organization:stanford

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

Does Theranos Mark the Peak of the Silicon Valley Bubble? - Issue 60: Searches
▻http://nautil.us/issue/60/searches/does-theranos-mark-the-peak-of-the-silicon-valley-bubble

http://static.nautil.us/14783_7a60da111333447a4ab4bb31897e314c.png

Silicon Valley has a term for startups that reach the $1 billion valuation mark: unicorns. The term is instructive. It suggests not only that hugely successful startups are rare, but also that there’s something unreal about them. There’s no recent Valley startup that satisfies both dimensions better than Theranos. Founded by a 19-year-old Stanford dropout, Elizabeth Holmes, who went on to become the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, it raised nearly a billion dollars from investors and was valued at $10 billion at its peak. It claimed to have developed technology that dramatically increased the affordability, convenience, and speed of blood testing. It partnered with Safeway and Walgreens, which together spent hundreds of millions of dollars building in-store clinics that (...)

Des hippies aux Gafam : « L’utopie numérique doit être réenchantée »
▻https://www.nouvelobs.com/societe/mai-68/20180511.OBS6527/des-hippies-aux-gafam-l-utopie-numerique-doit-etre-reenchantee.html

https://media.nouvelobs.com/referentiel/1200x630/16516629.jpg

Ce n’est pas un hasard si la Silicon Valley s’est implantée tout près de San Francisco, foyer de la contre-culture américaine des années 1960 : la pensée qui a présidé au développement de la micro-informatique puis d’Internet doit beaucoup aux hippies, comme l’a bien montré le sociologue américain Fred Turner. Mais les rêves des années 1970 et 1980, qui faisaient des technologies numériques une porte d’entrée vers un monde meilleur, ont volé en éclats face aux réalités de la nouvelle économie.

Fred Turner est professeur de sciences de la communication et d’histoire des médias à l’université Stanford, en Californie. Outre « Aux sources de l’utopie numérique », un autre de ses ouvrages a été traduit en français : « le Cercle démocratique. Le design multimédia, de la Seconde Guerre mondiale aux années psychédéliques » (C&F Éditions, 2016).

#Fred_Turner #C&F_éditions #Utopie #Silicon_Valley

La carte d’Urbano Monte (1587) - Philippe Rivière - Visionscarto
►https://visionscarto.net/urbano-monte-fr

https://visionscarto.net/local/cache-vignettes/L480xH156/arton497-787f5.jpg?1523783368

La carte d’Urbano Monte est l’un des premiers, et certainement l’un des plus extraordinaires, planisphères de l’histoire. Dessinée à la main, en 1587, elle forme un Atlas de 60 feuilles, dont seuls deux exemplaires existent au monde.

La collection de cartes David Rumsey de l’université de Stanford (Californie), vient de numériser l’atlas d’Urbano Monte, rédigé en 1587 à Milan. Comme 85 000 autres documents de cette collection, cette carte historique est désormais disponible sur son site Internet sous forme de fichiers d’une très grande qualité (définition et couleurs).

Nous vous proposons de la découvrir ci-dessous, en choisissant dans le menu la projection qui vous sied, et, avec la souris, l’angle de vue.

#Cartographie #Installation_artistique #Art

Lundi matin sur visionscarto.net - Philippe Rivière a réalisé un assemblage de la carte d’Urbano Monte, qui est l’un des premiers, et certainement l’un des plus extraordinaires, planisphères de l’histoire.

Dessinée à la main, en 1587, elle forme un Atlas de 60 feuilles dont seuls deux exemplaires existent au monde,

Nous vous proposons de la découvrir ci-dessous, en choisissant dans le menu la projection qui vous sied, et, avec la souris, l’angle de vue.

En français
►https://visionscarto.net/urbano-monte-fr

In english
▻https://visionscarto.net/urbano-monte

En español
▻https://visionscarto.net/el-mapa-de-urbano-monte

L’ensemble des planches ont récemment été numérisé par la collection David Rumsey - ►https://www.davidrumsey.com

https://dl.dropbox.com/s/ljhe73s2q39aa6o/Capture%20d%E2%80%99%C3%A9cran%202018-04-16%20%C3%A0%2013.59.24.png?dl=0

Silicon Valley’s Sixty-Year Love Affair with the Word “Tool” | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/silicon-valleys-sixty-year-love-affair-with-the-word-tool

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5ace316ca78110708645d61d/16:9/w_1200,h_630,c_limit/Weigel-Zuckerberg-changing-definition-of-Tool.jpg

In the written remarks that Mark Zuckerberg, the C.E.O. of Facebook, submitted in advance of his testimony on Capitol Hill this week, he used the word “tool” eleven times. “As Facebook has grown, people everywhere have gotten a powerful new tool to stay connected to the people they love, make their voices heard, and build communities and businesses,” Zuckerberg wrote. “We have a responsibility to not just build tools, but to make sure those tools are used for good.” Later, he added, “I don’t want anyone to use our tools to undermine democracy.” In his testimony before the Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committees on Tuesday, Zuckerberg referred to “these tools,” “those tools, “any tool,” “technical tools,” and—thirteen times—“A.I. tools.” On Wednesday, at a separate hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, a congressman from Florida told Zuckerberg, “Work on those tools as soon as possible, please.”

What’s in a tool? The Oxford English Dictionary will tell you that the English word is more than a thousand years old and that, since the mid-sixteenth century, it has been used as the slur that we’re familiar with today.

In Silicon Valley, according to Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor at the University of Virginia whose book about Facebook, “Antisocial Media,” is due out in September, “Tools are technologies that generate other technologies.” When I asked an engineer friend who builds “developer tools” for his definition, he noted that a tool is distinct from a product, since a product is “experienced rather than used.” The iTunes Store, he said, is a product: “there are lots of songs you can download, but it’s just a static list.” A Web browser, by contrast, is a tool, because “the last mile of its use is underspecified.”

Yesterday was not Zuckerberg’s first time being called in and interrogated about a Web site that he created. In the fall of 2003, when he was a sophomore at Harvard, a disciplinary body called the Ad Board summoned him to answer questions about Facemash, the Facebook precursor that he had just released. Using I.D. photos of female undergraduates scraped from the university’s online directories, Facemash presented users with pairs of women and asked them to rank who was “hotter.” (“Were we let in for our looks? No,” the site proclaimed. “Will we be judged on them? Yes.”) By 10 P.M. on the day Facemash launched, some four hundred and fifty visitors had cast at least twenty-two thousand votes. Several student groups, including Fuerza Latina and the Harvard Association of Black Women, led an outcry. But Zuckerberg insisted to the Ad Board that he had not intended to “insult” anyone. As the student newspaper, the Crimson, reported, “The programming and algorithms that made the site function were Zuckerberg’s primary interest in creating it.” The point of Facemash was to make a tool. The fact that it got sharpened on the faces of fellow-students was incidental.

The exaltation of tools has a long history in the Bay Area, going back to the late nineteen-sixties, when hippie counterculture intersected with early experiments in personal computing. In particular, the word got its cachet from the “Whole Earth Catalog,” a compendium of product reviews for commune dwellers that appeared several times a year, starting in 1968, and then sporadically after 1972. Its slogan: “Access to tools.” The publisher of the “Catalog,” Stewart Brand—a Stanford-trained biologist turned hippie visionary and entrepreneur—would later call it “the first instance of desktop publishing.” Steve Jobs, in his 2005 commencement address at Stanford, described it as “one of the bibles of my generation.” The “Catalog,” Jobs said, was “Google in paperback form, thirty-five years before Google came along. It was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and notions.” Jobs’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, quotes Brand as saying that the Apple co-founder was a kindred spirit; in designing products, Jobs “got the notion of tools for human use.” With the rise of personal computing, the term “tools” migrated from communes to software. The generation of tech leaders who grew up taking P.C.s and the World Wide Web for granted nevertheless inherited an admiration for Brand. In 2016, for instance, Facebook’s head of product, Chris Cox, joined him onstage at the Aspen Ideas Festival to give a talk titled “Connecting the Next Billion.”

Tool talk encodes an entire attitude to politics—namely, a rejection of politics in favor of tinkering. In the sixties, Brand and the “Whole Earth Catalog” presented tools as an alternative to activism. Unlike his contemporaries in the antiwar, civil-rights, and women’s movements, Brand was not interested in gender, race, class, or imperialism. The transformations that he sought were personal, not political. In defining the purpose of the “Catalog,” he wrote, “a realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.” Like Zuckerberg, Brand saw tools as a neutral means to engage any and every user. “Whole Earth eschewed politics and pushed grassroots direct power—tools and skills,” he later wrote. If people got good enough tools to build the communities they wanted, politics would take care of itself.

#Facebook #Fred_Turner #Stewart_Brand #Tools
This idea became highly influential in the nineties, as the Stanford historian Fred Turner demonstrates in his book “From Counterculture to Cyberculture.” Through Wired magazine, which was founded by Brand’s collaborator Kevin Kelly, the message reached not just Silicon Valley but also Washington. The idea that tools were preferable to politics found a ready audience in a decade of deregulation. The sense that the Web was somehow above or beyond politics justified laws that privatized Internet infrastructure and exempted sites from the kinds of oversight that governed traditional publishers. In other words, Brand’s philosophy helped create the climate in which Facebook, Google, and Twitter could become the vast monopolies that they are today—a climate in which dubious political ads on these platforms, and their casual attitudes toward sharing user data, could pass mostly unnoticed. As Turner put it in a recent interview with Logic magazine (of which I am a co-founder), Brand and Wired persuaded lawmakers that Silicon Valley was the home of the future. “Why regulate the future?” Turner asked. “Who wants to do that?”

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

https://fm.cnbc.com/applications/cnbc.com/resources/img/editorial/2018/04/05/105112385-GettyImages-622247700.1910x1000.jpg

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 New York Times on race and class: What determines social mobility in America? - World Socialist Web Site

▻https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/04/05/ineq-a05.html

The New York Times on race and class: What determines social mobility in America?

Part one
By Eric London
5 April 2018

This is the first part of a two-part article.

In recent weeks, the New York Times has promoted a new study by researchers from the US Census Bureau, Harvard and Stanford that examines the impact of race and income inequality in the United States over the course of an entire generation. The March 2018 working paper, published by the Equality of Opportunity Project, is titled “Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An intergenerational perspective.”

#race #classe #nation#états-unis #mobilité

How to biohack your intelligence — with everything from sex to modafinil to MDMA
▻https://hackernoon.com/biohack-your-intelligence-now-or-become-obsolete-97cdd15e395f?source=rss

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*LpUcnFkresOG4sMvsx9u8g.png

I had some free time over the holidays and wrote this article to showcase, on the basis of a personal story, many highly actionable, science-based, approaches and tools that can be used to significantly enhance intelligence.In my case these include legal/illegal drugs; using sex as a biohacking tool; drinking ketone esters; using beta blockers or testosterone to gain advantage in negotiations; eating only once a day; and a lot more.Editor’s Note: This story contains some R-rated approaches to bio-hacking. We published it because we want readers to be informed of what’s actually happening in the technology industry. Proceed at your own risk :-)BackgroundI’m a cliche Silicon Valley techie —Russian, Stanford, YCombinator, started a couple large/successful companies, working in artificial (...)

#life #life-lessons #health #personal-development #self-improvement

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

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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

L’empire des GAFA
▻https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/le-journal-des-idees/le-journal-des-idees-du-mercredi-07-mars-2018

https://cdn.radiofrance.fr/s3/cruiser-production/2018/03/7399902c-9e13-4aa2-a5e0-aefd0c40f02d/738_000_sx0i0.jpg

Le Journal des idées par Jacques Munier

La rencontre entre la culture militaire et la contre-culture

Fred Turner, directeur du département des sciences de la communication de l’université Stanford retrace l’histoire de la Silicon Valley, ainsi nommée en référence au matériau de base des composants électroniques, le silicium. La côte ouest des Etats-Unis est traditionnellement investie par l’industrie militaire, dont la prospérité a largement bénéficié aux entreprises technologiques locales, c’est pourquoi l’historien résume l’efflorescence de l’économie numérique dans les années 60 comme le fruit paradoxal de « la rencontre entre la culture militaire et la contre-culture ». Ce sont des ingénieurs militaires qui ont fourni leurs premières puces électroniques à Steve Jobs et Steve Wozniak, les fondateurs d’Apple. « Historiquement, la culture militaire est bien plus ouverte que les gens ne l’imaginent – explique Fred Turner – et la contre-culture est, dans son versant californien, bien plus à l’aise avec l’idée de commerce que ce qu’on pense. » Mais pour le spécialiste d’histoire culturelle, si des sociétés comme Facebook et Google ont été créées au départ autour de l’idée de bien public, elles se sont progressivement enfermées dans un « palindrome protestant ». Fournir de l’information est bon pour le monde, mais puisque c’est Google qui la fournit, ce qui est bon pour le monde est bon pour Google et inversement. « Et l’argent que nous gagnons en faisant cela est un signe de notre bonté. » Une déclinaison à l’échelle planétaire de l’éthique protestante du capitalisme façon Max Weber, où le chiffre d’affaire est l’indice de l’impact positif sur le monde. Pourtant, observe Fred Turner, Apple, « l’un des membres les plus cyniques de la Vallée se vend comme une entreprise utopiste, alors qu’elle est tout sauf cela. Il suffit d’observer ses pratiques d’approvisionnement et le mal qu’elle fait à l’environnement pour construire les IPhone ».

#Silicon_valley #Fred_Turner

#Facebook et la recherche : le « quasi État »
▻http://www.internetactu.net/2018/03/07/facebook-et-la-recherche-le-quasi-etat

Voilà longtemps que les données de Facebook sont un inestimable matériau de recherche. Mais la politique de l’entreprise de Mark Zuckerberg en la matière est digne de celle d’un État. En proposant un état civil de substitution, en organisant le recensement quasi exhaustif de la population américaine (et du monde, (...)

#Recherches #Tribune #science

How Hidden Social Contexts Influence Your Genetics - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/how-hidden-social-contexts-influence-your-genetics

http://static.nautil.us/14183_37bd8b4bb1cea47935613348ad16c660.jpg

Educational attainment has some qualitatively unique features that we’re going to have to be sensitive to when we attempt to study the genetics of it.Photograph by Joey Yee / FlickrWhat if a wound of yours, a pierced ear, say, healed at a different rate depending on who was around you? A 2017 study explored this question, albeit with mice. Researchers paired mice together, punching holes in their ears, and tracked the rate of recovery. They found that the genome of a cagemate affected how fast their ears healed.Benjamin Domingue, an assistant professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education who studies sociogenomics, was fascinated by what the researchers called an “indirect” or “social” genetic effect. He wanted to see if similar things were going on in humans. Through the National (...)

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

I’m a Stanford professor accused of being part of a ’terrorist group’. McCarthyism is back | David Palumbo-Liu | Opinion | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/08/stanford-professor-mccarthyism-antifa

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/e8acc2a387c31dd8df8b3cd927c7c1986ee08ec8/0_42_5616_3370/master/5616.jpg?w=1200&h=630&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=crop&crop=faces%2Centropy&bm=normal&ba=bottom%2Cleft&blend64=aHR0cHM6Ly91cGxvYWRzLmd1aW0uY28udWsvMjAxOC8wMS8zMS9mYWNlYm9va19vcGluaW9ucy5wbmc&s=874e481e8cf7083f7c9087ecae882792

As a scholar-activist working on issues such as sexual assault, Palestine, and anti-fascism, I am used to receiving abusive messages and being publicly maligned. Now, however, attacks on me have reached troubling new heights.

Last month, the Stanford Review, a rightwing publication co-founded by Peter Thiel and based on my university campus, wrote that I have helped set up an “organization [that is] undeniably a chapter of a terrorist group” and demanded my resignation. Their article was picked up by groups like JihadWatch, Campus Fix, Campus Reform, Fox & Friends, and other rightwing media outlets.

The organization I belong to is called the Campus Antifascist Network. We advocate for organized resistance to fascist violence on campus, and for educating our communities and others as to the nature of fascism today. We claim solidarity with a proud tradition of anti-fascism dating back to the early 20th century.

Today, we are seeing the resurgence of a wretched phenomenon we thought we had put behind us – McCarthyism, which involves “the use of tactics involving personal attacks on individuals by means of widely publicized indiscriminate allegations especially on the basis of unsubstantiated charges”.

Professors are more than hesitant about fighting back against accusations that emanate from organizations supported by the likes of Peter Thiel or Charlie Kirk, who founded Turning Point USA.

I don’t have the resources to bring a libel suit – I cannot out-lawyer a newspaper that has an ally in its founder and major contributor to the university, Peter Thiel.

The troubling question is: who does?

#MacCarthysme #Politique_USA #Peter_Thiel

Les conductrices Uber gagnent 1,24 dollar par heure de moins que les conducteurs : pourquoi ?
▻https://www.numerama.com/tech/327491-les-conductrices-uber-gagnent-124-dollars-par-heure-de-moins-que-le

Une étude réalisée par des universitaires et des économistes de l’entreprise Uber montre qu’une différence de salaire entre les femmes et les hommes existe, mais qu’elle n’est pas forcément due à l’application ou aux usagers. Les hommes qui conduisent pour Uber gagnent environ 7 % de plus par heure que les femmes, selon une étude des revenus de plus d’1,8 million de chauffeurs Uber. L’étude, publiée le 6 février, a été réalisée par des chercheurs des universités de Chicago et de Stanford, en collaboration (...)

#Uber #algorithme #discrimination #travail

Nos données nous appartiennent : monétisons-les !
▻http://abonnes.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2018/02/05/nos-donnees-nous-appartiennent-monetisons-les_5251774_3232.html

http://img.lemde.fr/2018/02/05/110/0/4643/2318/644/322/60/0/c305463_26909-1g46dk1.pnrf.jpg

Le grand n’importe quoi : les données personnelles sont aussi sociales. Rabattre ça sur la notion de propriété est en fait le cache-sexe d’une nouvelle industrie qui voudrait jouer les notaires de cette fausse-propriété. Mais que ces aspirateurs de données commencent par payer des impôts (socialisation de la plus-value). Le néolibéralisme, c’est avant tout l’extension de la sphère marchande à tout ce qui peut entrer dans ses rêts. Comme le monde physique est fini, il faut trouver une « nouvelle frontière » au marché, au lieu de raisonner sur l’utilité de construire des formes sociales en dehors du marché et de la propriété. L’alliance des signataires est également fort significative du projet idéologique de ce texte.

Je le stocke ici pour mémoire...

Nos données nous appartiennent : monétisons-les !

Un collectif plaide pour que chaque personne puisse monnayer ses données personnelles qui, actuellement, enrichissent les géants de l’Internet.

LE MONDE | 05.02.2018 à 06h39 | Par Jaron Lanier (informaticien, créateur de start-up), Gaspard Koenig (philosophe), Bruno Bonnell (député LRM), Manuel Carcassonne (éditeur), Alexandr...
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Par quel étrange renoncement sommes-nous devenus de la chair à algorithmes ? Tous les jours, nous abandonnons une partie de nous-mêmes à des plates-formes numériques, appâtés par l’illusion de la gratuité. Nos données personnelles les plus intimes, concernant nos goûts, nos déplacements ou nos amours, sont passées à la moulinette, collectées, agrégées, souvent revendues, et ultimement utilisées pour orienter et contrôler nos comportements. En cliquant sur des conditions d’utilisation léonines, que nous n’avons pas le temps ni la capacité de lire, encore moins de comprendre ou de négocier, nous courons vers notre servitude volontaire. Les géants du Web bâtissent leur fortune sur les dépouilles de notre identité.

Parce qu’il est urgent de rétablir nos valeurs les plus fondamentales, nous plaidons pour instaurer une patrimonialité des données personnelles. En dépit des idées reçues, le droit de propriété a toujours été une conquête sociale permettant de rééquilibrer les rapports de pouvoir au profit de l’individu et de ses libertés. Du cadastre aux brevets, la propriété garantit, selon l’adage romain, l’usus, l’abusus et le fructus, nous rendant pleinement maîtres de nous-mêmes et de nos actions, protégés de l’arbitraire des puissants. Voilà pourquoi Proudhon pouvait écrire dans la Théorie de la propriété, en revenant sur ses propos de jeunesse, que « la propriété est la plus grande force révolutionnaire qui existe ». Après la terre et les idées, le temps est venu d’étendre cette force révolutionnaire à nos data.
Concevoir des contrats intelligents et adaptés

Cette simple adjonction juridique, qui n’existe aujourd’hui ni en Europe ni aux Etats-Unis, suffirait à bouleverser l’écosystème du numérique. Chacun pourrait choisir en toute autonomie l’usage qu’il souhaite faire de ses données, selon leur nature et leur finalité. On pourrait ainsi accéder à certains services sans partager ses propres données, mais en payant le prix de cette confidentialité et donc en devenant véritablement client. A l’inverse, dans la mesure où l’on accepte de céder ses données, il faudra que les plates-formes nous rémunèrent, réintégrant ainsi le producteur primaire de données dans la chaîne de valeur.

Des flux continus de transactions, plus ou moins importants en fonction des catégories de data, en débit comme en crédit selon nos préférences contractuelles, viendraient alimenter nos comptes personnels de données, avec possiblement une blockchain [technique qui consiste à sécuriser une transaction en la faisant valider par une multitude d’ordinateurs, de manière chiffrée] pour garantir la validité des transactions. On peut imaginer que de puissants intermédiaires se constituent, comme les sociétés de gestion collective pour les droits d’auteur, afin de négocier conditions et tarifs au nom de millions de citoyens numériques, et de concevoir des contrats intelligents adaptés à chacun d’entre eux.
« Nos données sont de facto devenues objets de commerce »

Il ne s’agit pas de marchandiser ses données, selon le terme convenu pour inhiber tout débat, mais de rendre aux citoyens une valeur aujourd’hui capturée par les Gafam – Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon et Microsoft – et leurs milliers de disciples. En quoi est-il contraire à la dignité humaine de doter les producteurs de data d’un capital qui leur revient, et qui leur permettra d’effectuer leurs choix de manière d’autant plus indépendante ? Dénoncer la monétisation, c’est nier une réalité économique, puisque nos données sont de facto devenues objets de commerce (au point de représenter bientôt 8 % du PIB européen !). Mais c’est aussi, politiquement, se faire le complice objectif des oligopoles, comme l’Eglise condamnait le prêt à intérêt pour empêcher la naissance d’une bourgeoisie marchande, menaçant son pouvoir.
Monétisation sauvage des données

D’autant que la logique de la patrimonialité n’entre nullement en contradiction avec celle des droits fondamentaux, portée au niveau européen par le règlement général sur la protection des données (RGPD). Etablir des droits inaliénables permet d’autant mieux de concevoir un marché qui les respecte, comme c’est classiquement le cas dans nos démocraties. De plus, certaines conquêtes du RGPD, telles que l’exigence de portabilité, constituent des étapes indispensables vers un droit de propriété.
« Il est urgent de reprendre la maîtrise de nos data et donc de nous-mêmes »

Qu’on le veuille ou non, cette discussion a commencé. Des start-up se créent chaque semaine pour monétiser nos données de manière sauvage. Jaron Lanier, l’un des geeks les plus charismatiques de la Silicon Valley, porte le sujet depuis plusieurs années aux Etats-Unis, au nom même des valeurs libertaires qui faisaient la vigueur de l’Internet des années 1980, décentralisé et idéaliste. Son dernier papier, cosigné entre autres avec des universitaires de Stanford, a relancé le débat outre-Atlantique. En France, le député Bruno Bonnell (LRM) travaille sur une proposition de loi. L’Europe s’honorerait de prendre les devants et d’imposer sa soft law [règles de droit non obligatoires] face à une Amérique à genoux devant les intérêts du big business et à une Chine peu soucieuse de l’individu.

Alors qu’on nous annonce, à l’image de l’historien Yuval Noah Harari, un « dataisme » dissolvant l’humain dans le réseau et rendant caduc le libre arbitre, il est urgent de reprendre la maîtrise de nos data et donc de nous-mêmes. Le droit de propriété est l’un des outils essentiels de cet humanisme 2.0.

Liste complète des signataires : Rafaël Biosse-Duplan, associé gérant de Finisterre Capital ; Bruno Bonnell, député LRM ; Manuel Carcassonne, directeur général des Editions Stock ; Alexandre Jardin, écrivain et cinéaste ; Aurélie Jean, computational scientist ; Gaspard Koenig, philosophe, maître de conférences à Sciences Po Paris et président du think tank Generation Libre ; Willy Lafran, entrepreneur, fondateur de Datarmine ; Sébastien Lalevée, gérant associé de Financière Arbevel ; Isabelle Landreau, avocate ; Jaron Lanier, informaticien, créateur de start-up ; Céline Lazorthes, entrepreneure, fondatrice et PDG du groupe Leetchi ; Guillaume Liégey, cofondateur de Liegey Muller Pons ; Laurence Parisot, dirigeante d’entreprise, présidente de Gravida, ancienne présidente du Medef ; Gérard Peliks, ingénieur en cybersécurité, président de l’association CyberEdu ; Virginie Pez, économiste, maître de conférence à l’université Panthéon-Assas (Paris II) ; Rubin Sfadj, avocat en droit du numérique et de la finance ; Philippe Silberzahn, économiste ; Pierre Valade, entrepreneur et cofondateur de l’application Sunrise ; Natacha Valla, économiste, membre du Conseil d’analyse économique ; Guy Vallancien, chirurgien ; Glen Weyl, économiste.

#Données_personnelles #Néolibéralisme #Propriété_des_données

La littérature en numérique - La Vie des idées
►http://www.laviedesidees.fr/La-litterature-en-numerique.html

http://www.laviedesidees.fr/IMG/arton3732.jpg?1493670386

L’ensemble du volume a d’abord le mérite de nous faire porter un regard métathéorique sur les humanités numériques, qui prend à contre-pied la conception caricaturale que l’on peut s’en faire, à savoir des humanités froides, sérielles, algorithmiques, lourdement équipées et financées, faisant le jeu du néolibéralisme, reposant sur une externalisation expéditive de la lecture, évacuant les missions herméneutiques traditionnelles, faisant preuve d’une forme peu désirable de scientisme. Bref « le flot des clichés sur le positivisme simplet des humanités numériques » (p. 106). Loin de montrer des chercheurs se contentant de faire mouliner des machines et d’interroger des corpus gigantesques pour extraire paresseusement des données, il est au contraire important de prendre la mesure des nouvelles manières de travailler impliquées par les humanités numériques.

C’est pourquoi il faut voir dans l’approche computationnelle défendue par le Stanford Literary Lab un appel à rouvrir la fabrique des concepts littéraires. Mais à ceux qui déploreraient que les humanités numériques signent l’arrêt de mort de l’interprétation littéraire [5], on répondra avec l’appui du livre qu’en réalité on n’arrête pas d’interpréter sous l’emprise d’algorithmes perfectionnés et qu’on ne fait jamais que déplacer les interventions intellectuelles du chercheur à qui il reste toujours à donner de l’intelligibilité à cette masse de données et à dégager des causalités dans les corrélations qu’il a pu observer (p. 274). C’est ainsi que les big data se présentent légitimement comme des smart data.

Une nouvelle conception de l’histoire littéraire émerge ainsi, portée par un esprit vérificationniste et expérimental, qui assume la nature explicative et hypothético-déductive du raisonnement littéraire. Les hypothèses sont faites pour être le plus souvent falsifiées et abandonnées ; la reconnaissance des échecs et la capacité autocritique ont cet avantage qu’ils nous prémunissent non seulement des hypothèses autoportées auxquelles on est tenté intuitivement de s’agripper, mais donnent aussi leur robustesse aux dernières hypothèses que nous sommes amenés à défendre comme des résultats solides et corroborés – en somme des faits scientifiques comme les autres.

Mais justement, la littérature est-elle un « fait scientifique » comme les autres ? Ce sont souvent des poètes ou des littérateurs qui lisent et commentent les textes antérieurs ; pas seulement des chercheurs de laboratoire.

F. Moretti remporte là une double victoire contre l’herméneutique traditionnelle : certes, et c’est déjà beaucoup, il congédie toute lecture littéraire qui ne serait attentive qu’à l’exception, l’écart ou la singularité au profit du repérage, dans le chaos et le bruit formés par les données, des régularités, des séries, des cohortes ou des patterns. Cependant, par une sorte de ruse tout à fait ironique, il parvient à accomplir les missions de l’herméneutique bien au delà des attentes de ceux qui se prévalent d’en être les gardiens. De la même manière que les sciences sociales peuvent comprendre les conduites humaines à des niveaux qui dépassent la simple compréhension qu’en ont les acteurs eux-mêmes, la critique littéraire digitale se détourne de la conception mythologique, éculée mais à tout le moins persistante, selon laquelle le sens d’une œuvre serait une affaire essentiellement individuelle et limitée à une poignée d’acteurs (l’auteur et/ou le lecteur). Elle se donne de la sorte les moyens de comprendre des œuvres mieux que les acteurs individuels n’en seraient capables à leur humble niveau, en en faisant un phénomène social complexe dont on rendrait observables des corrélations demeurant hors de leur portée.

#Littérature #Humanités_numériques

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

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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, (...)

Jean-Pierre Dupuy : « Trump n’a rien compris à la dissuasion nucléaire »

▻http://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2018/01/26/jean-pierre-dupuy-trump-n-a-rien-compris-a-la-dissuasion-nucleaire_5247299_3

Dans une tribune au « Monde », Jean-Pierre Dupuy, philosophe et professeur à l’université Stanford, affirme que Trump manie mal la dissuasion nucléaire. Selon lui, un accident pourrait plonger le monde dans l’enfer.

http://img.lemde.fr/2018/01/23/70/0/2660/1330/644/322/60/0/26d9b49_fddb7657e6c84c12b464de30553316fd-fddb7657e6c84c12b464de30553316fd-0.jpg

Donald Trump est comme un garçon de 9 ans dont la main serait juste posée sur le bouton nucléaire. Il dispose d’un jouet formidable, l’arsenal le plus puissant du monde. Pourquoi diable ne s’en servirait-il pas quand il se trouve nargué par ce leadeur communiste paranoïaque qui menace de réduire l’île américaine de Guam en cendres radioactives ? Trump, lui, d’un coup d’un seul, peut rayer la Corée du Nord de la carte du monde.

On a cru que l’escalade verbale entre Kim Jong-un et Donald Trump avait atteint un tel sommet que seul un échange réciproque de frappes atomiques pourrait calmer les nerfs des protagonistes, au prix de millions de morts. On a oublié que la guerre froide n’avait pas débouché sur une apocalypse en dépit de, ou, selon la théorie, grâce à des échanges de menaces non moins extrêmes.

Mélange de rationalité et de folie

C’est entendu, Trump a un bien plus gros organe que Kim. Le fait qu’il s’en vante montre qu’il n’a rien compris à la dissuasion. Certes, le statut de grande puissance implique aujourd’hui l’accession à la toute-puissance illusoire de l’arme atomique. Des pays comme l’Iran et la Corée du Nord en sont bien persuadés, la France n’étant pas en reste, cela lui valant de siéger au Conseil de sécurité de l’ONU. Mais la taille de l’arsenal ne devrait en principe rien faire à l’affaire. Si vous pouvez déjà détruire la terre cent fois, à quoi bon vouloir faire mieux ? La dissuasion est le grand égalisateur. Le plus faible peut encore causer des dommages irréparables chez l’ennemi. C’est la base de la doctrine française.

Très peu de gens en vérité ont compris en quoi consistait la dissuasion nucléaire, en particulier sous sa forme pure, dénommée à juste titre MAD, pour Mutually Assured Destruction (« destruction mutuelle assurée »). Mélange paroxystique de rationalité et de folie, MAD (« fou » en anglais) implique que chaque partenaire menace son ou ses adversaires de représailles incommensurables s’ils franchissent une ligne que l’on juge fatale.

Trump, le sosie de Nixon ?

La seule chose que l’on puisse dire au sujet de la dissuasion, c’est qu’elle marche tant qu’elle marche. Si elle échoue, rien n’est assuré, contrairement à ce que proclame le sigle MAD. La victime d’une première frappe exécutera-t-elle sa menace de lancer l’escalade, ce qui par hypothèse mènerait à sa perte non moins qu’à celle de son adversaire et peut-être du reste du monde en prime ? Si elle possède cette rationalité minimale qu’est le souci de la préservation de soi, la réponse est négative.

L’été dernier, les commentateurs ont cru voir en Trump le sosie de Nixon. On s’est souvenu que sous le nom de Madman Theory (« théorie du fou »), ce dernier avait eu en pleine guerre du Vietnam l’idée géniale que s’il feignait d’être exaspéré au point de commettre un acte fou, les Nord-Vietnamiens le supplieraient de faire la paix aussitôt. Trump serait donc son émule. On n’a pas compris que loin d’être une invention de Nixon, la « théorie du fou » est partie intégrante de la doctrine MAD. La rationalité de la dissuasion repose sur une menace dont la mise à exécution serait le comble de l’irrationalité.

Pour jouer efficacement le jeu MAD, il faut être capable de tenir deux rôles à la fois, le sien, celui du stratège rationnel, et celui du cinglé. Cela implique un talent de comédien, celui qui est tout ensemble son personnage et l’acteur qui l’incarne à distance. Nixon avait ce talent, on peut douter que Trump en soit capable.

Certains experts estiment à un risque sur trois l’éventualité d’une guerre nucléaire entre l’Amérique et la Corée du Nord avant la fin du mandat de Trump. Pourtant, ni Kim ni Trump ne veulent cette guerre. Les intentions n’ont plus d’importance. C’est un accident qui plongera le monde dans l’enfer. A la suite d’une erreur humaine, un système d’alerte signale faussement l’arrivée de missiles nucléaires. Cela s’est produit plusieurs fois pendant la guerre froide. Cela vient de se produire à Hawaï puis au Japon. Le monde a les nerfs à vif. Il n’y a plus de différence entre une vraie et une fausse alerte.

Deux intelligences artificielles ont battu l’homme au célèbre test de #lecture de Stanford - L’ #IA a battu l’Homme au test du SQuAD de #Stanford.
▻http://www.20minutes.fr/high-tech/2203787-20180117-etats-unis-deux-intelligences-artificielles-battu-homme-c
▻https://siecledigital.fr/2018/01/16/alibaba-intelligence-artificielle-lecture-stanford

De l’automatisation des inégalités
►http://www.internetactu.net/2018/01/15/de-lautomatisation-des-inegalites

Dans une récente tribune pour le New York Times, l’avocate Elisabeth Mason (@elismason1), directrice du Laboratoire pauvreté et technologie qui dépend duCentre sur la pauvreté et l’inégalité de Stanford (@CenterPovlneq) soulignait que le #big_data et l’intelligence artificielle étaient amenés à être des outils puissants pour lutter contre la pauvreté. Les (...)

#Articles #Débats #algorithmes #eAdministration #eDémocratie #Interfaces #pauvreté #politiques_publiques #surveillance

»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.