about a young goat herder from Porvenir who purportedly witnessed the Christmas Day raid, told authorities about the perpetrators from his community and then disappeared without a trace into a witness protection program in Oklahoma. When I asked if there was any evidence that the boy actually existed, she acknowledged the story was “folklore.” Still, she said, “the story has lasted 100 years. Why would anybody make something like that up?”
The actual history is quite clear. In the days after the massacre, the Texas Rangers commander, Captain J.M. Fox, initially reported that Porvenir residents had fired on the Rangers. Later, he claimed that residents had participated in the Christmas Day raid. Subsequent investigations by the Mexican consulate, the U.S. Army and state Representative J.T. Canales concluded that the murdered men were unarmed and innocent, targeted solely because of their ethnicity by a vigilante force organized at the Brite Ranch. As a result, in June 1918, five Rangers were dismissed, Fox was forced to resign and Company B of the Texas Rangers was disbanded.
But justice remained elusive. In the coming years, Fox re-enlisted as captain of Company A, while three of the dismissed lawmen found new employment. One re-enlisted as a Ranger, a second became a U.S. customs inspector and the third was hired by the Brite Ranch. No one was ever prosecuted. As time passed, the historical records of the massacre, including Harry Warren’s papers, affidavits from widows and other relatives and witness testimony from the various investigations, were largely forgotten. In their place came texts like Walter Prescott Webb’s The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense, which played an outsize role in the creation of the heroic myth of the Texas Rangers. Relying entirely on interviews with the murderers themselves, Webb accepted at face value Fox’s discredited version of events. For more than 50 years, Webb’s account was considered the definitive one of the massacre — though, unsurprisingly, he didn’t use that word.
–
An Observer review of hundreds of emails shows that the state commission was aware of potential controversy over the marker from the very beginning. In an email from 2015, Executive Director Mark Wolfe gave John Nau, the chair of the THC’s executive committee, a heads-up that while the marker was supported by historical scholarship, “the [Presidio County Historical Commission] opposes the marker.” The emails also demonstrate that the agency viewed the claims of historical inaccuracies in the marker text made by Mona Blocker Garcia and the county commission as minor issues of wording.
On August 6, the day before the decision to halt the marker, Charles Sadnick, the history programs director, wrote Wolfe to say that the “bigger problem” was the ceremony, where he worried there might be disagreements among Presidio County residents, and which he described as “involving some politics which we don’t want a part of.”
What were the politics that the commission was worried about, and where were these concerns coming from? Garcia’s last-minute letter may have been a factor, but it wasn’t the only one. For the entire summer, Glenn Justice, a right-wing amateur historian who lives in a rural gated community an hour outside San Angelo, had been the driving force behind a whisper campaign to discredit Martinez and scuttle the dedication ceremony.
“There are radicals in the ‘brown power’ movement that only want the story told of Rangers and [the] Army and gringos killing innocent Mexicans,” Justice told me when we met in his garage, which doubles as the office for Rimrock Press, a publishing company whose catalog consists entirely of Justice’s own work. He was referring to Refusing to Forget and in particular Martinez, the marker’s sponsor.
Justice has been researching the Porvenir massacre for more than 30 years, starting when he first visited the Big Bend as a graduate student. He claims to be, and probably is, the first person since schoolteacher Harry Warren to call Porvenir a “massacre” in print, in a master’s thesis published by the University of Texas at El Paso in 1991. Unlike White and Garcia, Justice doesn’t question the innocence of the Porvenir victims. But he believes that additional “context” is necessary to understand the reasons for the massacre, which he views as an aberration, rather than a representatively violent part of a long history of racism. “There have never been any problems between the races to speak of [in Presidio County],” he told me.
In 2015, Justice teamed up with former Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson and Sul Ross State University archaeologist David Keller on a privately funded excavation at the massacre site. He is working on a new book about the bullets and bullet casings they found — which he believes implicate the U.S. Army cavalry in the shooting — and also partnered with Patterson to produce a documentary. But they’d run out of money, and the film was taken over by noted Austin filmmaker Andrew Shapter, who pitched the project to PBS and Netflix. In the transition, Justice was demoted to the role of one of 12 consulting historians. Meanwhile, Martinez was given a prominent role on camera.
Justice was disgruntled when he learned that the dedication ceremony would take place in El Paso. He complained to organizer Arlinda Valencia and local historical commission members before contacting Ponton, the county attorney, and Amanda Shields, a descendant of massacre victim Manuel Moralez.
“I didn’t want to take my father to a mob scene,” Shields told me over the phone, by way of explaining her opposition to the dedication ceremony. She believed the rumor that O’Rourke and Gutiérrez would be involved.
In August, Shields called Valencia to demand details about the program for the ceremony. At the time, she expressed particular concern about a potential Q&A event with Martinez that would focus on parallels between border politics and violence in 1918 and today.
“This is not a political issue,” Shields told me. “It’s a historical issue. With everything that was going on, we didn’t want the ugliness of politics involved in it.” By “everything,” she explained, she was referring primarily to the issue of family separation. Benita and Buddy Albarado told me that Shields’ views represent a small minority of descendants.
Martinez said that the idea of ignoring the connections between past and present went against her reasons for fighting to get a marker in the first place. “I’m a historian,” she said. “It’s hard to commemorate such a period of violence, in the midst of another ongoing humanitarian crisis, when this period of violence shaped the institutions of policing that we have today. And that cannot be relegated to the past.”
–
After communicating with Justice and Shields, Ponton phoned THC Commissioner Gilbert “Pete” Peterson, who is a bank investment officer in Alpine. That call set in motion the sequence of events that would ultimately derail the marker. Peterson immediately emailed Wolfe, the state commission’s executive director, to say that the marker was becoming “a major political issue.” Initially, though, Wolfe defended the agency’s handling of the marker. “Frankly,” Wolfe wrote in his reply, “this might just be one where the [Presidio County Historical Commission] isn’t going to be happy, and that’s why these stories have been untold for so long.” Peterson wrote back to say that he had been in touch with members of the THC executive committee, which consists of 15 members appointed by either former Governor Rick Perry or Governor Greg Abbott, and that an email about the controversy had been forwarded to THC chair John Nau. Two days later, Peterson added, “This whole thing is a burning football that will be thrown to the media.”
At a meeting of the Presidio County Historical Commission on August 17, Peterson suggested that the executive board played a major role in the decision to pause production of the marker. “I stopped the marker after talking to Rod [Ponton],” Peterson said. “I’ve spent quite a bit of time talking with the chairman and vice-chairman [of the THC]. What we have said, fairly emphatically, is that there will not be a dedication in El Paso.” Through a spokesperson, Wolfe said that the executive committee is routinely consulted and the decision was ultimately his.
The spokesperson said, “The big reason that the marker was delayed was to be certain about its accuracy. We want these markers to stand for generations and to be as accurate as possible.”
With no marker to unveil, Valencia still organized a small commemoration. Many descendants, including Benita and Buddy Albarado, chose not to attend. Still, the event was described by Jeff Davis, a THC representative in attendance, as “a near perfect event” whose tone was “somber and respectful but hopeful.”
–
Most of THC’s executive committee members are not historians. The chair, John Nau, is CEO of the nation’s largest Anheuser-Busch distributor and a major Republican party donor. His involvement in the Porvenir controversy was not limited to temporarily halting the marker. In August, he also instructed THC staff to ask the Presidio historical commission to submit applications for markers commemorating raids by Mexicans on white ranches during the Mexican Revolution, which Nau described as “a significant but largely forgotten incident in the state’s history.”
Garcia confirmed that she had been approached by THC staff. She added that the THC had suggested two specific topics: the Christmas Day raid and a subsequent raid at the Neville Ranch.
The idea of additional plaques to provide so-called context that could be interpreted as justifying the massacre — or at the very least setting up a false moral equivalence — appears to have mollified critics like White, Garcia and Justice. The work on a revised Porvenir massacre text proceeded quickly, with few points of contention, once it began in mid-September. The marker was sent to the foundry on September 18.
“It’s hard to commemorate such a period of violence, in the midst of another ongoing humanitarian crisis, when this period of violence shaped the institutions of policing that we have today.”
In the end, the Porvenir descendants will get their marker — but it may come at a cost. Martinez called the idea of multiple markers “deeply unsettling” and not appropriate for the Undertold Marker program. “Events like the Brite Ranch raid and the Neville raid have been documented by historians for over a century,” she said. “These are not undertold histories. My concern with having a series of markers is that, again, it casts suspicion on the victims of these historical events. It creates the logic that these raids caused this massacre, that it was retribution for these men and boys participating.”
In early November, the THC unexpectedly announced a dedication ceremony for Friday, November 30. The date was one of just a few on which Martinez, who was still planning on organizing several public history events in conjunction with the unveiling, had told the agency months prior that she had a schedule conflict. In an email to Martinez, Sadnick said that it was the only date Nau could attend this year, and that it was impossible for agency officials to make “secure travel plans” once the legislative session began in January.
A handful of descendants, including Shields and the Albarados, still plan to attend. “This is about families having closure,” Shields told me. “Now, this can finally be put to rest.”
The Albarados are livid that the THC chose a date that, in their view, prioritized the convenience of state and county officials over the attendance of descendants — including their own daughters, who feared they wouldn’t be able to get off work. They also hope to organize a second, unofficial gathering at the marker site next year, with the participation of more descendants and the Refusing to Forget historians. “We want people to know the truth of what really happened [at Porvenir],” Buddy told me, “and to know who it was that got this historical marker put there.”
Others, like Arlinda Valencia, planned to stay home. “Over 100 years ago, our ancestors were massacred, and the reason they were massacred was because of lies that people were stating as facts,” she told me in El Paso. “They called them ‘bandits,’ when all they were doing was working and trying to make a living. And now, it’s happening again.”
#mémoire #histoire #Texas #USA #massacre #assassinat #méxicains #violence #migrations #commémoration #historicisation #frontières #violence_aux_frontières #violent_borders #Mexique
Interview with The Co-Founder and Researcher at Fast.ai: Dr. Rachel Thomas
▻https://hackernoon.com/interview-with-the-co-founder-and-researcher-at-fast-ai-dr-rachel-thomas
Interview with Co-Founder and Researcher at Fast.ai: Dr. Rachel ThomasPart 12 of The series where I interview my heroes.During the past few interviews, I’ve had the chance of interacting with Kaggle Grandmasters, Technical Leaders, Practitioners, and Two Distinguished Researchers and an OpenAI Fellow.Today, I’m super excited to be interviewing one of my Role Models and gurus: Dr Rachel Thomas.Rachel is Co-Founder and researcher at Fast.ai, Assistant Professor at The Data Institute, USF.She holds a Ph.D. in Math from the Duke University.Dr Rachel ThomasAbout the Series:I have very recently started making some progress with my Self-Taught Machine Learning Journey. But to be honest, it wouldn’t be possible at all without the amazing community online and the great people that have helped me.In (...)
#deep-learning #machine-learning #artificial-intelligence #data-science #fastai
EU border ’lie detector’ system criticised as pseudoscience
Technology that analyses facial expressions being trialled in Hungary, Greece and Latvia.
The EU has been accused of promoting pseudoscience after announcing plans for a “#smart_lie-detection_system” at its busiest borders in an attempt to identify illegal migrants.
The “#lie_detector”, to be trialled in Hungary, Greece and Latvia, involves the use of a computer animation of a border guard, personalised to the traveller’s gender, ethnicity and language, asking questions via a webcam.
The “deception detection” system will analyse the micro-expressions of those seeking to enter EU territory to see if they are being truthful about their personal background and intentions. Those arriving at the border will be required to have uploaded pictures of their passport, visa and proof of funds.
According to an article published by the European commission, the “unique approach to ‘deception detection’ analyses the micro-expressions of travellers to figure out if the interviewee is lying”.
The project’s coordinator, George Boultadakis, who works for the technology supplier, European Dynamics, in Luxembourg, said: “We’re employing existing and proven technologies – as well as novel ones – to empower border agents to increase the accuracy and efficiency of border checks. The system will collect data that will move beyond biometrics and on to biomarkers of deceit.”
Travellers who have been flagged as low risk by the #avatar, and its lie detector, will go through a short re-evaluation of their information for entry. Those judged to be of higher risk will undergo a more detailed check.
Border officials will use a handheld device to automatically crosscheck information, comparing the facial images captured during the pre-screening stage to passports and photos taken on previous border crossings.
When documents have been reassessed, and fingerprinting, palm-vein scanning and face matching have been carried out, the potential risk will be recalculated. A border guard will then take over from the automated system.
The project, which has received €4.5m (£3.95m) in EU funding, has been heavily criticised by experts.
Bruno Verschuere, a senior lecturer in forensic psychology at the University of Amsterdam, told the Dutch newspaper De Volskrant he believed the system would deliver unfair outcomes.
A neuroscientist explains: the need for ‘empathetic citizens’ - podcast
“Non-verbal signals, such as micro-expressions, really do not say anything about whether someone is lying or not,” he said. “This is the embodiment of everything that can go wrong with lie detection. There is no scientific foundation for the methods that are going to be used now.
“Once these systems are put into use, they will not go away. The public will only hear the success stories and not the stories about those who have been wrongly stopped.”
Verschuere said there was no evidence for the assumption that liars were stressed and that this translated to into fidgeting or subtle facial movements.
Bennett Kleinberg, an assistant professor in data science at University College London, said: “This can lead to the implementation of a pseudoscientific border control.”
A spokesman for the project said: “The border crossing decision is not based on the single tool (ie lie detection) but on the aggregated risk estimations based on a risk-based approach and technology that has been used widely in custom procedures.
“Therefore, the overall procedure is safe because it is not relying in the risk on one analysis (ie the lie detector) but on the correlated risks from various analysis.”
The technology has been designed by a consortium of the Hungarian national police, Latvian customs, and Manchester Metropolitan and Leibnitz universities. Similar technology is being developed in the US, where lie detection is widely used in law enforcement, despite scepticism over its scientific utility in much of the rest of the world.
Last month, engineers at the University of Arizona said they had developed a system that they hoped to install on the US-Mexico border known as the #Automated_Virtual_Agent_for_Truth_Assessments_in_Real-Time, or Avatar.
▻https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/02/eu-border-lie-detection-system-criticised-as-pseudoscience?CMP=share_bt
#wtf #what_the_fuck #frontières #contrôles_frontaliers #technologie #expressions_faciales #Grèce #Hongrie #Lettonie #mensonge #abus #gardes-frontière #biométrie #biomarqueurs #corps #smart_borders #risques #université #science-fiction
ping @reka @isskein
Smart lie-detection system to tighten EU’s busy borders
An EU-funded project is developing a way to speed up traffic at the EU’s external borders and ramp up security using an automated border-control system that will put travellers to the test using lie-detecting avatars. It is introducing advanced analytics and risk-based management at border controls.
More than 700 million people enter the EU every year – a number that is rapidly rising. The huge volume of travellers and vehicles is piling pressure on external borders, making it increasingly difficult for border staff to uphold strict security protocols – checking the travel documents and biometrics of every passenger – whilst keeping disruption to a minimum.
To help, the EU-funded project IBORDERCTRL is developing an ‘intelligent control system’ facilitating – making faster – border procedures for bona fide and law-abiding travellers. In this sense, the project is aiming to deliver more efficient and secure land border crossings to facilitate the work of border guards in spotting illegal immigrants, and so contribute to the prevention of crime and terrorism.
‘We’re employing existing and proven technologies – as well as novel ones – to empower border agents to increase the accuracy and efficiency of border checks,’ says project coordinator George Boultadakis of European Dynamics in Luxembourg. ‘IBORDERCTRL’s system will collect data that will move beyond biometrics and on to biomarkers of deceit.’
Smart ‘deception detection’
The IBORDERCTRL system has been set up so that travellers will use an online application to upload pictures of their passport, visa and proof of funds, then use a webcam to answer questions from a computer-animated border guard, personalised to the traveller’s gender, ethnicity and language. The unique approach to ‘deception detection’ analyses the micro-expressions of travellers to figure out if the interviewee is lying.
This pre-screening step is the first of two stages. Before arrival at the border, it also informs travellers of their rights and travel procedures, as well as providing advice and alerts to discourage illegal activity.
The second stage takes place at the actual border. Travellers who have been flagged as low risk during the pre-screening stage will go through a short re-evaluation of their information for entry, while higher-risk passengers will undergo a more detailed check.
Border officials will use a hand-held device to automatically cross-check information, comparing the facial images captured during the pre-screening stage to passports and photos taken on previous border crossings. After the traveller’s documents have been reassessed, and fingerprinting, palm vein scanning and face matching have been carried out, the potential risk posed by the traveller will be recalculated. Only then does a border guard take over from the automated system.
At the start of the IBORDERCTRL project, researchers spent a lot of time learning about border crossings from border officials themselves, through interviews, workshops, site surveys, and by watching them at work.
It is hoped that trials about to start in Hungary, Greece and Latvia will prove that the intelligent portable control system helps border guards reliably identify travellers engaging in criminal activity. The trials will start with lab testing to familiarise border guards with the system, followed by scenarios and tests in realistic conditions along the borders.
A mounting challenge
‘The global maritime and border security market is growing fast in light of the alarming terror threats and increasing terror attacks taking place on European Union soil, and the migration crisis,” says Boultadakis.
As a consequence, the partner organisations of IBORDERCTRL are likely to benefit from this growing European security market – a sector predicted to be worth USD 146 billion (EUR 128 bn) in Europe by 2020.
Project details
Project acronym: #iBorderCtrl
Participants: Luxembourg (Coordinator), Greece, Cyprus, United Kingdom, Poland, Spain, Hungary, Germany, Latvia
Project N°: 700626
Total costs: € 4 501 877
EU contribution: € 4 501 877
Duration: September 2016 to August 2019
AVATAR - Automated Virtual Agent for Truth Assessments in Real-Time
There are many circumstances, particularly in a border-crossing scenario, when credibility must be accurately assessed. At the same time, since people deceive for a variety of reasons, benign and nefarious, detecting deception and determining potential risk are extremely difficult. Using artificial intelligence and non-invasive sensor technologies, BORDERS has developed a screening system called the Automated Virtual Agent for Truth Assessments in Real-Time (AVATAR). The AVATAR is designed to flag suspicious or anomalous behavior that warrants further investigation by a trained human agent in the field. This screening technology may be useful at Land Ports of Entry, airports, detention centers, visa processing, asylum requests, and personnel screening.
The AVATAR has the potential to greatly assist DHS by serving as a force multiplier that frees personnel to focus on other mission-critical tasks, and provides more accurate decision support and risk assessment. This can be accomplished by automating interviews and document/biometric collection, and delivering real-time multi-sensor credibility assessments in a screening environment. In previous years, we have focused on conducting the basic research on reliably analyzing human behavior for deceptive cues, better understanding the DHS operational environment, and developing and testing a prototype system.
Principal Investigators:
#Aaron_Elkins
#Doug_Derrick
#Jay_Nunamaker, Jr.
#Judee_Burgoon
Status:
Current
▻http://borders.arizona.edu/cms/projects/avatar-automated-virtual-agent-truth-assessments-real-time
#University_of_Arizona
Un #détecteur_de_mensonges bientôt testé aux frontières de l’Union européenne
L’Union européenne va tester dans un avenir proche un moyen de réguler le passage des migrants sur certaines de ses frontières, en rendant celui-ci plus simple et plus rapide. Ce moyen prendra la forme d’un détecteur de mensonges basé sur l’intelligence artificielle.
Financé depuis 2016 par l’UE, le projet iBorderCtrl fera bientôt l’objet d’un test qui se déroulera durant six mois sur quatre postes-frontière situés en Hongrie, en Grèce et en Lettonie. Il s’avère que chaque année, environ 700 millions de nouvelles personnes arrivent dans l’UE, et les gardes-frontières ont de plus en plus de mal à effectuer les vérifications d’usage.
Ce projet iBorderCtrl destiné à aider les gardes-frontières n’est autre qu’un détecteur de mensonges reposant sur une intelligence artificielle. Il s’agit en somme d’une sorte de garde frontière virtuel qui, après avoir pris connaissance des documents d’un individu (passeport, visa et autres), lui fera passer un interrogatoire. Ce dernier devra donc faire face à une caméra et répondre à des questions.
L’IA en question observera la personne et fera surtout attention aux micro-mouvements du visage, le but étant de détecter un éventuel mensonge. À la fin de l’entretien, l’individu se verra remettre un code QR qui déterminera son appartenance à une des deux files d’attente, c’est-à-dire les personnes acceptées et celles – sur lesquelles il subsiste un doute – qui feront l’objet d’un entretien plus poussé avec cette fois, des gardes-frontières humains.
Le système iBorderCtrl qui sera bientôt testé affiche pour l’instant un taux de réussite de 74 %, mais les porteurs du projet veulent atteindre au moins les 85 %. Enfin, évoquons le fait que ce dispositif pose assez logiquement des questions éthiques, et a déjà de nombreux opposants !
L’IA a été présentée lors du Manchester Science Festival qui s’est déroulé du 18 au 29 octobre 2018, comme le montre la vidéo ci-dessous :
▻https://sciencepost.fr/2018/11/un-detecteur-de-mensonges-bientot-teste-aux-frontieres-de-lunion-europee
v. aussi:
The EU plans to test an AI lie detector at border points - The Verge
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/733557
signalé par @fil avec le tag #fascisme_informatique
Drone Warriors: The Art of Surveillance and Resistance at #Standing_Rock
From April 2016 through February 2017, thousands of Native and non-Native people, together known as #Water_Protectors, made the Plains of #North_Dakota their home, standing in opposition to the proposed Dakota Access #Pipeline (#DAPL). They knew that the pipeline would bring more than 500,000 barrels of oil under Lake #Oahe, the only source of drinking water for the Standing Rock #Sioux Nation and millions of others downstream. Its construction threatened #Lakota cultural and sacred sites, and Standing Rock’s sovereignty as a Native nation.
As the Water Protectors faced militarized police, National Guard roadblocks, and heavy surveillance from local, state, and federal forces, a group of photographic drone operators emerged within their ranks. These #Drone_Warriors used technology to document the militarized force and police brutality the Water Protectors faced. By sending their drones up and over barricades, they illuminated spaces hidden from the public, unmasked the face of force, and showed the world the beauty of the landscape that was threatened by construction and potential contamination.
Their images motivated Water Protectors to join the movement in person, through donations, or by spreading the word on Facebook and with hashtags like #NoDAPL. We can view the use of drones by the Drone Warriors as an indigenization of neocolonial military and corporate #surveillance technology. However, we also see in these images forms of aesthetic protest in which the beauty of the water, land, and the Movement itself are on full display.
Opening May 11, 2018. Curated by Adrienne Keene, Haffenreffer Museum Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies, and Gregory Hitch, American Studies doctoral student.
Your Brain’s Music Circuit Has Been Discovered - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/-your-brains-music-circuit-has-been-discovered
.ursa-feature-image.jpg)
The discovery that certain neurons have “music selectivity” stirs questions about the role of music in human life. Illustration by Len SmallBefore Josh McDermott was a neuroscientist, he was a club DJ in Boston and Minneapolis. He saw first-hand how music could unite people in sound, rhythm, and emotion. “One of the reasons it was so fun to DJ is that, by playing different pieces of music, you can transform the vibe in a roomful of people,” he says. With his club days behind him, McDermott now ventures into the effects of sound and music in his lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is an assistant professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. In 2015, he and a post-doctoral colleague, Sam Norman-Haignere, and Nancy Kanwisher, a professor of cognitive (...)
Eliot Borenstein, Author at NYU Jordan Center
▻http://jordanrussiacenter.org/author/eliot
Eliot Borenstein is a Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies and Collegiate Professer at New York University. Educated at Oberlin College (B.A., 1988) and the University of Wisconsin, Madison (M.A., 1989, Ph.D., 1993), Mr. Borenstein was an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia (1993-95) before taking an appointment at NYU in 1995.
...
Articles by Eliot Borenstein
The Americans: “Take Your Daughter to Work” Day
Previously, on the Walking Dead…
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The Americans: The Marriage Plot against America
Even if our heroes survive the season, their future looks bleak.
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Was Putin targeting Jews?
Semantics, not anti-Semitism, may be behind Putin’s gaffe.
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Boys Just Want to Have Fun: Just How Queer are the “Satisfaction” Videos?
The Satisfaction supporters are definitely fighting for something, but it is not LGBT rights
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Enabling Russian Paranoia: A Response to Thomas Weber
We may not be colluding with Russia, but we are handing over propaganda victories free of charge
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Matt Taibbi’s Not-So-Secret Russian Past
Like the clueless expats they loathed, the editors treated Moscow and its residents as their playground.
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Ksenia Sobchak; or, Who Gets to Lose to Putin in 2018?
Russia could do a lot worse than Ksenia Sobchak. In fact, most countries currently are (not everyone gets to be Canada).
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Is “fake news” fake news?
We are in a panic about the very means that are used to spread panic.
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Blaming Russia
Blaming Russia lets us off the hook.
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Change is coming to All The Russias
I am stepping away from most of my editorial duties for the blog
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Talking with Geoff Cebula, Author of “Adjunct”
I knew from the beginning that I didn’t want her to be a Slavist.
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Cringe-Watching: Oliver Stone’s The Putin Interviews
Watching Stone question Putin and, worse, try to make small-talk, is simply embarrassing.
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The Ballad of Sonya and Louie: An Immigrant Story
I had thought my family was Russian, but then when I went to college, I found out we were just Jews.
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Hulk Smash Stupid Russia Theories
Monocausal explanations have the virtue of catchiness and the vice of absurdity.
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In Defense of Russia’s Holocaust on Ice
Has “Springtime for Hitler” finally met its match?
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American Fascism: Lessons from Russia
Putin is not a fascist, in part because he does not need to be. Trump ran a consistently fascist campaign.
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Russia vs. PornHub: Lie Back and Think of the Motherland
Apparently, people would rather do anything else—watch porn, have gay sex—than engage in heterosexual intercourse.
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PokéMaidan, or, How to Start a Moral Panic in Russia
Pokémon Go troubles the Russian media imagination because it represents the return of the repressed.
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Is Donald Trump carrying Putin’s baby?
The real problem with the constant Trump/Putin comparisons is that they are profoundly unfair… to Putin.
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No Netflix, No Chill: Russia’s Culture Minister Would Rather Purge than Binge
In the West, we’ve long been familiar with the clear and present danger of Netflix.
Definitions, Cake, and Zombies | 3 Lessons Learnt from #hacking at TX McCombs 3-P Hackathon
▻https://hackernoon.com/definitions-cake-and-zombies-3-lessons-from-hacking-at-tx-mccombs-3-p-ha
Last weekend, I had the pleasure of hacking at the McCombs School of #business 3-P Hackathon which was focused on tackling 3 challenges: People, Profit (Sustainability), and Planet. We worked over the course of Friday and Saturday to come up with some creative solutions to these mammoth-sized problems.With every hackathon, there is always something new to learn and I wanted to share 3 lessons that I took away from this experience:1. Define everything2. Problems = Layered cake3. Zombies are welcomeOur keynote speaker on Saturday afternoon was Kristjan Jespersen, Ph.D. who is an Assistant Professor at the Copenhagen Business School. I loved his quote about how every business developed these days should be sustainable, but beyond that, he started his speech by showing a painting “Landscape (...)
How Hidden Social Contexts Influence Your Genetics - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/how-hidden-social-contexts-influence-your-genetics
Educational attainment has some qualitatively unique features that we’re going to have to be sensitive to when we attempt to study the genetics of it.Photograph by Joey Yee / FlickrWhat if a wound of yours, a pierced ear, say, healed at a different rate depending on who was around you? A 2017 study explored this question, albeit with mice. Researchers paired mice together, punching holes in their ears, and tracked the rate of recovery. They found that the genome of a cagemate affected how fast their ears healed.Benjamin Domingue, an assistant professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education who studies sociogenomics, was fascinated by what the researchers called an “indirect” or “social” genetic effect. He wanted to see if similar things were going on in humans. Through the National (...)
Algoliterary Lectures
▻http://constantvzw.org/site/Algoliterary-Lectures,2852.html
In the framework of Algoliterary Encounters, we will be hosting two lectures on Friday 10 November. Generative Models and the Digital Humanities: Towards Synthetic #Literature, by Mike Kestemont Mike Kestemont is assistant professor in the department of literature at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. He is a researcher in computational text analysis, in particular for historic texts. Authorship attribution is one of his main areas of expertise. He designs computational algorithms (...)
#Algolit / #Lecture, #Netnative_literature, Literature, #Algorithm
«►http://www.mike-kestemont.org»
«▻https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:Ladsgroup»
«►https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/ORES»
Édulcorants artificiels : leurs dangers enfin prouvés ?
▻http://www.futura-sciences.com/sante/actualites/nutrition-edulcorants-artificiels-leurs-dangers-enfin-prouves-68032/#xtor=RSS-8
Une nouvelle étude a découvert un lien entre les édulcorants artificiels et plusieurs problèmes de santé, parmi lesquels la prise de poids à long terme, le risque accru d’obésité, le diabète, l’hypertension et les maladies cardiaques.
« Il convient de rester prudent tant que les effets des édulcorants artificiels à long terme sur la santé ne sont pas complètement connus », explique Meghan Azad, auteure principale de l’étude, dont l’équipe au Children’s Hospital Research Institute of Manitoba est également en train d’étudier les effets de la consommation d’édulcorants artificiels pendant la grossesse sur la prise de poids, le métabolisme et la flore intestinale de l’enfant.
Artificial sweeteners linked with weight gain, little health benefit
▻http://www.wsaw.com/content/news/Artificial-sweeteners-linked-with-weight-gain-little-health-benefit-435409873.
Two-thirds of Americans are overweight, and those who diet sometimes turn to alternative sweeteners — including aspartame, sucralose and stevioside — to cut calories.
Now, a new review of many studies suggests that doing so might not be the best idea.
The scientists took a comprehensive look at more than 11,000 studies and found that, for overweight individuals or those with high blood pressure (hypertension) or diabetes, the benefits of consuming zero-calorie, “non-nutritive sweeteners” were modest to nil. For other people, there was an increased risk of weight gain, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, stroke and heart disease. [7 Biggest Diet Myths]
“Overall, the evidence does not support the intended purpose of weight loss and suggests that there might be adverse effects in the long term,” said Meghan Azad, lead author of the review and an assistant professor at the University of Manitoba.
Previous research had suggested that non-nutritive sweeteners were not the healthiest choice, but those studies were smaller in scope than the new review, and tended to focus on one outcome at a time, said Azad, who researches the development of chronic diseases.
Regular Consumption of Artificial Sweeteners Linked to Increased Risk of Obesity, Diabetes, Other Health Issues
A literature review of 37 studies has found that regular consumption of artificial sweeteners is associated with long-term weight gain and an increased risk of obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease.
▻http://www.sci-news.com/medicine/regular-consumption-artificial-sweeteners-linked-risk-obesity-diabetes-050
dossier #edulcorants (nb : je suit hyper intolerante aux edulcorants de synthèse, qui sont parfois cachés dans certains produits d’où le suivi de ce sujet.) #alimentation #bombe_a_retardement
#cancer
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/1008057
L’agence de recherche sur le #cancer de l’#OMS va déclarer l’#édulcorant #aspartame comme cancérogène possible
The podcast for African #hip_hop
▻http://africasacountry.com/2017/04/teaching-african-hip-hop-through-podcasting
Msia Kibona Clark is assistant professor of African Studies at Howard University. Her research focuses on in hip hop in Africa. Clark recently served as editor and contributor to Hip Hop and Social Change in Africa: Ni Wakati and has authored numerous articles on hip hop in Tanzania. At Howard, Clark teaches a course entitled…
What would feminist data visualization look like?, by Catherine D’Ignazio
▻https://medium.com/@kanarinka/what-would-feminist-data-visualization-look-like-aa3f8fc7f96c
▻https://civic.mit.edu/feminist-data-visualization
The God Trick! Is this not the rhetorical premise and the seductive promise of most data visualization? To see from the perspective of no person, no body? Our appetite for such perspectives is fierce, “gluttonous”, as [Donna] Haraway characterizes it.
And yet, there are ways to do more responsible representation. There are ways to “situate” data visualization and locate it in concrete bodies and geographies. Critical cartographers, counter-mapping artists, indigenous mappers and others have experimented for years with these methods and we can learn from them.
Here are some beginning design thoughts about what #feminist_data_visualization could do:
1. Invent new ways to represent uncertainty, outsides, missing data, and flawed methods
While visualizations - particularly popular, public ones - are great at presenting wholly contained worlds, they are not so good at visually representing their limitations.
2. Invent new ways to reference the material economy behind the data.
(...) What are the conditions that make a data visualization possible? Who are the funders? Who collected the data? Whose labor happened behind the scenes and under what conditions? (...)
Data visualizations often cite data sources as fact on a legend but we could do more. What if we visually problematized the provenance of the data? The interests behind the data? The stakeholders in the data?
(...)
3. Make dissent possible
(...) as we know from Wikipedia editing wars and GoogleMap Controversies the world is not actually bracketed so conveniently and “facts” are not always what they appear to be.
–---
Catherine D’Ignazio is an Assistant Professor of Data Visualization and Civic Media at Emerson College who investigates how data visualization, technology and new forms of storytelling can be used for civic engagement.
▻http://www.kanarinka.com
Feminist Data Visualization
by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein
Abstract —In this paper, we begin to outline how feminist theory may be productively applied to information visualization research and practice. Other technology- and design-oriented fields such as Science and Technology Studies, Human-Computer Interaction, Digital Humanities, and Geography/GIS have begun to incorporate feminist principles into their research. Feminism is not (just) about women, but rather draws our attention to questions of epistemology – who is included in dominant ways of producing and communicating knowledge and whose perspectives are marginalized. We describe potential applications of feminist theory to influence the information design process as well as to shape the outputs from that process.
Index Terms —Visualization, inclusion, digital humanities, critical perspectives, feminism.
▻http://www.academia.edu/28173807/Feminist_Data_Visualization
Et voici la traduction en français sur @visionscarto :
Pour une pratique féministe de la visualisation de données
►https://visionscarto.net/visualisation-donnees-feministe
(avec une copie de l’original pour faire bonne mesure)
▻https://visionscarto.net/feminist-data-visualization
Catherine a eu la gentillesse de réviser un peu le texte pour cette occasion, en ajoutant des exemples dans la troisième partie. Et quels exemples ! Je vous laisse découvrir ça…
conférence sur le sujet de Catherine d’Ignazio à l’université de Haifa
vidéo => ▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdRilsNmXX0
Che cos’è il “femminismo dei dati” e perché Bologna è una città apripista
►https://www.editorialedomani.it/politica/italia/che-cose-il-femminismo-dei-dati-e-perche-bologna-e-una-citta-apripi
Food and Agriculture in an Unequal World: Perspectives from Law and Anthropology
Interview with #Shaila_Seshia_Galvin, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Sociology of Development, and Anne Saab, Assistant Professor of International Law.
▻http://graduateinstitute.ch/fr/home/relations-publiques/news-at-the-institute/news-archives.html/_/news/corporate/2016/food-and-agriculture-in-an-unequ
#nourriture #agriculture
DDoSCoin : Researchers create crypto coin with DDoS puzzle for miners
▻http://www.itnews.com.au/news/researchers-create-cryptocoin-with-ddos-puzzle-for-miners-433500
University of Colorado assistant professor Eric Wustrow and University of Michigan phD student Benjamin VanderSloot have created a cryptocurrency that uses a malicious alternative to bitcoin’s double-SHA256 hash-based proof-of-work, the computational effort required to mine new coins.
Called DDoSCoin, the alternative cryptocurrency’s “Proof-of-DDoS” allows miners to prove that they have participated in distributed denial of service attacks against preselected targets in order to create more virtual money.
DDoSCoin operates by miners opening a large number of Transport Layer Security (TLS) connections to target webservers. It would then use the signed responses as proof a connection has occurred.
Miners with DDoSCoin blocks could then trade these for other currencies, including bitcoin and ethereum.
This malicious “proof-of-DDoS” model used by DDoSCoin miners works only with sites that support TLS 1.2, but the researchers said over half of the top million websites as measured by metrics firm Alexa support that version of the protocol.
Bitcoin’s proof-of-work, a mathematical puzzle that miners have to collectively solve before more units of the currency can be created, has been criticised as a waste of resources.
The paper presented at the Usenix 2016 security conference:
▻https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/woot16/woot16-paper-wustrow.pdf
There’s Now A Cryptocurrency Created by Participating in DDoS Attacks
▻http://motherboard.vice.com/read/theres-now-a-cryptocurrency-created-by-participating-in-ddos-attac
Researchers Reveal Altcoin to Reward Participating in DDoS Attacks
▻https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/researchers-reveal-altcoin-to-reward-participating-in-ddos-attacks
The paper noted that victim websites can use several methods to defend against DDoSCoin miners. Websites can simply disable TLS 1.2 entirely, and only support earlier versions of TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1. While older versions of TLS 1.0 clients can still be vulnerable to a certain attack, most modern clients have mitigations for this attack.
Websites could thwart DDoSCoin by participating in the mining themselves. Since the victim website will have local access to its private key, the victim will have an advantage over remote clients. The victim could mine enough DDoSCoins to mint a proof-of-stake block that removes itself from the list, or increase the difficulty of mining a block high enough that a remote miner has a small chance of succeeding.
Finally, websites could take legal actions against mining operations. Publishing a proof-of-DDoS block in the DDoSCoin blockchain could reveal a miner’s intent to attack a service for financial profit. If the victim can log their traffic, they can find the IP address of the party given a published proof-of-DDoS block.
How China can ramp up wind power | EurekAlert! Science News
▻http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-06/miot-hcc062016.php
▻http://us6.campaign-archive2.com/?u=6e13c74c17ec527c4be72d64f&id=0644089904&e=08052803c8
China has an opportunity to massively increase its use of wind power — if it properly integrates wind into its existing power system, according to a newly published MIT study.
The study forecasts that wind power could provide 26 percent of China’s projected electricity demand by 2030, up from 3 percent in 2015. Such a change would be a substantial gain in the global transition to renewable energy, since China produces the most total greenhouse gas emissions of any country in the world.
But the projection comes with a catch. China should not necessarily build more wind power in its windiest areas, the study finds. Instead, it should build more wind turbines in areas where they can be more easily integrated into the operations of its existing electricity grid.
“Wind that is built in distant, resource-rich areas benefits from more favorable physical properties but suffers from existing constraints on the operation of the power system,” states Valerie Karplus, an assistant professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, director of the Tsinghua-MIT China Energy and Climate Project, and a member of the MIT Energy Initiative. Those constraints include greater transmission costs and the cost of “curtailment,” when available wind power is not used.
Are Hamas, Egypt nearing reconciliation?
▻http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/06/abu-zuhri-interview-al-monitor-hamas-egypt-ties.html
However, the Hamas delegation’s March 12 visit to Cairo may have brought back some hope that a new page of bilateral relations between the two parties will be opened. In a May 17 statement by its spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri, Hamas welcomed the recent Egyptian statements about reconciliation with the movement and confirmed its readiness to deal with these efforts calling for ending the Palestinian division and opening a new page with Egypt.
Al-Monitor spoke to Abu Zuhri, a native of Rafah and lecturer in the Department of History and Archaeology at Gaza’s Islamic University since 2000. He is currently an assistant professor in the department and holds a doctorate in Islamic history.
Read more: ▻http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/06/abu-zuhri-interview-al-monitor-hamas-egypt-ties.html#ixzz4AewHpApt
