organization:stanford university

  • Training a single AI model can emit as much carbon as five cars in their lifetimes - MIT Technology Review
    https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613630/training-a-single-ai-model-can-emit-as-much-carbon-as-five-cars-in

    In a new paper, researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, performed a life cycle assessment for training several common large AI models. They found that the process can emit more than 626,000 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent—nearly five times the lifetime emissions of the average American car (and that includes manufacture of the car itself).

    It’s a jarring quantification of something AI researchers have suspected for a long time. “While probably many of us have thought of this in an abstract, vague level, the figures really show the magnitude of the problem,” says Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez, a computer scientist at the University of A Coruña in Spain, who was not involved in the research. “Neither I nor other researchers I’ve discussed them with thought the environmental impact was that substantial.”

    They found that the computational and environmental costs of training grew proportionally to model size and then exploded when additional tuning steps were used to increase the model’s final accuracy. In particular, they found that a tuning process known as neural architecture search, which tries to optimize a model by incrementally tweaking a neural network’s design through exhaustive trial and error, had extraordinarily high associated costs for little performance benefit. Without it, the most costly model, BERT, had a carbon footprint of roughly 1,400 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent, close to a round-trip trans-American flight.

    What’s more, the researchers note that the figures should only be considered as baselines. “Training a single model is the minimum amount of work you can do,” says Emma Strubell, a PhD candidate at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the lead author of the paper. In practice, it’s much more likely that AI researchers would develop a new model from scratch or adapt an existing model to a new data set, either of which can require many more rounds of training and tuning.

    The significance of those figures is colossal—especially when considering the current trends in AI research. “In general, much of the latest research in AI neglects efficiency, as very large neural networks have been found to be useful for a variety of tasks, and companies and institutions that have abundant access to computational resources can leverage this to obtain a competitive advantage,” Gómez-Rodríguez says. “This kind of analysis needed to be done to raise awareness about the resources being spent [...] and will spark a debate.”

    “What probably many of us did not comprehend is the scale of it until we saw these comparisons,” echoed Siva Reddy, a postdoc at Stanford University who was not involved in the research.
    The privatization of AI research

    The results underscore another growing problem in AI, too: the sheer intensity of resources now required to produce paper-worthy results has made it increasingly challenging for people working in academia to continue contributing to research.

    #Intelligence_artificielle #Consommation_énergie #Empreinte_carbone

  • Maximizing influence in a social network: Improved results using a genetic algorithm
    Kaiqi Zhang, Haifeng Du, Marcus W. Feldman,
    From School of Management of Xi’an Jiaotong University (China), and Stanford University (US)
    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437117301930

    Influence Maximization in Online Social Networks
    Cigdem Aslay ISI Foundation, Turin, Italy
    Laks V.S. Lakshmanan, Vancouver, KKKanada
    https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3162007

    Viral marketing , a popular concept in the business literature, has recently attracted a lot of attention also in computer science, dueto its high application potential and computational challenges.Theidea of viral marketing is simple yet appealing: by targeting themost influential users in a social network (e.g., by giving themfree or price-discounted samples), one can exploit the power ofthe network effect through word-of-mouth, thus delivering themarketing message to a large portion of the network analogous tothe spread of a virus.

    Influence maximization is the key algorithmic problem behind viral marketing.

    #scary_science

  • Opinion | Do Not Trust That Stranger’s 5-Star Review - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/25/opinion/sunday/five-star-customer-reviews.html

    Stars beget sales. According to an often mentioned Harvard Business School working paper that studied restaurant reviews on Yelp, each added star is associated with a 5 percent to 9 percent increase in revenue. Not surprisingly, then, new businesses have sprung up to exploit the rating system to the seller’s or the platform’s advantage.

    Finally, it’s hard to know what the stars even mean. Often times, whether it’s a mattress or can opener or an Uber driver, a five-star rating means “nothing disastrous happened,” said Nikhil Garg, a doctoral candidate at Stanford University. A recent study he co-wrote reported that 80 percent of people gave freelancers hired from an online platform five stars. But when he asked people to choose from different words (“terrible,” “mediocre,” “best possible,” etc.), at least half of the freelancers earned the equivalent of a two-, three- or four-star review.

    In the case of hotels, said Dr. Cotte, five stars typically means “everything is what I expected.” I’m assuming this is how the Hampton Inn averaged a five-star rating on my recent search for a hotel in Maine, compared to several luxury resorts that rated only a four.

    The experts confirmed what I knew, but resisted, all along. If you really want to find the best product or service for your needs, you’ll need to exert some effort. But it’s also worth remembering that if you don’t, it’s no big deal.

    As Dr. Salganik explained, even if a system is gamed, the worst product probably won’t end up at the top of your screen for long; assuming there’s a considerable difference in quality among the options, it will eventually be knocked down. But if the products are pretty similar, then yes, it’s possible that the very best one will actually not float to the very top — though that’s no tragedy either. As Barry Schwartz, the author of “The Paradox of Choice,” argues, if everything is essentially the same, then there’s nothing wrong with ending up with a product that’s the second- or third-best of the heap.

  • Opinion | Do Not Trust That Stranger’s 5-Star Review - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/25/opinion/sunday/five-star-customer-reviews.html

    Bon papier sur les évaluations en ligne.

    Stars beget sales. According to an often mentioned Harvard Business School working paper that studied restaurant reviews on Yelp, each added star is associated with a 5 percent to 9 percent increase in revenue. Not surprisingly, then, new businesses have sprung up to exploit the rating system to the seller’s or the platform’s advantage.

    Finally, it’s hard to know what the stars even mean. Often times, whether it’s a mattress or can opener or an Uber driver, a five-star rating means “nothing disastrous happened,” said Nikhil Garg, a doctoral candidate at Stanford University. A recent study he co-wrote reported that 80 percent of people gave freelancers hired from an online platform five stars. But when he asked people to choose from different words (“terrible,” “mediocre,” “best possible,” etc.), at least half of the freelancers earned the equivalent of a two-, three- or four-star review.

    In the case of hotels, said Dr. Cotte, five stars typically means “everything is what I expected.” I’m assuming this is how the Hampton Inn averaged a five-star rating on my recent search for a hotel in Maine, compared to several luxury resorts that rated only a four.

    The experts confirmed what I knew, but resisted, all along. If you really want to find the best product or service for your needs, you’ll need to exert some effort. But it’s also worth remembering that if you don’t, it’s no big deal.

    As Dr. Salganik explained, even if a system is gamed, the worst product probably won’t end up at the top of your screen for long; assuming there’s a considerable difference in quality among the options, it will eventually be knocked down. But if the products are pretty similar, then yes, it’s possible that the very best one will actually not float to the very top — though that’s no tragedy either. As Barry Schwartz, the author of “The Paradox of Choice,” argues, if everything is essentially the same, then there’s nothing wrong with ending up with a product that’s the second- or third-best of the heap.

    #E-commerce #Evaluation #Avis_utilisateurs

  • Opinion | Do Not Trust That Stranger’s 5-Star Review - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/25/opinion/sunday/five-star-customer-reviews.html

    Stars beget sales. According to an often mentioned Harvard Business School working paper that studied restaurant reviews on Yelp, each added star is associated with a 5 percent to 9 percent increase in revenue. Not surprisingly, then, new businesses have sprung up to exploit the rating system to the seller’s or the platform’s advantage.

    Finally, it’s hard to know what the stars even mean. Often times, whether it’s a mattress or can opener or an Uber driver, a five-star rating means “nothing disastrous happened,” said Nikhil Garg, a doctoral candidate at Stanford University. A recent study he co-wrote reported that 80 percent of people gave freelancers hired from an online platform five stars. But when he asked people to choose from different words (“terrible,” “mediocre,” “best possible,” etc.), at least half of the freelancers earned the equivalent of a two-, three- or four-star review.

    In the case of hotels, said Dr. Cotte, five stars typically means “everything is what I expected.” I’m assuming this is how the Hampton Inn averaged a five-star rating on my recent search for a hotel in Maine, compared to several luxury resorts that rated only a four.

    The experts confirmed what I knew, but resisted, all along. If you really want to find the best product or service for your needs, you’ll need to exert some effort. But it’s also worth remembering that if you don’t, it’s no big deal.

    As Dr. Salganik explained, even if a system is gamed, the worst product probably won’t end up at the top of your screen for long; assuming there’s a considerable difference in quality among the options, it will eventually be knocked down. But if the products are pretty similar, then yes, it’s possible that the very best one will actually not float to the very top — though that’s no tragedy either. As Barry Schwartz, the author of “The Paradox of Choice,” argues, if everything is essentially the same, then there’s nothing wrong with ending up with a product that’s the second- or third-best of the heap.

  • How to #product Manage Your Own Career with Stanford PM Instructor Daniel Elizade
    https://hackernoon.com/how-to-product-manage-your-own-career-with-stanford-pm-instructor-daniel

    Daniel Elizade teaches Internet of Things product management at Stanford University, and works as an Internet-of-Things PM Coach full-time. Daniel and I discuss IoT product management and how to succeed in PM recruiting by imagining yourself as a product.Tell us about how you broke into product management. I was born and raised in Mexico City, went to school there, and graduated with a dual degree in Electronics and Computer Science. My first job was in Austin, Texas at a company called National Instruments, which is an industrial automation and instrumentation company. That was a fascinating job for me because it started me on a path of IoT that I work on today.One of my favorite roles in that company was serving as a solutions architect for the consulting team. My role was to go out (...)

    #product-manager #interview #product-management #hackernoon-top-story

  • Silicon Valley sans fard | Entre les lignes entre les mots
    https://entreleslignesentrelesmots.blog/2019/02/18/silicon-valley-sans-fard

    Visages de la Silicon Valley se veut un essai de Fred Turner, professeur de communication à la Stanford University, avec des photographies, qu’il faut prendre le temps de regarder, de de les scruter, de les contempler pour les faire « parler ». Mary Bett Mehan, la photographe, sait donner à voir comme le texte lui-même. Le tout se veut éclairages sur la réalité du mythe. Combinaison de diplômés et de pauvres qui dévoile une des réalités de la révolution numérique : l’approfondissement des inégalités entre les très qualifiés et les non-qualifiés lié à un éclatement des qualifications moyennes.

    Visage de la Silicon Valley est à la fois un « beau livre » – les images sont bien mises en valeur en affirmant leur nécessité esthétique – et une sorte de réquisitoire contre cette Amérique qui fait cohabiter extrême richesse et extrême pauvreté en perdant le sens même de la notion de solidarité. Ce livre indique simultanément les réactions, actions de résistance, de résilience pour éviter le délitement et dessiner un avenir différent – le socialisme redevient présent outre atlantique – par la lutte contre les mutations climatiques, la crise écologique.

    L’essai de Fred Turner, si américain dans ses références, donne à comprendre le concept de « Silicon Valley » et la réalité du piège qu’il comporte, piège de l’imagerie. Les photographies de Mary Bett Mehan deviennent fondamentales à ce niveau pour abandonner cette mythologie. Cet essai critique à deux voix permet de comprendre tout en laissant percevoir d’autres possibles.

    Fred Turner & Mary Bett Mehan : Visages de la Silicon Valley, C&F éditions, 33€

    Nicolas Béniès

  • Top University #blockchain Curriculum #rankings of 2018
    https://hackernoon.com/top-university-blockchain-curriculum-rankings-of-2018-d3807b513dc8?sourc

    In the past two years, the soaring price of #bitcoin has brought a wave of attention to blockchain technology. In fact, keywords such as Bitcoin, blockchain, and cryptocurrency have become #academic spotlights that universities are paying attention to.In October this year, Coindesk announced the top ten universities in the United States that have opened blockchain courses. These universities are arguably the world’s top universities, including Stanford University, UC Berkeley, Harvard University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Blockchain Courses Offered by Top UniversitiesWhat are the characteristics of the courses offered by these schools? Which colleges are offering related courses? SV Insight Research analyzed the top 30 North American universities from US News 2019 (...)

    #education

  • #interview with #kaggle GrandMaster: Dr Bojan Tunguz
    https://hackernoon.com/interview-with-kaggle-grandmaster-dr-bojan-tunguz-726b28e601e?source=rss

    Interview with Kaggle GrandMaster, Data Scientist: Dr. Bojan TunguzPart 14 of The series where I interview my heroes.Index to “Interviews with ML Heroes”In this very interview, I’m super excited talking to another great kaggler: The Discussions grandmaster: (kaggle: @tunguz, ranked #3), Kernels (Ranked #10) and Competitions Master (Ranked #23): Dr. Bojan TunguzDr. Bojan Tunguz holds a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from the University of Illinois and a masters in Physics from Stanford University.He is currently working as a Data Scientist at H2o.ai, before H2o.ai he had worked at Figure as a Data Scientist and at ZestFinance as a Machine Learning Modeler.About 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 (...)

    #artificial-intelligence #machine-learning #deep-learning

  • #proof-of-work and #proof-of-stake are Regressive
    https://hackernoon.com/proof-of-work-and-proof-of-stake-are-regressive-3db6f4d3761?source=rss--

    Thinking toward ethical behavioral cryptoeconomicsThe recent low in #cryptocurrency morale has given our community a rich opportunity for reflection. The vast majority of us crypto enthusiasts have a genuine heart for marrying technology and social action, and I believe it’s time we reflect on where we wanted to go with digital currencies, honestly take stock of the state of blockchain technology today, and rigorously plan how to improve digital currencies moving forward.I’ve been fortunate enough to sit in on many lectures discussing blockchain technologies and incentive structures in computer science at Stanford University, and it’s led me to the conclusion that crypto incentives have driven a lust for global consensus which obscures the important goals we originally had in mind. (...)

    #bitcoin #proof-of-stake-regressive

  • Brazilian media report that police are entering university classrooms to interrogate professors

    In advance of this Sunday’s second-round presidential election between far-right politician Jair #Bolsonaro and center-left candidate Fernando Haddad, Brazilian media are reporting that Brazilian police have been staging raids, at times without warrants, in universities across the country this week. In these raids, police have been questioning professors and confiscating materials belonging to students and professors.

    The raids are part a supposed attempt to stop illegal electoral advertising. Brazilian election law prohibits electoral publicity in public spaces. However, many of the confiscated materials do not mention candidates. Among such confiscated materials are a flag for the Universidade Federal Fluminense reading “UFF School of Law - Anti-Fascist” and flyers titled “Manifest in Defense of Democracy and Public Universities.”

    For those worrying about Brazilian democracy, these raids are some of the most troubling signs yet of the problems the country faces. They indicate the extremes of Brazilian political polarization: Anti-fascist and pro-democracy speech is now interpreted as illegal advertising in favor of one candidate (Fernando Haddad) and against another (Jair Bolsonaro). In the long run, the politicization of these two terms will hurt support for the idea of democracy, and bolster support for the idea of fascism.

    In the short run, the raids have even more troublesome implications. Warrantless police raids in university classrooms to monitor professor speech have worrisome echoes of Brazil’s 1964-1985 military regime — particularly when the speech the raids are seeking to stop is not actually illegal.

    Perhaps the most concerning point of all is that these raids are happening before Bolsonaro takes office. They have often been initiated by complaints from Bolsonaro supporters. All of this suggests that if Bolsonaro wins the election — as is widely expected — and seeks to suppress the speech of his opponents, whom he has called “red [i.e., Communist] criminals,” he may have plenty of willing helpers.

    https://www.vox.com/mischiefs-of-faction/2018/10/26/18029696/brazilian-police-interrogate-professors
    #université #extrême_droite #Brésil #police #it_has_begun
    Je crois que je vais commencer à utiliser un nouveau tag, qui est aussi le nom d’un réseau : #scholars_at_risk

    • Brésil : à peine élu, Jair Bolsonaro commence la chasse aux opposants de gauche

      Les universités dans le viseur

      Enfin, toujours pour lutter contre l’opposition à gauche, Jair Bolsonaro entend faire pression sur les professeurs d’université qui parleraient de politique pendant leurs cours.

      Le président élu a récemment scandalisé une partie du monde éducatif en accusant des professeurs, cités avec leurs noms et prénoms, de défendre les régimes de Cuba et de Corée du Nord devant leurs élèves, dans une vidéo diffusée sur Internet.

      Et pour y remédier, il compte installer des pancartes devant les salles de cours pour appeler les étudiants à dénoncer leurs professeurs par le biais d’une « hotline » téléphonique dédiée à la question.

      https://www.bfmtv.com/international/bresil-a-peine-elu-jair-bolsonaro-commence-la-chasse-aux-opposants-de-gauche-

    • Au Brésil, vague de répression dans les universités à la veille du second tour

      Quelques jours avant le second tour de l’élection présidentielle brésilienne, qui voit s’affronter le candidat d’extrême droite Jair Bolsonaro et le candidat du Parti des travailleurs (PT) Fernando Haddad, les campus universitaires du pays ont fait face à une vague inédite de répression de la liberté d’expression. Jeudi 25 octobre, la police a investi 27 universités, à la demande des tribunaux électoraux, dont les juges sont chargés de faire respecter les règles de communication et de propagande électorales des partis en lice. Les forces de police étaient à la recherche de supposé matériel de propagande électorale illégale. En fait, ces opérations ont visé des banderoles antifascistes, de soutien à la démocratie, un manifeste en soutien à l’université publique, des débats et des cours sur la dictature, la démocratie et les « fakes news » – ces mensonges ayant été largement diffusés pendant la campagne, en particulier par l’extrême-droite… [1]

      À Rio, une juge a ainsi fait enlever une banderole du fronton du bâtiment de la faculté de droit de l’université fédérale Fluminense (UFF), sur laquelle était inscrit, autour du symbole antifasciste du double drapeau rouge et noir, « Droit UFF antifasciste ». À l’université de l’État de Rio, les agents électoraux ont retiré une banderole en hommage à Marielle Franco, l’élue municipale du parti de gauche PSOL assassinée en pleine rue en mars dernier.

      220 000 messages de haine en quatre jours contre une journaliste

      Dans une université du Pará, quatre policiers militaires sont entrés sur le campus pour interroger un professeur sur « son idéologie ». L’enseignant avait abordé la question des fake news dans un cours sur les médias numériques. Une étudiante s’en est sentie offensée, alléguant une « doctrine marxiste », et l’a dit à son père, policier militaire. Une enquête du journal la Folha de São Paulo a pourtant révélé mi-octobre que des entreprises qui soutiennent le candidat d’extrême droite avaient acheté les services d’entreprises de communication pour faire envoyer en masse des fausses nouvelles anti-Parti des travailleurs directement sur les numéros whatsapp – une plateforme de messagerie en ligne – des Brésiliens. L’auteure de l’enquête, la journaliste Patricia Campos Melo, et le quotidien de São Paulo, ont ensuite reçu 220 000 messages de haine en quatre jours ! [2] Le journal a demandé à la police fédérale de lancer une enquête.

      Mais ce sont des conférences et des débats sur la dictature militaire et le fascisme qui ont pour l’instant été interdits. C’est le cas d’un débat public intitulé « Contre la fascisme, pour la démocratie », qui devait avoir lieu à l’université fédérale de Rio Grande do Sul (la région de Porto Alegre). Devaient y participer l’ex-candidat du parti de gauche PSOL au premier tour de la présidentielle, Guilherme Boulos, un ancien ministre issu du Parti des travailleurs, des députés fédéraux du PT et du PSOL. « J’ai donné des cours et des conférences dans des universités en France, en Angleterre, au Portugal, en Espagne, en Allemagne, en Argentine, et ici, même pendant la dictature. Aujourd’hui, je suis censuré dans l’État, le Rio Grande do Sul, que j’ai moi-même gouverné. Le fascisme grandit », a réagi l’un des députés, Tarso Genro, sur twitter.

      Une banderole « moins d’armes, plus de livres » jugée illégale

      Dans le Paraíba, les agents du tribunal électoral se sont introduits dans l’université pour retirer une banderole où était simplement inscrit « moins d’armes, plus de livres ». « Cette opération de la justice électorale dans les universités du pays pour saisir du matériel en défense de la démocratie et contre le fascisme est absurde. Cela rappelle les temps sombres de la censure et de l’invasion des facultés », a écrit Guilherme Boulos, le leader du PSOL, sur twitter, ajoutant : « Le parti de la justice a formé une coalition avec le PSL », le parti de Bolsonaro. « De telles interventions à l’intérieur de campus au cours d’une campagne électorale sont inédites. Une partie de l’appareil d’État se prépare au changement de régime », a aussi alerté l’historienne française, spécialiste du Brésil, Maud Chirio, sur sa page Facebook.

      Dimanche dernier, dans une allocution filmée diffusée pour ses supporters rassemblés à São Paulo, Jair Bolsonaro a proféré des menaces claires à l’égard de ses opposants. « Ou vous partez en exil ou vous partez en prison », a-il dit, ajoutant « nous allons balayer ces bandits rouges du Brésil », et annonçant un « nettoyage jamais vu dans l’histoire de ce pays ». Il a précisé qu’il allait classer le Mouvements des paysans sans Terre (MST) et le Mouvement des travailleurs sans toit (MTST) comme des organisations terroristes, et menacé Fernando Haddad de l’envoyer « pourrir en prison aux côtés de Lula ».


      https://www.bastamag.net/Au-Bresil-vague-de-repression-dans-les-universites-a-la-veille-du-second-t

    • We deplore this attack on freedom of expression in Brazil’s universities

      107 international academics react to social media reports that more than 20 universities in Brazil have been invaded by military police in recent days, with teaching materials confiscated on ideological grounds

      Reports have emerged on social media that more than 20 universities in Brazil have been subjected in recent days to: invasions by military police; the confiscation of teaching materials on ideological grounds; and the suppression of freedom of speech and expression, especially in relation to anti-fascist history and activism.

      As academics, researchers, graduates, students and workers at universities in the UK, Europe and further afield, we deplore this attack on freedom of expression in Brazil’s universities, which comes as a direct result of the campaign and election of far-right President Bolsonaro.

      Academic autonomy is a linchpin not only of independent and objective research, but of a functioning democracy, which should be subject to scrutiny and informed, evidence-based investigation and critique.

      We call on co-workers, colleagues and students to decry this attack on Brazil’s universities in the name of Bolsonaro’s wider militaristic, anti-progressive agenda. We will not stand by as this reactionary populist attacks the pillars of Brazil’s democracy and education system. We will campaign vigorously in whatever capacity we can with activists, educators and lawmakers in Brazil to ensure that its institutions can operate without the interference of this new – and hopefully short-lived – government.
      Dr William McEvoy, University of Sussex, UK (correspondent)
      Dr Will Abberley, University of Sussex
      Nannette Aldred, University of Sussex
      Patricia Alessandrini, Stanford University, USA
      Dr Michael Alexander, University of Glasgow
      Steven Allen, Birkbeck, University of London
      Dr Katherine Angel, Birkbeck, University of London
      Pedro Argenti, University of Antwerp, Belgium
      Nick Awde, International Editor, The Stage newspaper, London
      Professor Ian Balfour, York University, Toronto, Canada
      Lennart Balkenhol, University of Melbourne, Australia
      Nehaal Bajwa, University of Sussex
      Dr Louis Bayman, University of Southampton
      Mark Bergfeld, former NUS NEC (2010-2012)
      Professor Tim Bergfelder, University of Southampton
      Dr Patricia Pires Boulhosa, University of Cambridge
      Dr Maud Bracke, University of Glasgow
      Max Brookman-Byrne, University of Lincoln
      Dr Conrad Brunström, Maynooth University, Ireland
      Dr Christopher Burlinson, Jesus College, Cambridge
      Professor Martin Butler, University of Sussex
      Professor Gavin Butt, University of Sussex
      Cüneyt Çakirlar, Nottingham Trent University
      Guilherme Carréra, University of Westminster
      Geoffrey Chew, Royal Holloway, University of London
      Dr Maite Conde, University of Cambridge
      Dr Luke Cooper, Anglia Ruskin University, UK, and Institute of Human Sciences, Vienna, Austria
      Dr Sue Currell, University of Sussex
      Professor Dimitris Dalakoglou, Vrije University, Amsterdam, Netherlands
      William Dalziel, University of Sussex
      Dr April de Angelis, Royal Holloway, University of London
      Dr Olga Demetriou, Durham University
      Dr Stephanie Dennison, University of Leeds
      Dr Steffi Doebler, University of Liverpool
      Dr Sai Englert, SOAS University of London
      James Erskine, University of Sussex and Birkbeck, University of London
      Professor Martin Paul Eve, Birkbeck, University of London
      John Fallas, University of Leeds
      Dr Lynne Fanthome, Staffordshire University
      Dr Hannah Field, University of Sussex
      Dr Adrian Garvey, Birkbeck, University of London
      Dr Laura Gill, University of Sussex
      Dr Priyamvada Gopal, University of Cambridge
      Bhavini Goyate, University of Sussex
      Dr Craig Haslop, University of Liverpool
      Professor Björn Heile, University of Glasgow
      Dr Phil Hutchinson, Manchester Metropolitan University
      Professor Martin Iddon, University of Leeds
      Dr Eleftheria Ioannidou, University of Groningen, Netherlands
      Dr Chris Kempshall, University of Sussex
      Andrew Key, University of California, Berkeley, USA
      Professor Laleh Khalili, SOAS University of London
      Dr Theodore Koulouris, University of Brighton
      Professor Maria Lauret, University of Sussex
      Professor Vicky Lebeau, University of Sussex
      Professor James Livesey, University of Dundee, Scotland
      Professor Luke Martell, University of Sussex
      Dr N Gabriel Martin, Lebanese American University, Lebanon
      Wolfgang Marx, University College, Dublin, Ireland
      Andy Medhurst, University of Sussex
      Professor Philippe Meers, University of Antwerp, Belgium
      Dr Shamira A Meghani, University of Cambridge
      Niccolo Milanese, CESPRA EHESS, Paris, France and PUC Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
      Dr Ian Moody, CESEM – Universidade Nova, Lisbon
      Professor Lucia Naqib, University of Reading
      Dr Catherine Packham, University of Sussex
      Professor Dimitris Papanikolaou, University of Oxford
      Mary Parnwell, University of Sussex
      Professor Deborah Philips, University of Brighton
      Dr Chloe Porter, University of Sussex
      Dr Jason Price, University of Sussex
      Dr Duška Radosavljević, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London
      Francesca Reader, University of Sussex and University of Brighton
      Naida Redgrave, University of East London
      Professor Nicholas Ridout, Queen Mary, University of London
      Professor Lucy Robinson, University of Sussex
      Dr Kirsty Rolfe, University of Sussex
      Dr Joseph Ronan, University of Brighton
      Dr Michael Rowland, University of Sussex
      Dr Zachary Rowlinson, University of Sussex
      Professor Nicholas Royle, University of Sussex
      Dr Eleanor Rycroft, University of Bristol
      Dr Jason Scott-Warren, University of Cambridge
      Dr Deborah Shaw, University of Portsmouth
      Dr Lisa Shaw, University of Liverpool
      Kat Sinclair, University of Sussex
      Sandrine Singleton-Perrin, University of Essex
      Despina Sinou, University of Paris 13 – Sorbonne Paris Cité, France
      Dave Smith, University of Hertfordshire
      John Snijders, Durham University
      Dr Samuel Solomon, University of Sussex
      Dr Arabella Stanger, University of Sussex
      Professor Rob Stone, University of Birmingham
      Bernard Sufrin, Emeritus Fellow, Dept of Computer Science, University of Oxford
      Dr Natasha Tanna, University of Cambridge
      Professor Lyn Thomas, University of Sussex
      Simon Thorpe, University of Warwick
      Dr Gavan Titley, Maynooth University, Ireland
      Dr Pamela Thurschwell, University of Sussex
      Dr Dominic Walker, University of Sussex
      Dr Ed Waller, University of Surrey and University of Portsmouth
      Dr Kiron Ward, University of Sussex
      Helen Wheatley, University of Warwick
      Ian Willcock, University of Herfordshire
      Professor Gregory Woods, Nottingham Trent University
      Dr Tom F Wright, University of Sussex
      Dr Heba Youssef, University of Brighton

      https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/01/we-deplore-this-attack-on-freedom-of-expression-in-brazils-universities
      #liberté_d'expression

    • Brazil Court Strikes Down Restrictions on University Speech

      Brazil´s Supreme Court issued an important decision striking down restrictions on political speech on university campuses in a unanimous ruling yesterday. Meanwhile, president-elect Jair Bolsonaro´s allies in Congress are pressing ahead with efforts to restrict what students and educators can discuss in the classroom.

      The court ruling overturned decisions by electoral court judges who recently ordered universities across the country to clamp down on what they considered illegal political campaigning. The orders were spurred by complaints from anonymous callers and, in a few cases, by members of conservative groups.

      For example, at Grande Dourados Federal University, court officials suspended a public event against fascism, according to the student group that organized it. At Campina Grande Federal University, police allegedly seized copies of a pamphlet titled “Manifesto in defense of democracy and public universities” and hard drives, said a professors´ association.

      At Rio de Janeiro State University, police ordered the removal of a banner honoring Marielle Franco, a black lesbian human rights defender and councilwoman murdered in March, despite not having a judicial order.

      The attorney general, Raquel Dodge, asked the Supreme Court to rule the electoral court judges´ decisions unconstitutional, and Supreme Court justice Cármen Lúcia Rocha issued an injunction stopping them. The full court upheld that decision on October 31.

      “The only force that must enter universities is the force of ideas,” said Rocha.

      “The excessive and illegitimate use of force by state agents … echoes somber days in Brazilian history,” said Justice Rosa Weber, referring to Brazil´s 1964 – 1985 military dictatorship.

      The ruling comes as Bolsonaro, who remains in Congress until he assumes the presidency on January 1, and his allies push a bill that would prohibit teachers from promoting their own opinions in the classroom or using the terms “gender” or “sexual orientation,” and would order that sex and religious education be framed around “family values.”

      A state representative-elect from Bolsonaro´s party has even called on students to film and report teachers who make “political-partisan or ideological statements.” Bolsonaro made a similar call in 2016. State prosecutors have filed a civil action against the representative-elect, alleging she instituted “an illegal service for the political and ideological control of teaching activities.”

      In his long career in Congress, Bolsonaro has endorsed abusive practices that undermine the rule of law, defended the dictatorship, and has been a vocal proponent of bigotry.

      More than ever, Brazil needs its judiciary to defend human rights within and outside the classroom.


      https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/11/01/brazil-court-strikes-down-restrictions-university-speech
      #cour_suprême #justice

    • Présidentielle au Brésil : relents de dictature militaire

      Présidentielle au Brésil : Bolsonaro et le « risque d’un retour à l’ordre autoritaire en Amérique latine »

      Porté par plus de deux cents universitaires, responsables politiques et citoyens d’Europe et du Canada, ce manifeste s’inscrit dans un mouvement mondial de soutien à la démocratie face à la violence déchaînée par la candidature de Jair Bolsonaro au Brésil. Il est ouvert aux démocrates de toutes les sensibilités politiques. Face au risque imminent d’un retour à l’ordre autoritaire en Amérique latine, la solidarité internationale est impérative.

      Nous, citoyens, intellectuels, militants, personnalités politiques vivant, travaillant et étudiant en Europe et au Canada, exprimons notre vive inquiétude face à la menace imminente de l’élection de Jair Bolsonaro à la présidence du Brésil le 28 octobre 2018.

      Le souvenir de la dictature militaire

      La victoire de l’extrême droite radicale au Brésil risque de renforcer le mouvement international qui a porté au pouvoir des politiciens réactionnaires et antidémocratiques dans de nombreux pays ces dernières années.

      Bolsonaro défend ouvertement le souvenir de la dictature militaire qui a imposé sa loi au Brésil entre 1964 et 1985, ses pratiques de torture et ses tortionnaires. Il méprise le combat pour les droits humains. Il exprime une hostilité agressive envers les femmes, les Afro-descendants, les membres de la communauté LGBT +, les peuples autochtones et les pauvres. Son programme vise à détruire les avancées politiques, économiques, sociales, environnementales et culturelles des quatre dernières décennies, ainsi que l’action menée par les mouvements sociaux et le camp progressiste pour consolider et étendre la démocratie au Brésil.

      L’élection de Bolsonaro menace les fragiles institutions démocratiques pour la construction desquelles les Brésilien·ne·s ont pris tant de risques. Son arrivée au pouvoir serait aussi un frein majeur à toute politique internationale ambitieuse en matière de défense de l’environnement et de préservation de la paix.

      Premiers signataires : Martine Aubry , maire de Lille, ancienne ministre (PS) ; Luc Boltanski , sociologue, directeur d’études, EHESS ; Peter Burke , historien, professeur émérite à l’université de Cambridge ; Roger Chartier , historien, directeur d’études EHESS/Collège de France ; Mireille Clapot , députée de la Drôme, vice-présidente de la commission des affaires étrangères (LRM) ; Laurence Cohen , sénatrice du Val-de-Marne (PCF) ; Didier Fassin , professeur de sciences sociales, Institute for advanced study, Princeton ; Carlo Ginzburg , professeur émérite à UCLA et à l’Ecole normale supérieure de Pise ; Eva Joly , députée européenne (groupe Verts-ALE) ; Pierre Louault , sénateur d’Indre-et-Loire (UDI) ; Paul Magnette, bourgmestre de Charleroi, ex-ministre président de la Wallonie, ex-président du Parti socialiste belge ; Thomas Piketty , directeur d’études à l’EHESS.

      http://jennifer-detemmerman.fr/index.php/2018/10/23/presidentielle-au-bresil-relents-de-dictature-militaire

    • Une pétition qui a été lancé avant l’élection...
      Defend Democracy in Brazil. Say No to Jair Bolsonaro

      Defend Democracy in Brazil,

      Say No to Jair Bolsonaro

      We, citizens, intellectuals, activists, politicians, people living, working, and studying in Europe and Canada, wish to express our growing alarm at the imminent threat of Jair Bolsonaro’s election to the presidency on October 28, 2018. The potential victory of a far-right radical in Brazil would reinforce a dangerous international trend of extremely reactionary and anti-democratic politicians gaining state power in recent years.

      Bolsonaro explicitly defends the Brazilian military dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964-85 and praises torture and torturers. He condemns human rights efforts. He has expressed aggressive and vile hostility toward women, people of African descent, the LGBT+ community, indigenous people, and the poor. His proposed policies would effectively undo all of the political, social, economic, labor, environmental, and cultural gains of the last four decades, efforts by social movements and progressive politicians to consolidate and expand democracy in Brazil. A Bolsonaro presidency also threatens to undermine the still fragile democratic politics that people throughout Brazil have risked so much to build.

      His election would seriously hamper any ambitious international effort for environmental protection, against climate change and for the preservation of peace.

      Adapted version of the text « Defend Democracy in Brazil, Say No to Jair Bolsonaro! »

      https://www.change.org/p/association-pour-la-recherche-sur-le-br%C3%A9sil-en-europe-pour-la-d%C3%A9fe

  • Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy? | The New Yorker
    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/17/can-mark-zuckerberg-fix-facebook-before-it-breaks-democracy

    Since 2011, Zuckerberg has lived in a century-old white clapboard Craftsman in the Crescent Park neighborhood, an enclave of giant oaks and historic homes not far from Stanford University. The house, which cost seven million dollars, affords him a sense of sanctuary. It’s set back from the road, shielded by hedges, a wall, and mature trees. Guests enter through an arched wooden gate and follow a long gravel path to a front lawn with a saltwater pool in the center. The year after Zuckerberg bought the house, he and his longtime girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, held their wedding in the back yard, which encompasses gardens, a pond, and a shaded pavilion. Since then, they have had two children, and acquired a seven-hundred-acre estate in Hawaii, a ski retreat in Montana, and a four-story town house on Liberty Hill, in San Francisco. But the family’s full-time residence is here, a ten-minute drive from Facebook’s headquarters.

    Occasionally, Zuckerberg records a Facebook video from the back yard or the dinner table, as is expected of a man who built his fortune exhorting employees to keep “pushing the world in the direction of making it a more open and transparent place.” But his appetite for personal openness is limited. Although Zuckerberg is the most famous entrepreneur of his generation, he remains elusive to everyone but a small circle of family and friends, and his efforts to protect his privacy inevitably attract attention. The local press has chronicled his feud with a developer who announced plans to build a mansion that would look into Zuckerberg’s master bedroom. After a legal fight, the developer gave up, and Zuckerberg spent forty-four million dollars to buy the houses surrounding his. Over the years, he has come to believe that he will always be the subject of criticism. “We’re not—pick your noncontroversial business—selling dog food, although I think that people who do that probably say there is controversy in that, too, but this is an inherently cultural thing,” he told me, of his business. “It’s at the intersection of technology and psychology, and it’s very personal.”

    At the same time, former Facebook executives, echoing a growing body of research, began to voice misgivings about the company’s role in exacerbating isolation, outrage, and addictive behaviors. One of the largest studies, published last year in the American Journal of Epidemiology, followed the Facebook use of more than five thousand people over three years and found that higher use correlated with self-reported declines in physical health, mental health, and life satisfaction. At an event in November, 2017, Sean Parker, Facebook’s first president, called himself a “conscientious objector” to social media, saying, “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.” A few days later, Chamath Palihapitiya, the former vice-president of user growth, told an audience at Stanford, “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works—no civil discourse, no coöperation, misinformation, mistruth.” Palihapitiya, a prominent Silicon Valley figure who worked at Facebook from 2007 to 2011, said, “I feel tremendous guilt. I think we all knew in the back of our minds.” Of his children, he added, “They’re not allowed to use this shit.” (Facebook replied to the remarks in a statement, noting that Palihapitiya had left six years earlier, and adding, “Facebook was a very different company back then.”)

    In March, Facebook was confronted with an even larger scandal: the Times and the British newspaper the Observer reported that a researcher had gained access to the personal information of Facebook users and sold it to Cambridge Analytica, a consultancy hired by Trump and other Republicans which advertised using “psychographic” techniques to manipulate voter behavior. In all, the personal data of eighty-seven million people had been harvested. Moreover, Facebook had known of the problem since December of 2015 but had said nothing to users or regulators. The company acknowledged the breach only after the press discovered it.

    We spoke at his home, at his office, and by phone. I also interviewed four dozen people inside and outside the company about its culture, his performance, and his decision-making. I found Zuckerberg straining, not always coherently, to grasp problems for which he was plainly unprepared. These are not technical puzzles to be cracked in the middle of the night but some of the subtlest aspects of human affairs, including the meaning of truth, the limits of free speech, and the origins of violence.

    Zuckerberg is now at the center of a full-fledged debate about the moral character of Silicon Valley and the conscience of its leaders. Leslie Berlin, a historian of technology at Stanford, told me, “For a long time, Silicon Valley enjoyed an unencumbered embrace in America. And now everyone says, Is this a trick? And the question Mark Zuckerberg is dealing with is: Should my company be the arbiter of truth and decency for two billion people? Nobody in the history of technology has dealt with that.”

    In 2002, Zuckerberg went to Harvard, where he embraced the hacker mystique, which celebrates brilliance in pursuit of disruption. “The ‘fuck you’ to those in power was very strong,” the longtime friend said. In 2004, as a sophomore, he embarked on the project whose origin story is now well known: the founding of Thefacebook.com with four fellow-students (“the” was dropped the following year); the legal battles over ownership, including a suit filed by twin brothers, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, accusing Zuckerberg of stealing their idea; the disclosure of embarrassing messages in which Zuckerberg mocked users for giving him so much data (“they ‘trust me.’ dumb fucks,” he wrote); his regrets about those remarks, and his efforts, in the years afterward, to convince the world that he has left that mind-set behind.

    New hires learned that a crucial measure of the company’s performance was how many people had logged in to Facebook on six of the previous seven days, a measurement known as L6/7. “You could say it’s how many people love this service so much they use it six out of seven days,” Parakilas, who left the company in 2012, said. “But, if your job is to get that number up, at some point you run out of good, purely positive ways. You start thinking about ‘Well, what are the dark patterns that I can use to get people to log back in?’ ”

    Facebook engineers became a new breed of behaviorists, tweaking levers of vanity and passion and susceptibility. The real-world effects were striking. In 2012, when Chan was in medical school, she and Zuckerberg discussed a critical shortage of organs for transplant, inspiring Zuckerberg to add a small, powerful nudge on Facebook: if people indicated that they were organ donors, it triggered a notification to friends, and, in turn, a cascade of social pressure. Researchers later found that, on the first day the feature appeared, it increased official organ-donor enrollment more than twentyfold nationwide.

    Sean Parker later described the company’s expertise as “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” The goal: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” Facebook engineers discovered that people find it nearly impossible not to log in after receiving an e-mail saying that someone has uploaded a picture of them. Facebook also discovered its power to affect people’s political behavior. Researchers found that, during the 2010 midterm elections, Facebook was able to prod users to vote simply by feeding them pictures of friends who had already voted, and by giving them the option to click on an “I Voted” button. The technique boosted turnout by three hundred and forty thousand people—more than four times the number of votes separating Trump and Clinton in key states in the 2016 race. It became a running joke among employees that Facebook could tilt an election just by choosing where to deploy its “I Voted” button.

    These powers of social engineering could be put to dubious purposes. In 2012, Facebook data scientists used nearly seven hundred thousand people as guinea pigs, feeding them happy or sad posts to test whether emotion is contagious on social media. (They concluded that it is.) When the findings were published, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they caused an uproar among users, many of whom were horrified that their emotions may have been surreptitiously manipulated. In an apology, one of the scientists wrote, “In hindsight, the research benefits of the paper may not have justified all of this anxiety.”

    Facebook was, in the words of Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google, becoming a pioneer in “ persuasive technology.

    Facebook had adopted a buccaneering motto, “Move fast and break things,” which celebrated the idea that it was better to be flawed and first than careful and perfect. Andrew Bosworth, a former Harvard teaching assistant who is now one of Zuckerberg’s longest-serving lieutenants and a member of his inner circle, explained, “A failure can be a form of success. It’s not the form you want, but it can be a useful thing to how you learn.” In Zuckerberg’s view, skeptics were often just fogies and scolds. “There’s always someone who wants to slow you down,” he said in a commencement address at Harvard last year. “In our society, we often don’t do big things because we’re so afraid of making mistakes that we ignore all the things wrong today if we do nothing. The reality is, anything we do will have issues in the future. But that can’t keep us from starting.”

    In contrast to a traditional foundation, an L.L.C. can lobby and give money to politicians, without as strict a legal requirement to disclose activities. In other words, rather than trying to win over politicians and citizens in places like Newark, Zuckerberg and Chan could help elect politicians who agree with them, and rally the public directly by running ads and supporting advocacy groups. (A spokesperson for C.Z.I. said that it has given no money to candidates; it has supported ballot initiatives through a 501(c)(4) social-welfare organization.) “The whole point of the L.L.C. structure is to allow a coördinated attack,” Rob Reich, a co-director of Stanford’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, told me. The structure has gained popularity in Silicon Valley but has been criticized for allowing wealthy individuals to orchestrate large-scale social agendas behind closed doors. Reich said, “There should be much greater transparency, so that it’s not dark. That’s not a criticism of Mark Zuckerberg. It’s a criticism of the law.”

    La question des langues est fondamentale quand il s’agit de réseaux sociaux

    Beginning in 2013, a series of experts on Myanmar met with Facebook officials to warn them that it was fuelling attacks on the Rohingya. David Madden, an entrepreneur based in Myanmar, delivered a presentation to officials at the Menlo Park headquarters, pointing out that the company was playing a role akin to that of the radio broadcasts that spread hatred during the Rwandan genocide. In 2016, C4ADS, a Washington-based nonprofit, published a detailed analysis of Facebook usage in Myanmar, and described a “campaign of hate speech that actively dehumanizes Muslims.” Facebook officials said that they were hiring more Burmese-language reviewers to take down dangerous content, but the company repeatedly declined to say how many had actually been hired. By last March, the situation had become dire: almost a million Rohingya had fled the country, and more than a hundred thousand were confined to internal camps. The United Nations investigator in charge of examining the crisis, which the U.N. has deemed a genocide, said, “I’m afraid that Facebook has now turned into a beast, and not what it was originally intended.” Afterward, when pressed, Zuckerberg repeated the claim that Facebook was “hiring dozens” of additional Burmese-language content reviewers.

    More than three months later, I asked Jes Kaliebe Petersen, the C.E.O. of Phandeeyar, a tech hub in Myanmar, if there had been any progress. “We haven’t seen any tangible change from Facebook,” he told me. “We don’t know how much content is being reported. We don’t know how many people at Facebook speak Burmese. The situation is getting worse and worse here.”

    I saw Zuckerberg the following morning, and asked him what was taking so long. He replied, “I think, fundamentally, we’ve been slow at the same thing in a number of areas, because it’s actually the same problem. But, yeah, I think the situation in Myanmar is terrible.” It was a frustrating and evasive reply. I asked him to specify the problem. He said, “Across the board, the solution to this is we need to move from what is fundamentally a reactive model to a model where we are using technical systems to flag things to a much larger number of people who speak all the native languages around the world and who can just capture much more of the content.”

    Lecture des journaux ou des aggrégateurs ?

    once asked Zuckerberg what he reads to get the news. “I probably mostly read aggregators,” he said. “I definitely follow Techmeme”—a roundup of headlines about his industry—“and the media and political equivalents of that, just for awareness.” He went on, “There’s really no newspaper that I pick up and read front to back. Well, that might be true of most people these days—most people don’t read the physical paper—but there aren’t many news Web sites where I go to browse.”

    A couple of days later, he called me and asked to revisit the subject. “I felt like my answers were kind of vague, because I didn’t necessarily feel like it was appropriate for me to get into which specific organizations or reporters I read and follow,” he said. “I guess what I tried to convey, although I’m not sure if this came across clearly, is that the job of uncovering new facts and doing it in a trusted way is just an absolutely critical function for society.”

    Zuckerberg and Sandberg have attributed their mistakes to excessive optimism, a blindness to the darker applications of their service. But that explanation ignores their fixation on growth, and their unwillingness to heed warnings. Zuckerberg resisted calls to reorganize the company around a new understanding of privacy, or to reconsider the depth of data it collects for advertisers.

    Antitrust

    In barely two years, the mood in Washington had shifted. Internet companies and entrepreneurs, formerly valorized as the vanguard of American ingenuity and the astronauts of our time, were being compared to Standard Oil and other monopolists of the Gilded Age. This spring, the Wall Street Journal published an article that began, “Imagine a not-too-distant future in which trustbusters force Facebook to sell off Instagram and WhatsApp.” It was accompanied by a sepia-toned illustration in which portraits of Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, and other tech C.E.O.s had been grafted onto overstuffed torsos meant to evoke the robber barons. In 1915, Louis Brandeis, the reformer and future Supreme Court Justice, testified before a congressional committee about the dangers of corporations large enough that they could achieve a level of near-sovereignty “so powerful that the ordinary social and industrial forces existing are insufficient to cope with it.” He called this the “curse of bigness.” Tim Wu, a Columbia law-school professor and the author of a forthcoming book inspired by Brandeis’s phrase, told me, “Today, no sector exemplifies more clearly the threat of bigness to democracy than Big Tech.” He added, “When a concentrated private power has such control over what we see and hear, it has a power that rivals or exceeds that of elected government.”

    When I asked Zuckerberg whether policymakers might try to break up Facebook, he replied, adamantly, that such a move would be a mistake. The field is “extremely competitive,” he told me. “I think sometimes people get into this mode of ‘Well, there’s not, like, an exact replacement for Facebook.’ Well, actually, that makes it more competitive, because what we really are is a system of different things: we compete with Twitter as a broadcast medium; we compete with Snapchat as a broadcast medium; we do messaging, and iMessage is default-installed on every iPhone.” He acknowledged the deeper concern. “There’s this other question, which is just, laws aside, how do we feel about these tech companies being big?” he said. But he argued that efforts to “curtail” the growth of Facebook or other Silicon Valley heavyweights would cede the field to China. “I think that anything that we’re doing to constrain them will, first, have an impact on how successful we can be in other places,” he said. “I wouldn’t worry in the near term about Chinese companies or anyone else winning in the U.S., for the most part. But there are all these places where there are day-to-day more competitive situations—in Southeast Asia, across Europe, Latin America, lots of different places.”

    The rough consensus in Washington is that regulators are unlikely to try to break up Facebook. The F.T.C. will almost certainly fine the company for violations, and may consider blocking it from buying big potential competitors, but, as a former F.T.C. commissioner told me, “in the United States you’re allowed to have a monopoly position, as long as you achieve it and maintain it without doing illegal things.”

    Facebook is encountering tougher treatment in Europe, where antitrust laws are stronger and the history of fascism makes people especially wary of intrusions on privacy. One of the most formidable critics of Silicon Valley is the European Union’s top antitrust regulator, Margrethe Vestager.

    In Vestager’s view, a healthy market should produce competitors to Facebook that position themselves as ethical alternatives, collecting less data and seeking a smaller share of user attention. “We need social media that will allow us to have a nonaddictive, advertising-free space,” she said. “You’re more than welcome to be successful and to dramatically outgrow your competitors if customers like your product. But, if you grow to be dominant, you have a special responsibility not to misuse your dominant position to make it very difficult for others to compete against you and to attract potential customers. Of course, we keep an eye on it. If we get worried, we will start looking.”

    Modération

    As hard as it is to curb election propaganda, Zuckerberg’s most intractable problem may lie elsewhere—in the struggle over which opinions can appear on Facebook, which cannot, and who gets to decide. As an engineer, Zuckerberg never wanted to wade into the realm of content. Initially, Facebook tried blocking certain kinds of material, such as posts featuring nudity, but it was forced to create long lists of exceptions, including images of breast-feeding, “acts of protest,” and works of art. Once Facebook became a venue for political debate, the problem exploded. In April, in a call with investment analysts, Zuckerberg said glumly that it was proving “easier to build an A.I. system to detect a nipple than what is hate speech.”

    The cult of growth leads to the curse of bigness: every day, a billion things were being posted to Facebook. At any given moment, a Facebook “content moderator” was deciding whether a post in, say, Sri Lanka met the standard of hate speech or whether a dispute over Korean politics had crossed the line into bullying. Zuckerberg sought to avoid banning users, preferring to be a “platform for all ideas.” But he needed to prevent Facebook from becoming a swamp of hoaxes and abuse. His solution was to ban “hate speech” and impose lesser punishments for “misinformation,” a broad category that ranged from crude deceptions to simple mistakes. Facebook tried to develop rules about how the punishments would be applied, but each idiosyncratic scenario prompted more rules, and over time they became byzantine. According to Facebook training slides published by the Guardian last year, moderators were told that it was permissible to say “You are such a Jew” but not permissible to say “Irish are the best, but really French sucks,” because the latter was defining another people as “inferiors.” Users could not write “Migrants are scum,” because it is dehumanizing, but they could write “Keep the horny migrant teen-agers away from our daughters.” The distinctions were explained to trainees in arcane formulas such as “Not Protected + Quasi protected = not protected.”

    It will hardly be the last quandary of this sort. Facebook’s free-speech dilemmas have no simple answers—you don’t have to be a fan of Alex Jones to be unnerved by the company’s extraordinary power to silence a voice when it chooses, or, for that matter, to amplify others, to pull the levers of what we see, hear, and experience. Zuckerberg is hoping to erect a scalable system, an orderly decision tree that accounts for every eventuality and exception, but the boundaries of speech are a bedevilling problem that defies mechanistic fixes. The Supreme Court, defining obscenity, landed on “I know it when I see it.” For now, Facebook is making do with a Rube Goldberg machine of policies and improvisations, and opportunists are relishing it. Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, seized on the ban of Jones as a fascist assault on conservatives. In a moment that was rich even by Cruz’s standards, he quoted Martin Niemöller’s famous lines about the Holocaust, saying, “As the poem goes, you know, ‘First they came for Alex Jones.’ ”

    #Facebook #Histoire_numérique

  • Quelqu’un parmi les seenthisien·nes peut peut-être m’aider ?
    @simplicissimus peut-être ? @reka ?

    Je cherche cette #caricature, mentionnée dans cet article, passionnant par ailleurs : https://journals.openedition.org/etudesrurales/8132

    Voici la description de la caricature :

    une caricature parue dans un journal israélien montre #Arafat remettant aux incendiaires un certificat de « brûleurs d’#arbres » fait sur le modèle des certificats de planteurs d’arbres décernés par le #FNJ [Bardenstein 2005].

    source citée dans l’article :

    Bardenstein, 2005, Cultivating Attachments. Discourses of Rootedness in Palestine/Israel. Stanford, Stanford University Press (à paraître).

    –-> mais qui en réalité n’a jamais paru, j’ai l’impression !

    #Israël #Palestine

  • Israel is using an online blacklist against pro-Palestinian activists. But nobody knows who compiled it

    Israeli border officials are using a shadowy online dossier as an intelligence source on thousands of students and academics

    The Forward and Josh Nathan-Kazis Aug 07, 2018

    https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/the-blacklist-used-by-israel-against-pro-palestinian-activists-1.6359001

    Last December, Andrew Kadi flew to Israel to visit his mother. As he walked through Ben Gurion International Airport, officials pulled him aside and said that the security services wanted to speak with him.
    Kadi is among the leaders of a major pro-Palestinian advocacy group, and border authorities always question him when he travels to Israel to see his family. This time, however, something was different.

    During his second of what ended up being three interrogations, spanning more than eight hours, Kadi realized that much of what the interrogator knew about him had come from Canary Mission, an anonymously-run online blacklist that tries to frighten pro-Palestinian students and activists into silence by posting dossiers on their politics and personal lives.

    Kadi’s interrogator asked question after question about organizations listed on his Canary Mission profile. A pro-Palestinian organization that Kadi had been involved with but that wasn’t listed on his Canary Mission profile went unmentioned. Hours later, a third interrogator confirmed what Kadi had suspected: They were looking at his Canary Mission profile.

    Canary Mission has said since it went live in 2015 that it seeks to keep pro-Palestinian student activists from getting work after college. Yet in recent months, the threat it poses to college students and other activists has grown far more severe.
    The site, which is applauded by some pro-Israel advocates for harassing hardcore activists, is now being used as an intelligence source on thousands of students and academics by Israeli officials with immense power over people’s lives, the Forward has learned.
    Rumors of the border control officers’ use of the dossiers is keeping both Jewish and Palestinian activists from visiting relatives in Israel and the West Bank, and pro-Palestinian students say they are hesitant to express their views for fear of being unable to travel to see family.
    >> Twitter account of Canary Mission, group blacklisting pro-Palestinian activists, deactivated
    Meanwhile, back on campus, pro-Israel students are facing suspicion of colluding with Canary Mission. The students, and not the operatives and donors who run it from behind a veil of anonymity, are taking the blame for the site’s work.

    The dossiers
    Canary Mission’s profiles, of which there are now more than 2,000, can run for thousands of words. They consist of information about the activist, including photographs and screenshots, cobbled together from the internet and social media, along with descriptions of the groups with which they are affiliated.
    The phrase, “if you’re a racist, the world should know,” appears on the top of each page on the site.
    In addition to the thousands of profiles of pro-Palestinian students and professors, Canary Mission has also added a smattering of profiles of prominent white supremacists, including 13 members of Identity Evropa and a handful of others.
    The site’s profiles appear to be based entirely on open source intelligence that could be gathered by anyone with a computer. But the researchers are thorough, and some of what they post is exceptionally personal. Canary Mission’s profile of Esther Tszayg, a junior at Stanford University whose profile went online in May, includes two photographs of her as a young child and one taken for a campus fashion magazine.
    “It feels pretty awful and I really wish I wasn’t on that website,” said Tszayg, the president of Stanford’s chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, a pro-Palestinian group.
    Canary Mission’s profile of Rose Asaf, a leader of the local chapter of JVP at New York University, includes nearly 60 photographs of her and screenshots of her social media activities. It went online in November of 2017, when she was a college junior.
    Liz Jackson, a staff attorney at the legal advocacy group Palestine Legal, said that she was aware of one case in which Canary Mission posted old photographs a student had deleted a year before. The student believes that Canary Mission had been tracking her for over a year before they posted her profile.
    Some of what Canary Mission captures is genuinely troubling, including anti-Semitic social media posts by college students. But often, the eye-catching charges they make against their subjects don’t quite add up. A profile of an NYU freshman named Ari Kaplan charges him with “demonizing Israel at a Jewish event.” In fact, he had stood up at a Hillel dinner to make an announcement that was critical of President Trump’s decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.
    “It’s really weird when they’re trying to have someone who looks like me [as] the face of anti-Semitism,” said Kaplan, joking that he looks stereotypically Jewish.
    The border
    It’s these profiles that Israeli border control officers were looking at when they interrogated Kadi, who is in his 30s, and is a member of the steering committee of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights. Kadi is a U.S. citizen, but his mother and her family are Palestinian citizens of Israel.
    Kadi’s case is not unique. In April, before deporting Columbia University Law School professor Katherine Franke and telling her she will be permanently banned from the country, an Israeli border control officer showed her something on his phone that she says she is “80% sure” was her Canary Mission profile.
    The officer, Franke said, had accused her of traveling to Israel to “promote BDS.” When she said that wasn’t true, the officer accused her of lying, saying she was a “leader” of JVP. He held up the screen of his phone, which appeared to show her Canary Mission profile, and told her: “See, I know you’re lying.”
    Franke, who had previously sat on JVP’s academic advisory council steering committee but at that time had no formal role with the group, told the officer she was not on JVP’s staff. The officer deported her anyhow.
    “Canary Mission information is often neither reliable, nor complete, nor up to date,” said Israeli human rights attorney Emily Schaeffer Omer-Man, who represents activists and human rights advocates denied entry to Israel. Schaeffer Omer-Man says that the site, as such, shouldn’t legally qualify to be used as the basis for a deportation decision by border control officers, as it doesn’t meet reliability standards set by Israeli administrative law.
    Yet incidents like those experienced by Franke and Kadi are on the rise. Schaeffer Omer-Man said that clients for years have said that they suspected that their interrogators had seen their Canary Mission profiles, based on the questions they asked. More recently, she said, clients have told her that border control mentioned Canary Mission by name.
    Rumors of these incidents are spreading fear among campus activists.
    “I have family in Israel, and I don’t expect I will be let in again,” said Tszayg, the Stanford student.
    Palestine Legal’s Liz Jackson said that a large majority of people who get in touch with her organization about their Canary Mission profile are mostly worried about traveling across Israeli borders. “That really puts the muzzle on what people can say in the public sphere about Palestine,” Jackson said.
    Israel’s Ministry of the Interior, which oversees the country’s border control agency, did not respond to a question about whether it is ministry policy for its interrogators to use Canary Mission as a source of information on travelers. It’s possible that the officers are finding the Canary Mission dossiers on their own, by searching for travelers’ names on Google.
    But absent a denial from the interior ministry, it’s also possible that the dossiers are being distributed systematically. When Schaeffer Omer-Man reviews her clients’ interrogation files, as attorneys have the right to do under Israeli law, she has never seen a mention of Canary Mission. What she has seen, however, in summaries of the interrogations, are references to material provided by Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, the arm of the Israeli government tasked with opposing the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement worldwide, largely through a secret network of non-governmental organizations that help it defend Israel abroad.
    The Israeli connection
    When Gilad Erdan, the strategic affairs minister, took over his agency in 2015, the Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy, as it is officially known in English, had a tiny staff and a small budget. In just a few years, he has turned it into a major operation with a budget of over $100 million over two years, according to reporting by the Israeli investigative magazine the Seventh Eye.
    At the core of the MSA’s operation is a network of more than a hundred non-governmental organizations with which it shares information and resources. “A key part of the strategy is the belief that messaging by ‘real people’ is much more effective than plain old hasbara [propaganda] by official spokespersons,” said Itamar Benzaquen, an investigative journalist at the Seventh Eye, who has done extensive reporting on the MSA.
    The Forward has learned that the people who run Canary Mission are in direct contact with the leadership of Act.il, a pro-Israel propaganda app that is a part of the network, and has benefited from a publicity campaign funded by the MSA, according to Benzaquen’s reporting.
    The founder and CEO of Act.il, Yarden Ben Yosef, told the Forward last fall that he had been in touch with the people who run Canary Mission, and that they had visited his office in Israel.
    Neither Canary Mission nor the MSA responded to queries about their relationship to each other.
    The operators
    Canary Mission has jealously guarded the anonymity of its operators, funders, and administrators, and its cloak of secrecy has held up against the efforts of journalists and pro-Palestine activists alike.
    Two people, granted anonymity to speak about private conversations, have separately told the Forward that a British-born Jerusalem resident named Jonathan Bash identified himself to them as being in charge of Canary Mission.
    The Forward reported in 2015 that Bash was the CEO of a pro-Israel advocacy training organization, Video Activism, that appeared to have numerous ties to Canary Mission. At the time, Bash denied there was any relationship between the organizations.
    Neither Canary Mission nor Bash responded to requests for comment.
    The response
    As Canary Mission has become an increasingly prominent feature of the campus landscape, students have adapted to its threat. Increasingly, student governments vote on divestment resolutions by secret ballot, partly in an attempt to keep Canary Mission from profiling student representatives who vote in favor.
    Student activist groups, meanwhile, strategically mask the identities of vulnerable members. Abby Brook, who has been a leader in both the Students for Justice in Palestine and JVP groups at George Washington University, said that her fellow activists had strategized about who would be a public-facing leader of the group, and shoulder the risk of appearing on Canary Mission. When her profile went up last year, she was ready.
    “We made strategic decisions within our organization about who would be out-facing members and who would be in-facing members, knowing that Canary Missionwould have different consequences for different people,” Brook said. She said that the names of members of her chapter of SJP who are Palestinian are not listed publicly, and that those individuals have stayed off of Canary Mission.
    “We deliberately keep those people private,” Brook said. “I’m not Palestinian; I won’t be prohibited from being able to go home if I’m listed on Canary Mission. It has a lot less consequences for me as a white person.”
    While Brook’s Palestinian colleagues have been able to hide their identities while being active on the issue, others have chosen not to take the risk. Palestine Legal’s Jackson said that she has fielded questions from students who want to take political action in support of Palestinian rights, but have been afraid to do so because of what being listed on Canary Mission could mean for their families. One student activist told Jackson she wanted to be a leader in SJP, but asked Jackson if getting a Canary Mission profile could damage her family’s naturalization application.
    “I said I don’t know, honestly,” Jackson said.
    Another student told Jackson that she had wanted to write an op-ed about the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, a controversial piece of federal legislation that critics say could limit free speech, but that she was afraid to be published because she wanted to be able to go visit her grandparents in the West Bank, and couldn’t risk being profiled on Canary Mission.
    For students who do find themselves on Canary Mission, there is little recourse. Canary Mission has posted a handful of essays by “ex-canaries,” people who have written effusive apologies in return for being removed from the site. Jackson said that some profiles have been temporarily removed after the subjects filed copyright complaints, but that they were reposted later with the offending images removed.
    There do not appear to have been any defamation suits filed against Canary Mission. The authors of the profiles are careful about what they write, and pursuing a lawsuit would place a heavy burden on the plaintiff. “Students who are naturally concerned about the reputational damage of being smeared as a terrorist usually don’t want to go through a public trial, because that only makes it worse,” Jackson wrote in an email. “It’s tough to take on a bully, especially in court. But litigation is not off the table.”
    Campus spies
    In the meantime, Canary Mission’s utter secrecy has created an atmosphere of suspicion on campuses. While the operatives behind Canary Mission hide behind their well-protected anonymity, pro-Israel students take the blame for its activities, whether or not they were involved.
    A number of students listed on the site who spoke with the Forward named specific pro-Israel students on their campuses who they suspected of having informed on them to Canary Mission.
    Tilly Shames, who runs the local Hillel at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, said that Canary Mission has led to suspicion of pro-Israel students on her campus. “It has created greater mistrust and exclusion of pro-Israel students, who are assumed to be involved in Canary Mission, or sharing information with Canary Mission, when they are not,” Shames said.
    Kaplan, the NYU sophomore, said that he’s now wary talking to people who he knows are involved in pro-Israel activism on campus.
    “I’ll want to be open and warm with them, but it will be, how do I know this guy isn’t reporting to Canary Mission?” Kaplan said. He said he didn’t intend to let the suspicions fomented by Canary Mission keep him from spending time with other Jewish students.
    “I’m not going to live in fear; I love Jews,” he said. “I’m not going to not talk to Jewish students out of fear of being on Canary [Mission], but it would be better to have some solidarity from the Jewish community of NYU.”
    For more stories, go to www.forward.com. Sign up for the Forward’s daily newsletter at http://forward.com/newsletter/signup

  • #blockchain For #peace — Law & Governance Hackathon
    https://hackernoon.com/blockchain-for-peace-law-governance-hackathon-41bb784cc25f?source=rss---

    Blockchain for Peace is a community resource center for social entrepreneurs, researchers, and impact investors to create an open-source knowledge library.Where do coders, designers, and academics go to unleash their best ideas and push the limits of their creativity and intelligence? At #hackathons hundreds of people form teams to give birth to ideas in only 24 hours before presenting their creations to a panel of judges to win prizes. We’re excited to announce the dopest hackathon of the year, Blockchain for Peace’s “Law & Governance” hack at Bushwick Generator on July 27–29th. It will be co-hosted by Peace Accelerators, Stanford University, and Bushwick Blockchain Alliance, taking place two blocks from ConsenSys headquarters in the heart of NYC’s blockchain community.Signup now on (...)

    #government #sdgs

  • The #Opioid Timebomb: The #Sackler family and how their painkiller fortune helps bankroll London arts | London Evening Standard
    https://www.standard.co.uk/news/health/the-opioid-timebomb-the-sackler-family-and-how-their-painkiller-fortune-

    We sent all 33 non-profits the same key questions including: will they rename their public space (as some organisations have done when issues arose regarding former benefactors)? And will they accept future Sackler philanthropy?

    About half the respondents, including the Royal Opera House and the National Gallery, where Dame Theresa Sackler is respectively an honorary director and a patron, declined to answer either question.

    Of the rest, none said it planned to erase the Sackler name from its public space. The organisations’ positions were more guarded on future donations.

    Only the V&A, Oxford University, the Royal Court Theatre and the National Maritime Museum said outright that they were open to future Sackler grants.

    The V&A said: “The Sackler family continue to be a valuable donor to the V&A and we are grateful for their ongoing support.”

    Millions for London: Where Sackler money has gone
    MUSEUMS AND GALLERIES

    Serpentine Galleries

    Grants received/pledged: £5,500,000
    Used to fund (among other things): Serpentine Sackler Gallery
    Will you accept future Sackler grants? Won’t say

    Tate

    Grants received/pledged: £4,650,000
    Used to fund (among other things): Sackler Gallery, Sackler Escalators, Sackler Octagon
    Will you accept future Sackler grants? Won’t say

    Dulwich Picture Gallery

    Grants received/pledged: £3,491,000
    Used to fund (among other things): Sackler Centre for Arts Education
    Will you accept future Sackler grants? Won’t say

    V&A Museum

    Grants received/pledged: £2,500,000
    Used to fund (among other things): Sackler Courtyard
    Will you accept future Sackler grants? Yes

    The Design Museum

    Grants received/pledged: £1,500,000
    Used to fund (among other things): Sackler Library and Archive
    Will you accept future Sackler grants? No reply

    Natural History Museum

    Grants received/pledged: £1,255,000
    Used to fund (among other things): Sackler Biodiversity Imaging Laboratory
    Will you accept future Sackler grants? Subject to vetting that typically takes into account “reputational risk” and “all relevant new information about the donor in the public domain”

    National Gallery

    Grants received/pledged: £1,050,000
    Used to fund (among other things): Sackler Room (Room 34)
    Will you accept future Sackler grants? Won’t say

    National Portrait Gallery

    Grants received/pledged: £1,000,000
    Used to fund (among other things): Pledged grant still being vetted
    Will you accept future Sackler grants? Being vetted. Subject to vetting that typically takes into account “reputational risk” and “all relevant new information about the donor in the public domain”

    The Garden Museum

    Grants received/pledged: £850,000
    Used to fund (among other things): Sackler Garden
    Will you accept future Sackler grants? No reply

    National Maritime Museum

    Grants received/pledged: £230,000
    Used to fund (among other things): Sackler Research Fellowships
    Will you accept future Sackler grants? Yes

    Museum of London

    Grants received/pledged: Refused to disclose grants received
    Used to fund (among other things): Sackler Hall
    Will you accept future Sackler grants? Subject to vetting that typically takes into account “reputational risk” and “all relevant new information about the donor in the public domain”

    Royal Academy of Arts

    Grants received/pledged: Refused to disclose grants received
    Used to fund (among other things): Sackler Wing, Sackler Sculpture Gallery
    Will you accept future Sackler grants? Subject to vetting that typically takes into account “reputational risk” and “all relevant new information about the donor in the public domain”

    THE PERFORMING ARTS

    Old Vic

    Grants received/pledged: £2,817,000
    Used to fund (among other things): Productions and projects
    Will you accept future Sackler grants? Won’t say

    Royal Opera House

    Grants received/pledged: £2,500,000
    Used to fund (among other things): Won’t say
    Will you accept future Sackler grants? Won’t say

    National Theatre

    Grants received/pledged: £2,000,000
    Used to fund (among other things): Sackler Pavilion
    Will you accept future Sackler grants? Won’t say

    Shakespeare’s Globe

    Grants received/pledged: £1,660,000
    Used to fund (among other things): Sackler Studios
    Will you accept future Sackler grants? Won’t say

    Royal Court Theatre

    Grants received/pledged: £360,000
    Used to fund (among other things): Sackler Trust Trainee Scheme
    Will you accept future Sackler grants? Yes

    UNIVERSITIES/RESEARCH

    University of Oxford

    Grants received/pledged: £11,000,000
    Used to fund (among other things): Bodleian Sackler Library, Keeper of Antiquities
    Will you accept future Sackler grants? Yes

    University of Sussex

    Grants received/pledged: £8,400,000
    Used to fund (among other things): Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science
    Will you accept future Sackler grants? Won’t say

    King’s College, London

    Grants received/pledged: £6,950,000
    Used to fund (among other things): Sackler Institute for Translational Neurodevelopment
    Will you accept future Sackler grants? Subject to vetting that typically takes into account “reputational risk” and “all relevant new information about the donor in the public domain”

    The Francis Crick Institute

    Grants received/pledged: £5,000,000
    Used to fund (among other things): One-off funds raised via CRUK to help build the Crick
    Will you accept future Sackler grants? N/A

    UCL

    Grants received/pledged: £2,654,000
    Used to fund (among other things): Sackler Institute for Musculo-Skeletal Research
    Will you accept future Sackler grants? Subject to vetting that typically takes into account “reputational risk” and “all relevant new information about the donor in the public domain”

    Royal College of Art

    Grants received/pledged: £2,500,000
    Used to fund (among other things): Sackler Building
    Will you accept future Sackler grants? Subject to vetting that typically takes into account “reputational risk” and “all relevant new information about the donor in the public domain”

    The Courtauld Institute of Art

    Grants received/pledged: £1,170,000
    Used to fund (among other things): Sackler Research Fellowship, Sackler Lecture Series
    Will you accept future Sackler grants? Won’t say

    Royal Ballet School

    Grants received/pledged: £1,000,000
    Used to fund (among other things): Won’t say
    Will you accept future Sackler grants? Won’t say

    Imperial College London

    Grants received/pledged: £618,000
    Used to fund (among other things): Knee research
    Will you accept future Sackler grants? Subject to vetting that typically takes into account “reputational risk” and “all relevant new information about the donor in the public domain”

    Old Royal Naval College

    Grants received/pledged: £500,000
    Used to fund (among other things): Sackler Gallery
    Will you accept future Sackler grants? Won’t say

    OTHER

    Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

    Grants received/pledged: £3,100,000
    Used to fund (among other things): Sackler Crossing footbridge
    Will you accept future Sackler grants? Subject to vetting that typically takes into account “reputational risk” and “all relevant new information about the donor in the public domain”

    Moorfields Eye Hospital

    Grants received/pledged: £3,000,000
    Used to fund (among other things): New eye centre (pledged only)
    Will you accept future Sackler grants? Won’t say

    The London Library

    Grants received/pledged: £1,000,000
    Used to fund (among other things): The Sackler Study
    Will you accept future Sackler grants? Won’t say

    The Prince’s Trust

    Grants received/pledged: £775,000
    Used to fund (among other things): Programmes for disadvantaged youth
    Will you accept future Sackler grants? Subject to vetting that typically takes into account “reputational risk” and “all relevant new information about the donor in the public domain”

    Westminster Abbey

    Grants received/pledged: £500,000
    Used to fund (among other things): Restoration of Henry VII Chapel
    Will you accept future Sackler grants? Won’t say

    Royal Hospital for Neurodisability

    Grants received/pledged: £350,000
    Used to fund (among other things): Won’t say
    Will you accept future Sackler grants? No reply

    cc @hlc

    • Rob Reich, an ethics professor at Stanford University, has said that non-profits taking future Sackler donations could be seen as being “complicit in the reputation-laundering of the donor”.

      La liste ci dessus ne concerne que la GB mais en France la liste doit être longue aussi et encore plus aux USA et probablement un peu partout dans le monde.

      But our FoI requests revealed that at least one major Sackler donation has been held up in the vetting process: namely a £1 million grant for the National Portrait Gallery.

      The gallery said: “The Sackler Trust pledged a £1 million grant in June 2016 for a future project, but no funds have been received as this is still being vetted as part of our internal review process.

      Each gift is assessed on a case-by-case basis and where necessary, further information and advice is sought from third parties.”

      It added that its ethical fundraising policy sets out “unacceptable sources of funding” and examines the risk involved in “accepting support which may cause significant potential damage to the gallery’s reputation”.

    • What do the Sacklers say in their defence? The three brothers who founded Purdue in the Fifties — Arthur, Mortimer and Raymond — are dead but their descendants have conflicting views.

      Arthur’s daughter Elizabeth Sackler, 70, said her side of the family had not benefited a jot from OxyContin, which was invented after they were bought out in the wake of her father’s death in 1987. She has called the OxyContin fortune “morally abhorrent”.

      Her stepmother, British-born Jillian Sackler, who lives in New York and is a trustee at the Royal Academy of Arts, has called on the other branches of the family to acknowledge their “moral duty to help make this right and to atone for mistakes made”.

      But the OxyContin-rich branches of the family have remained silent. Representatives of Mortimer’s branch — the London Sacklers — said nobody was willing to speak on their behalf and referred us to Purdue’s communications director, Robert Josephson. He confirmed that the US-based Sacklers — Raymond’s branch — would not speak to us either, but that a Purdue spokesman would answer our questions.

      We asked the Purdue spokesman: does Purdue, and by extension the Sacklers, acknowledge the opioid crisis and a role in it?

      “Absolutely we acknowledge there is an opioid crisis,” he said, from Purdue’s HQ in Stamford, Connecticut. “But what’s driving the deaths is illicitly manufactured #fentanyl from China. It’s extremely potent and mixed with all sorts of stuff.”

      –—

      Philip Hopwood, 56, whose addiction to OxyContin and other opioids destroyed his £3 million business and his marriage, said: “If the Sackler family had a shred of decency, they would divert their philanthropy to help people addicted to the drugs they continue to make their fortune from.

      “The non-profits should be ashamed. At the very least they should be honest about the source of their funds.

      The V&A should rename their courtyard the OxyContin Courtyard and the Serpentine should call their gallery the OxyContin Gallery.

      “The money that built these public spaces comes from a drug that is killing people and ruining lives. They can no longer turn a blind eye. I’d feel sick to walk into a Sackler-named space.”

  • Facebook Building 8 explored data sharing agreement with hospitals
    https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/05/facebook-building-8-explored-data-sharing-agreement-with-hospitals.html

    CB FULL Christina Farr 180405
    Facebook health partnership on hold on concerns of data privacy
    15 Hours Ago | 05:37

    Facebook has asked several major U.S. hospitals to share anonymized data about their patients, such as illnesses and prescription info, for a proposed research project. Facebook was intending to match it up with user data it had collected, and help the hospitals figure out which patients might need special care or treatment.

    The proposal never went past the planning phases and has been put on pause after the Cambridge Analytica data leak scandal raised public concerns over how Facebook and others collect and use detailed information about Facebook users.

    But as recently as last month, the company was talking to several health organizations, including Stanford Medical School and American College of Cardiology, about signing the data-sharing agreement.

    While the data shared would obscure personally identifiable information, such as the patient’s name, Facebook proposed using a common computer science technique called “hashing” to match individuals who existed in both sets. Facebook says the data would have been used only for research conducted by the medical community.

    The project could have raised new concerns about the massive amount of data Facebook collects about its users, and how this data can be used in ways users never expected.

    Facebook provided a quote from Cathleen Gates, the interim CEO of the American College of Cardiology, explaining the possible benefits of the plan:

    “For the first time in history, people are sharing information about themselves online in ways that may help determine how to improve their health. As part of its mission to transform cardiovascular care and improve heart health, the American College of Cardiology has been engaged in discussions with Facebook around the use of anonymized Facebook data, coupled with anonymized ACC data, to further scientific research on the ways social media can aid in the prevention and treatment of heart disease—the #1 cause of death in the world. This partnership is in the very early phases as we work on both sides to ensure privacy, transparency and scientific rigor. No data has been shared between any parties.”

    Health systems are notoriously careful about sharing patient health information, in part because of state and federal patient privacy laws that are designed to ensure that people’s sensitive medical information doesn’t end up in the wrong hands.

    To address these privacy laws and concerns, Facebook proposed to obscure personally identifiable information, such as names, in the data being shared by both sides.

    When asked about the plans, Facebook provided the following statement:

    “The medical industry has long understood that there are general health benefits to having a close-knit circle of family and friends. But deeper research into this link is needed to help medical professionals develop specific treatment and intervention plans that take social connection into account.”

    “With this in mind, last year Facebook began discussions with leading medical institutions, including the American College of Cardiology and the Stanford University School of Medicine, to explore whether scientific research using anonymized Facebook data could help the medical community advance our understanding in this area. This work has not progressed past the planning phase, and we have not received, shared, or analyzed anyone’s data.”

    “Last month we decided that we should pause these discussions so we can focus on other important work, including doing a better job of protecting people’s data and being clearer with them about how that data is used in our products and services.”

    Facebook has taken only tentative steps into the health sector thus far, such as its campaign to promote organ donation through the social network. It also has a growing “Facebook health” team based in New York that is pitching pharmaceutical companies to invest its ample ad budget into Facebook by targeting users who “liked” a health advocacy page, or fits a certain demographic profile.

    #Facebook #Santé_publique #Données_médicales #Data_madness

  • The Secretive Family Making Billions From the Opioid Crisis
    https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a12775932/sackler-family-oxycontin

    The Sackler Courtyard is the latest addition to an impressive portfolio. There’s the Sackler Wing at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which houses the majestic Temple of Dendur, a sandstone shrine from ancient Egypt; additional Sackler wings at the Louvre and the Royal Academy; stand-alone Sackler museums at Harvard and Peking Universities; and named Sackler galleries at the Smithsonian, the Serpentine, and Oxford’s Ashmolean. The Guggenheim in New York has a Sackler Center, and the American Museum of Natural History has a Sackler Educational Lab. Members of the family, legendary in museum circles for their pursuit of naming rights, have also underwritten projects of a more modest caliber—a Sackler Staircase at Berlin’s Jewish Museum; a Sackler Escalator at the Tate Modern; a Sackler Crossing in Kew Gardens. A popular species of pink rose is named after a Sackler. So is an asteroid.

    The Sackler name is no less prominent among the emerald quads of higher education, where it’s possible to receive degrees from Sackler schools, participate in Sackler colloquiums, take courses from professors with endowed Sackler chairs, and attend annual Sackler lectures on topics such as theoretical astrophysics and human rights. The Sackler Institute for Nutrition Science supports research on obesity and micronutrient deficiencies. Meanwhile, the Sackler institutes at Cornell, Columbia, McGill, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Sussex, and King’s College London tackle psychobiology, with an emphasis on early childhood development.

    The Sacklers’ philanthropy differs from that of civic populists like Andrew Carnegie, who built hundreds of libraries in small towns, and Bill Gates, whose foundation ministers to global masses. Instead, the family has donated its fortune to blue-chip brands, braiding the family name into the patronage network of the world’s most prestigious, well-endowed institutions. The Sackler name is everywhere, evoking automatic reverence; the Sacklers themselves, however, are rarely seen.

    Even so, hardly anyone associates the Sackler name with their company’s lone blockbuster drug. “The Fords, Hewletts, Packards, Johnsons—all those families put their name on their product because they were proud,” said Keith Humphreys, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine who has written extensively about the opioid crisis. “The Sacklers have hidden their connection to their product. They don’t call it ‘Sackler Pharma.’ They don’t call their pills ‘Sackler pills.’ And when they’re questioned, they say, ‘Well, it’s a privately held firm, we’re a family, we like to keep our privacy, you understand.’ ”

    By any assessment, the family’s leaders have pulled off three of the great marketing triumphs of the modern era: The first is selling OxyContin; the second is promoting the Sackler name; and the third is ensuring that, as far as the public is aware, the first and the second have nothing to do with one another.

    #Opioides #Sackler #Communication

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

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

    #algorithme #biométrie #facial #discrimination

  • Does Aging Have a Reset Button ? - Issue 57 : Communities
    http://nautil.us/issue/57/communities/does-aging-have-a-reset-button

    Part of Vittorio Sebastiano’s job is to babysit a few million stem cells. The research professor of reproductive biology at Stanford University keeps the cells warm and moist deep inside the Lorry I. Lokey Stem Cell Research Building, one of the nation’s largest stem cell facilities. He’s joined there by an army of researchers, each with their own goals. His own research program is nothing if not ambitious: He wants to reverse aging in humans. Stem cells are the Gary Oldman of cell types. They can reprogram themselves to carry out the function of virtually any other type of cell, and play a vital role in early development. This functional reprogramming is usually accompanied by an age reset, down to zero. Sebastiano figures that if he can separate these different kinds of reprogramming, (...)

  • »Visual Mining« : une IA et beaucoup d’intelligence humaine
    https://linc.cnil.fr/fr/visual-mining-une-ia-et-beaucoup-dintelligence-humaine

    L’analyse de données visuelles et la reconnaissance des modèles de véhicules dans 50 millions d’images de Google Street View aux Etats-Unis permettent déjà d’inférer des données sensibles sur les habitants de certains quartiers. Une équipe de chercheurs de Stanford University a analysé par des algorithmes d’intelligence artificielle 50 millions d’images géolocalisées de Google Street View, pour en déduire des informations sur les habitants des quartiers d’où sont tirées les images. L’objectif pour les (...)

    #Google #Amazon #StreetView #AmazonMechanicalTurk #algorithme #domination #profiling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Women were the key to spreading culture around Europe | Daily Mail Online (septembre 2017)
    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4850532/Women-key-spreading-culture-Europe.html

    Women spread culture and knowledge around Europe 4,000 years ago while men stayed at home, according to ancient bone records
    • Families were formed in a surprising manner in the Lechtal area, now in Germany
    • Study found women travelled far and wide from home villages to start families
    • They brought with them new cultural ideas, while men tended to stay near home
    • The so-called ’patrilocal’ pattern combined with individual female mobility was not a temporary phenomenon, but persisted over a period of 800 years

    Women were the ‘driving force’ spreading new ideas and technologies across Britain and Europe during the Stone Age – while their menfolk stayed home, a surprising new study has found.

    Previous ideas of how our primitive ancestors travelled have been shaken by analysis of bones and teeth from ancient peoples.

    They show that many females found buried in ancient burial grounds made long journeys to distant villages far from the homesteads where they were born and grew up.

    • Female exogamy and gene pool diversification at the transition from the Final Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age in central Europe
      http://www.pnas.org/content/114/38/10083.abstract

      Significance
      Paleogenetic and isotope data from human remains shed new light on residential rules revealing patrilocality and high female mobility in European prehistory. We show the crucial role of this institution and its impact on the transformation of population compositions over several hundred years.

      Evidence for an epoch-transgressing maternal relationship between two individuals demonstrates long-debated population continuity from the central European Neolithic to the Bronze Age. We demonstrate that a simple notion of “migration” cannot explain the complex human mobility of third millennium BCE societies in Eurasia. On the contrary, it appears that part of what archaeologists understand as migration is the result of large-scale institutionalized and possibly sex- and age-related individual mobility.

      Abstract
      Human mobility has been vigorously debated as a key factor for the spread of bronze technology and profound changes in burial practices as well as material culture in central Europe at the transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age. However, the relevance of individual residential changes and their importance among specific age and sex groups are still poorly understood. Here, we present ancient DNA analysis, stable isotope data of oxygen, and radiogenic isotope ratios of strontium for 84 radiocarbon-dated skeletons from seven archaeological sites of the Late Neolithic Bell Beaker Complex and the Early Bronze Age from the Lech River valley in southern Bavaria, Germany. Complete mitochondrial genomes documented a diversification of maternal lineages over time. The isotope ratios disclosed the majority of the females to be nonlocal, while this is the case for only a few males and subadults. Most nonlocal females arrived in the study area as adults, but we do not detect their offspring among the sampled individuals.

      The striking patterns of patrilocality and female exogamy prevailed over at least 800 y between about 2500 and 1700 BC. The persisting residential rules and even a direct kinship relation across the transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age add to the archaeological evidence of continuing traditions from the Bell Beaker Complex to the Early Bronze Age. The results also attest to female mobility as a driving force for regional and supraregional communication and exchange at the dawn of the European metal ages.

    • Version plus musclée du Telegraph

      Forget the wandering warrior: Bronze Age women travelled the world while men stayed at home
      http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/09/04/forget-wandering-warrior-bronze-age-women-travelled-world-men

      The concept that men stay at home while independent women venture out into the world is considered a rather modern phenomenon.

      But a study suggests that in fact, the practice was rooted in ancient times, when Bronze Age men stayed at home while adventurous women were the key to spreading culture and ideas.

      The research reveals that over a period of some 800 years, European women travelled between 300km and 500km from their home villages to start families, while men tended to stay near where they were born.

    • Et un point de vue absolument inverse (article de mars 2017), qui reprend l’hypothèse de migrations
      • mixtes, lors de la transition néolithique (7500 ans AA (avant aujourd’hui)
      • essentiellement masculines, pour le passage à l’âge du bronze (5000 ans AA)

      Genetic data show mainly men migrated to Europe from the Pontic steppe 5,000 years ago - Vetenskapsområdet för teknik och naturvetenskap - Uppsala universitet
      http://www.teknat.uu.se/nyheter/nyhetsdetaljsida/?id=8264&typ=artikel

      Researchers from Uppsala and Stanford University investigated the genetic ancestry on the sex-specifically inherited X chromosome and the autosomes in 20 early Neolithic and 16 Late Neolithic/Bronze Age human remains. Contrary to previous hypotheses suggesting patrilocality (social system in which a family resides near the man’s parents) of many agricultural populations, they found no evidence of sex-biased admixture during the migration that spread farming across Europe during the early Neolithic.

      – For later migrations from the Pontic steppe during the early Bronze Age, however, we find a dramatic male bias. There are simply too few X-chromosomes from the migrants, which points to around ten migrating males for every migrating female, says Mattias Jakobsson, professor of Genetics at the Department of Organismal Biology, Uppsala University.

    • Ancient X chromosomes reveal contrasting sex bias in Neolithic and Bronze Age Eurasian migrations
      http://www.pnas.org/content/114/10/2657.full



      Male (blue) and female (red) contribution during the early Neolithic and later Neolithic/Bronze Age migrations.
      Foto/bild: Mattias Jakobsson

      Significance
      Studies of differing female and male demographic histories on the basis of ancient genomes can provide insight into the social structures and cultural interactions during major events in human prehistory. We consider the sex-specific demography of two of the largest migrations in recent European prehistory. Using genome-wide ancient genetic data from multiple Eurasian populations spanning the last 10,000 years, we find no evidence of sex-biased migrations from Anatolia, despite the shift to patrilocality associated with the spread of farming. In contrast, we infer a massive male-biased migration from the steppe during the late Neolithic and Bronze Age. The contrasting patterns of sex-specific migration during these two migrations suggest that different sociocultural processes drove the two events.

       Abstract
      Dramatic events in human prehistory, such as the spread of agriculture to Europe from Anatolia and the late Neolithic/Bronze Age migration from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, can be investigated using patterns of genetic variation among the people who lived in those times. In particular, studies of differing female and male demographic histories on the basis of ancient genomes can provide information about complexities of social structures and cultural interactions in prehistoric populations. We use a mechanistic admixture model to compare the sex-specifically–inherited X chromosome with the autosomes in 20 early Neolithic and 16 late Neolithic/Bronze Age human remains. Contrary to previous hypotheses suggested by the patrilocality of many agricultural populations, we find no evidence of sex-biased admixture during the migration that spread farming across Europe during the early Neolithic. For later migrations from the Pontic Steppe during the late Neolithic/Bronze Age, however, we estimate a dramatic male bias, with approximately five to 14 migrating males for every migrating female. We find evidence of ongoing, primarily male, migration from the steppe to central Europe over a period of multiple generations, with a level of sex bias that excludes a pulse migration during a single generation. The contrasting patterns of sex-specific migration during these two migrations suggest a view of differing cultural histories in which the Neolithic transition was driven by mass migration of both males and females in roughly equal numbers, perhaps whole families, whereas the later Bronze Age migration and cultural shift were instead driven by male migration, potentially connected to new technology and conquest.

  • Advances in AI are used to spot signs of sexuality
    Machines that read faces are coming
    Research at Stanford University by Michal Kosinski and Yilun Wang has shown that machine vision can infer sexual orientation by analysing people’s faces.
    https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21728614-machines-read-faces-are-coming-advances-ai-are-used-spot-signs

    Deep neural networks are more accurate than humans at detecting sexual orientation from facial images.
    https://osf.io/zn79k

    The study has limitations. Firstly, images from a dating site are likely to be particularly revealing of sexual orientation. The 91% accuracy rate only applies when one of the two men whose images are shown is known to be gay. Outside the lab the accuracy rate would be much lower. To demonstrate this weakness, the researchers selected 1,000 men at random with at least five photographs, but in a ratio of gay to straight that more accurately reflects the real world; approximately seven in every 100. When asked to select the 100 males most likely to be gay, only 47 of those chosen by the system actually were, meaning that the system ranked some straight men as more likely to be gay than men who actually are.

    #genre #ai #orientation #réseaux_de_neurones