organization:university of toronto

  • Google’s new reCaptcha has a dark side
    https://www.fastcompany.com/90369697/googles-new-recaptcha-has-a-dark-side


    Les vrais humains ont un compte Google : les autres vont aller se faire bouillir le cul.

    According to two security researchers who’ve studied reCaptcha, one of the ways that Google determines whether you’re a malicious user or not is whether you already have a Google cookie installed on your browser. It’s the same cookie that allows you to open new tabs in your browser and not have to re-log in to your Google account every time. But according to Mohamed Akrout, a computer science PhD student at the University of Toronto who has studied reCaptcha, it appears that Google is also using its cookies to determine whether someone is a human in reCaptcha v3 tests. Akrout wrote in an April paper about how reCaptcha v3 simulations that ran on a browser with a connected Google account received lower risk scores than browsers without a connected Google account. “If you have a Google account it’s more likely you are human,” he says. Google did not respond to questions about the role that Google cookies play in reCaptcha.

  • Who Was Shakespeare? Could the Author Have Been a Woman? - The Atlantic
    https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/06/who-is-shakespeare-emilia-bassano/588076

    On a spring night in 2018, I stood on a Manhattan sidewalk with friends, reading Shakespeare aloud. We were in line to see an adaptation of Macbeth and had decided to pass the time refreshing our memories of the play’s best lines. I pulled up Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy on my iPhone. “Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,” I read, thrilled once again by the incantatory power of the verse. I remembered where I was when I first heard those lines: in my 10th-grade English class, startled out of my adolescent stupor by this woman rebelling magnificently and malevolently against her submissive status. “Make thick my blood, / Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse.” Six months into the #MeToo movement, her fury and frustration felt newly resonant.

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    Pulled back into plays I’d studied in college and graduate school, I found myself mesmerized by Lady Macbeth and her sisters in the Shakespeare canon. Beatrice, in Much Ado About Nothing, raging at the limitations of her sex (“O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the marketplace”). Rosalind, in As You Like It, affecting the swagger of masculine confidence to escape those limitations (“We’ll have a swashing and a martial outside, / As many other mannish cowards have / That do outface it with their semblances”). Isabella, in Measure for Measure, fearing no one will believe her word against Angelo’s, rapist though he is (“To whom should I complain? Did I tell this, / Who would believe me?”). Kate, in The Taming of the Shrew, refusing to be silenced by her husband (“My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, / Or else my heart concealing it will break”). Emilia, in one of her last speeches in Othello before Iago kills her, arguing for women’s equality (“Let husbands know / Their wives have sense like them”).
    I was reminded of all the remarkable female friendships, too: Beatrice and Hero’s allegiance; Emilia’s devotion to her mistress, Desdemona; Paulina’s brave loyalty to Hermione in The Winter’s Tale; and plenty more. (“Let’s consult together against this greasy knight,” resolve the merry wives of Windsor, revenging themselves on Falstaff.) These intimate female alliances are fresh inventions—they don’t exist in the literary sources from which many of the plays are drawn. And when the plays lean on historical sources (Plutarch, for instance), they feminize them, portraying legendary male figures through the eyes of mothers, wives, and lovers. “Why was Shakespeare able to see the woman’s position, write entirely as if he were a woman, in a way that none of the other playwrights of the age were able to?” In her book about the plays’ female characters, Tina Packer, the founding artistic director of Shakespeare & Company, asked the question very much on my mind.

    Doubts about whether William Shakespeare (who was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564 and died in 1616) really wrote the works attributed to him are almost as old as the writing itself. Alternative contenders—Francis Bacon; Christopher Marlowe; and Edward de Vere, the 17th earl of Oxford, prominent among them—continue to have champions, whose fervor can sometimes border on fanaticism. In response, orthodox Shakespeare scholars have settled into dogmatism of their own. Even to dabble in authorship questions is considered a sign of bad faith, a blinkered failure to countenance genius in a glover’s son. The time had come, I felt, to tug at the blinkers of both camps and reconsider the authorship debate: Had anyone ever proposed that the creator of those extraordinary women might be a woman? Each of the male possibilities requires an elaborate theory to explain his use of another’s name. None of the candidates has succeeded in dethroning the man from Stratford. Yet a simple reason would explain a playwright’s need for a pseudonym in Elizabethan England: being female.
    Who was this woman writing “immortal work” in the same year that Shakespeare’s name first appeared in print?

    Long before Tina Packer marveled at the bard’s uncanny insight, others were no less awed by the empathy that pervades the work. “One would think that he had been Metamorphosed from a Man to a Woman,” wrote Margaret Cavendish, the 17th-century philosopher and playwright. The critic John Ruskin said, “Shakespeare has no heroes—he has only heroines.” A striking number of those heroines refuse to obey rules. At least 10 defy their fathers, bucking betrothals they don’t like to find their own paths to love. Eight disguise themselves as men, outwitting patriarchal controls—more gender-swapping than can be found in the work of any previous English playwright. Six lead armies.

    The prevailing view, however, has been that no women in Renaissance England wrote for the theater, because that was against the rules. Religious verse and translation were deemed suitable female literary pursuits; “closet dramas,” meant only for private reading, were acceptable. The stage was off-limits. Yet scholars have lately established that women were involved in the business of acting companies as patrons, shareholders, suppliers of costumes, and gatherers of entrance fees. What’s more, 80 percent of the plays printed in the 1580s were written anonymously, and that number didn’t fall below 50 percent until the early 1600s. At least one eminent Shakespeare scholar, Phyllis Rackin, of the University of Pennsylvania, challenges the blanket assumption that the commercial drama pouring forth in the period bore no trace of a female hand. So did Virginia Woolf, even as she sighed over the obstacles that would have confronted a female Shakespeare: “Undoubtedly, I thought, looking at the shelf where there are no plays by women, her work would have gone unsigned.”

    A tantalizing nudge lies buried in the writings of Gabriel Harvey, a well-known Elizabethan literary critic. In 1593, he referred cryptically to an “excellent Gentlewoman” who had written three sonnets and a comedy. “I dare not Particularise her Description,” he wrote, even as he heaped praise on her.

    All her conceits are illuminate with the light of Reason; all her speeches beautified with the grace of Affability … In her mind there appeareth a certain heavenly Logic; in her tongue & pen a divine Rhetoric … I dare undertake with warrant, whatsoever she writeth must needs remain an immortal work, and will leave, in the activest world, an eternal memory of the silliest vermin that she should vouchsafe to grace with her beautiful and allective style, as ingenious as elegant.

    Who was this woman writing “immortal work” in the same year that Shakespeare’s name first appeared in print, on the poem “Venus and Adonis,” a scandalous parody of masculine seduction tales (in which the woman forces herself on the man)? Harvey’s tribute is extraordinary, yet orthodox Shakespeareans and anti-Stratfordians alike have almost entirely ignored it.

    Until recently, that is, when a few bold outliers began to advance the case that Shakespeare might well have been a woman. One candidate is Mary Sidney, the countess of Pembroke (and beloved sister of the celebrated poet Philip Sidney)—one of the most educated women of her time, a translator and poet, and the doyenne of the Wilton Circle, a literary salon dedicated to galvanizing an English cultural renaissance. Clues beckon, not least that Sidney and her husband were the patrons of one of the first theater companies to perform Shakespeare’s plays. Was Shakespeare’s name useful camouflage, allowing her to publish what she otherwise couldn’t?
    Shakespeare’s life is remarkably well documented—yet no records from his lifetime identify him unequivocally as a writer.

    But the candidate who intrigued me more was a woman as exotic and peripheral as Sidney was pedigreed and prominent. Not long after my Macbeth outing, I learned that Shakespeare’s Globe, in London, had set out to explore this figure’s input to the canon. The theater’s summer 2018 season concluded with a new play, Emilia, about a contemporary of Shakespeare’s named Emilia Bassano. Born in London in 1569 to a family of Venetian immigrants—musicians and instrument-makers who were likely Jewish—she was one of the first women in England to publish a volume of poetry (suitably religious yet startlingly feminist, arguing for women’s “Libertie” and against male oppression). Her existence was unearthed in 1973 by the Oxford historian A. L. Rowse, who speculated that she was Shakespeare’s mistress, the “dark lady” described in the sonnets. In Emilia, the playwright Morgan Lloyd Malcolm goes a step further: Her Shakespeare is a plagiarist who uses Bassano’s words for Emilia’s famous defense of women in Othello.

    Could Bassano have contributed even more widely and directly? The idea felt like a feminist fantasy about the past—but then, stories about women’s lost and obscured achievements so often have a dreamlike quality, unveiling a history different from the one we’ve learned. Was I getting carried away, reinventing Shakespeare in the image of our age? Or was I seeing past gendered assumptions to the woman who—like Shakespeare’s heroines—had fashioned herself a clever disguise? Perhaps the time was finally ripe for us to see her.

    The ranks of Shakespeare skeptics comprise a kind of literary underworld—a cross-disciplinary array of academics, actors (Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance are perhaps the best known), writers, teachers, lawyers, a few Supreme Court justices (Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia, John Paul Stevens). Look further back and you’ll find such illustrious names as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Henry James, Sigmund Freud, Helen Keller, and Charlie Chaplin. Their ideas about the authorship of the plays and poems differ, but they concur that Shakespeare is not the man who wrote them.

    Their doubt is rooted in an empirical conundrum. Shakespeare’s life is remarkably well documented, by the standards of the period—yet no records from his lifetime identify him unequivocally as a writer. The more than 70 documents that exist show him as an actor, a shareholder in a theater company, a moneylender, and a property investor. They show that he dodged taxes, was fined for hoarding grain during a shortage, pursued petty lawsuits, and was subject to a restraining order. The profile is remarkably coherent, adding up to a mercenary impresario of the Renaissance entertainment industry. What’s missing is any sign that he wrote.

    From January 1863: Nathaniel Hawthorne considers authorship while visiting Stratford-upon-Avon

    No such void exists for other major writers of the period, as a meticulous scholar named Diana Price has demonstrated. Many left fewer documents than Shakespeare did, but among them are manuscripts, letters, and payment records proving that writing was their profession. For example, court records show payment to Ben Jonson for “those services of his wit & pen.” Desperate to come up with comparable material to round out Shakespeare, scholars in the 18th and 19th centuries forged evidence—later debunked—of a writerly life.

    To be sure, Shakespeare’s name can be found linked, during his lifetime, to written works. With Love’s Labour’s Lost, in 1598, it started appearing on the title pages of one-play editions called “quartos.” (Several of the plays attributed to Shakespeare were first published anonymously.) Commentators at the time saluted him by name, praising “Shakespeare’s fine filed phrase” and “honey-tongued Shakespeare.” But such evidence proves attribution, not actual authorship—as even some orthodox Shakespeare scholars grant. “I would love to find a contemporary document that said William Shakespeare was the dramatist of Stratford-upon-Avon written during his lifetime,” Stanley Wells, a professor emeritus at the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute, has said. “That would shut the buggers up!”
    FROM THE ARCHIVES
    October 1991 Atlantic cover

    In 1991, The Atlantic commissioned two pieces from admittedly partisan authors, Irving Matus and Tom Bethell, to examine and debate the argument:
    In Defense of Shakespeare
    The Case for Oxford

    By contrast, more than a few of Shakespeare’s contemporaries are on record suggesting that his name got affixed to work that wasn’t his. In 1591, the dramatist Robert Greene wrote of the practice of “underhand brokery”—of poets who “get some other Batillus to set his name to their verses.” (Batillus was a mediocre Roman poet who claimed some of Virgil’s verses as his own.) The following year, he warned fellow playwrights about an “upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers,” who thinks he is the “onely Shake-scene in a countrey.” Most scholars agree that the “Crow” is Shakespeare, then an actor in his late 20s, and conclude that the new-hatched playwright was starting to irk established figures. Anti-Stratfordians see something else: In Aesop’s fables, the crow was a proud strutter who stole the feathers of others; Horace’s crow, in his epistles, was a plagiarist. Shakespeare was being attacked, they say, not as a budding dramatist, but as a paymaster taking credit for others’ work. “Seeke you better Maisters,” Greene advised, urging his colleagues to cease writing for the Crow.

    Ben Jonson, among others, got in his digs, too. Scholars agree that the character of Sogliardo in Every Man Out of His Humour—a country bumpkin “without brain, wit, anything, indeed, ramping to gentility”—is a parody of Shakespeare, a social climber whose pursuit of a coat of arms was common lore among his circle of actors. In a satirical poem called “On Poet-Ape,” Jonson was likely taking aim at Shakespeare the theater-world wheeler-dealer. This poet-ape, Jonson wrote, “from brokage is become so bold a thief,”

    At first he made low shifts, would pick and glean,
    Buy the reversion of old plays; now grown
    To a little wealth, and credit in the scene,
    He takes up all, makes each man’s wit his own

    What to make of the fact that Jonson changed his tune in the prefatory material that he contributed to the First Folio of plays when it appeared seven years after Shakespeare’s death? Jonson’s praise there did more than attribute the work to Shakespeare. It declared his art unmatched: “He was not of an age, but for all time!” The anti-Stratfordian response is to note the shameless hype at the heart of the Folio project. “Whatever you do, Buy,” the compilers urged in their dedication, intent on a hard sell for a dramatist who, doubters emphasize, was curiously unsung at his death. The Folio’s introductory effusions, they argue, contain double meanings. Jonson tells readers, for example, to find Shakespeare not in his portrait “but his Booke,” seeming to undercut the relation between the man and the work. And near the start of his over-the-top tribute, Jonson riffs on the unreliability of extravagant praise, “which doth ne’er advance / The truth.”

    From September 1904: Ralph Waldo Emerson celebrates Shakespeare

    The authorship puzzles don’t end there. How did the man born in Stratford acquire the wide-ranging knowledge on display in the plays—of the Elizabethan court, as well as of multiple languages, the law, astronomy, music, the military, and foreign lands, especially northern Italian cities? The author’s linguistic brilliance shines in words and sayings imported from foreign vocabularies, but Shakespeare wasn’t educated past the age of 13. Perhaps he traveled, joined the army, worked as a tutor, or all three, scholars have proposed. Yet no proof exists of any of those experiences, despite, as the Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper pointed out in an essay, “the greatest battery of organized research that has ever been directed upon a single person.”
    Emilia Bassano’s life encompassed the breadth of the Shakespeare canon: its low-class references and knowledge of the court; its Italian sources and Jewish allusions; its music and feminism.

    In fact, a document that does exist—Shakespeare’s will—would seem to undercut such hypotheses. A wealthy man when he retired to Stratford, he was meticulous about bequeathing his properties and possessions (his silver, his second-best bed). Yet he left behind not a single book, though the plays draw on hundreds of texts, including some—in Italian and French—that hadn’t yet been translated into English. Nor did he leave any musical instruments, though the plays use at least 300 musical terms and refer to 26 instruments. He remembered three actor-owners in his company, but no one in the literary profession. Strangest of all, he made no mention of manuscripts or writing. Perhaps as startling as the gaps in his will, Shakespeare appears to have neglected his daughters’ education—an incongruity, given the erudition of so many of the playwright’s female characters. One signed with her mark, the other with a signature a scholar has called “painfully formed.”

    “Weak and unconvincing” was Trevor-Roper’s verdict on the case for Shakespeare. My delving left me in agreement, not that the briefs for the male alternatives struck me as compelling either. Steeped in the plays, I felt their author would surely join me in bridling at the Stratfordians’ unquestioning worship at the shrine—their arrogant dismissal of skeptics as mere deluded “buggers,” or worse. (“Is there any more fanatic zealot than the priest-like defender of a challenged creed?” asked Richmond Crinkley, a former director of programs at the Folger Shakespeare Library who was nonetheless sympathetic to the anti-Stratfordian view.) To appreciate how belief blossoms into fact—how readily myths about someone get disseminated as truth—one can’t do better than to read Shakespeare. Just think of how obsessed the work is with mistaken identities, concealed women, forged and anonymous documents—with the error of trusting in outward appearances. What if searchers for the real Shakespeare simply haven’t set their sights on the right pool of candidates?

    Read: An interview with the author of ‘The Shakespeare Wars’

    I met Emilia Bassano’s most ardent champion at Alice’s Tea Cup, which seemed unexpectedly apt: A teahouse on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, it has quotes from Alice in Wonderland scrawled across the walls. (“off with their heads!”) John Hudson, an Englishman in his 60s who pursued a degree at the Shakespeare Institute in a mid-career swerve, had been on the Bassano case for years, he told me. In 2014, he published Shakespeare’s Dark Lady: Amelia Bassano Lanier, the Woman Behind Shakespeare’s Plays? His zeal can sometimes get the better of him, yet he emphasizes that his methods and findings are laid out “for anyone … to refute if they wish.” Like Alice’s rabbit hole, Bassano’s case opened up new and richly disorienting perspectives—on the plays, on the ways we think about genius and gender, and on a fascinating life.

    Hudson first learned of Bassano from A. L. Rowse, who discovered mention of her in the notebooks of an Elizabethan physician and astrologer named Simon Forman. In her teens, she became the mistress of Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, the master of court entertainment and patron of Shakespeare’s acting company. And that is only the start. Whether or not Bassano was Shakespeare’s lover (scholars now dismiss Rowse’s claim), the discernible contours of her biography supply what the available material about Shakespeare’s life doesn’t: circumstantial evidence of opportunities to acquire an impressive expanse of knowledge.

    Bassano lived, Hudson points out, “an existence on the boundaries of many different social worlds,” encompassing the breadth of the Shakespeare canon: its coarse, low-class references and its intimate knowledge of the court; its Italian sources and its Jewish allusions; its music and its feminism. And her imprint, as Hudson reads the plays, extends over a long period. He notes the many uses of her name, citing several early on—for instance, an Emilia in The Comedy of Errors. (Emilia, the most common female name in the plays alongside Katherine, wasn’t used in the 16th century by any other English playwright.) Titus Andronicus features a character named Bassianus, which was the original Roman name of Bassano del Grappa, her family’s hometown before their move to Venice. Later, in The Merchant of Venice, the romantic hero is a Venetian named Bassanio, an indication that the author perhaps knew of the Bassanos’ connection to Venice. (Bassanio is a spelling of their name in some records.)

    Further on, in Othello, another Emilia appears—Iago’s wife. Her famous speech against abusive husbands, Hudson notes, doesn’t show up until 1623, in the First Folio, included among lines that hadn’t appeared in an earlier version (lines that Stratfordians assume—without any proof—were written before Shakespeare’s death). Bassano was still alive, and by then had known her share of hardship at the hands of men. More to the point, she had already spoken out, in her 1611 book of poetry, against men who “do like vipers deface the wombs wherein they were bred.”

    Prodded by Hudson, you can discern traces of Bassano’s own life trajectory in particular works across the canon. In All’s Well That Ends Well, a lowborn girl lives with a dowager countess and a general named Bertram. When Bassano’s father, Baptista, died in 1576, Emilia, then 7, was taken in by Susan Bertie, the dowager countess of Kent. The countess’s brother, Peregrine Bertie, was—like the fictional Bertram—a celebrated general. In the play, the countess tells how a father “famous … in his profession” left “his sole child … bequeathed to my overlooking. I have those hopes of her good that her education promises.” Bassano received a remarkable humanist education with the countess. In her book of poetry, she praised her guardian as “the Mistris of my youth, / The noble guide of my ungovern’d dayes.”
    Bassano’s life sheds possible light on the plays’ preoccupation with women caught in forced or loveless marriages.

    As for the celebrated general, Hudson seizes on the possibility that Bassano’s ears, and perhaps eyes, were opened by Peregrine Bertie as well. In 1582, Bertie was named ambassador to Denmark by the queen and sent to the court at Elsinore—the setting of Hamlet. Records show that the trip included state dinners with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, whose names appear in the play. Because emissaries from the same two families later visited the English court, the trip isn’t decisive, but another encounter is telling: Bertie met with the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, whose astronomical theories influenced the play. Was Bassano (then just entering her teens) on the trip? Bertie was accompanied by a “whole traine,” but only the names of important gentlemen are recorded. In any case, Hudson argues, she would have heard tales on his return.

    Later, as the mistress of Henry Carey (43 years her senior), Bassano gained access to more than the theater world. Carey, the queen’s cousin, held various legal and military positions. Bassano was “favoured much of her Majesty and of many noblemen,” the physician Forman noted, indicating the kind of extensive aristocratic associations that only vague guesswork can accord to Shakespeare. His company didn’t perform at court until Christmas of 1594, after several of the plays informed by courtly life had already been written. Shakespeare’s history plays, concerned as they are with the interactions of the governing class, presume an insider perspective on aristocratic life. Yet mere court performances wouldn’t have enabled such familiarity, and no trace exists of Shakespeare’s presence in any upper-class household.

    And then, in late 1592, Bassano (now 23) was expelled from court. She was pregnant. Carey gave her money and jewels and, for appearance’s sake, married her off to Alphonso Lanier, a court musician. A few months later, she had a son. Despite the glittering dowry, Lanier must not have been pleased. “Her husband hath dealt hardly with her,” Forman wrote, “and spent and consumed her goods.”

    Bassano was later employed in a noble household, probably as a music tutor, and roughly a decade after that opened a school. Whether she accompanied her male relatives—whose consort of recorder players at the English court lasted 90 years—on their trips back to northern Italy isn’t known. But the family link to the home country offers support for the fine-grained familiarity with the region that (along with in-depth musical knowledge) any plausible candidate for authorship would seem to need—just what scholars have had to strain to establish for Shakespeare. (Perhaps, theories go, he chatted with travelers or consulted books.) In Othello, for example, Iago gives a speech that precisely describes a fresco in Bassano del Grappa—also the location of a shop owned by Giovanni Otello, a likely source of the title character’s name.

    Her Bassano lineage—scholars suggest the family were conversos, converted or hidden Jews presenting as Christians—also helps account for the Jewish references that scholars of the plays have noted. The plea in The Merchant of Venice for the equality and humanity of Jews, a radical departure from typical anti-Semitic portrayals of the period, is well known. “Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?” Shylock asks. “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” A Midsummer Night’s Dream draws from a passage in the Talmud about marriage vows; spoken Hebrew is mixed into the nonsense language of All’s Well That Ends Well.
    Stephen Doyle

    What’s more, the Bassano family’s background suggests a source close to home for the particular interest in dark figures in the sonnets, Othello, and elsewhere. A 1584 document about the arrest of two Bassano men records them as “black”—among Elizabethans, the term could apply to anyone darker than the fair-skinned English, including those with a Mediterranean complexion. (The fellows uttered lines that could come straight from a comic interlude in the plays: “We have as good friends in the court as thou hast and better too … Send us to ward? Thou wert as good kiss our arse.”) In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the noblemen derisively compare Rosaline, the princess’s attendant, to “chimney-sweepers” and “colliers” (coal miners). The king joins in, telling Berowne, who is infatuated with her, “Thy love is black as ebony,” to which the young lord responds, “O wood divine!”

    Bassano’s life sheds possible light, too, on another outsider theme: the plays’ preoccupation with women caught in forced or loveless marriages. Hudson sees her misery reflected in the sonnets, thought to have been written from the early 1590s to the early 1600s. “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, / I all alone beweep my outcast state, /And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, /And look upon myself and curse my fate,” reads sonnet 29. (When Maya Angelou first encountered the poem as a child, she thought Shakespeare must have been a black girl who had been sexually abused: “How else could he know what I know?”) For Shakespeare, those years brought a rise in status: In 1596, he was granted a coat of arms, and by 1597, he was rich enough to buy the second-largest house in Stratford.

    Read: What Maya Angelou meant when she said ‘Shakespeare must be a black girl’

    In what is considered an early or muddled version of The Taming of the Shrew, a man named Alphonso (as was Bassano’s husband) tries to marry off his three daughters, Emilia, Kate, and Philema. Emilia drops out in the later version, and the father is now called Baptista (the name of Bassano’s father). As a portrait of a husband dealing “hardly” with a wife, the play is horrifying. Yet Kate’s speech of submission, with its allusions to the Letters of Paul, is slippery: Even as she exaggeratedly parrots the Christian doctrine of womanly subjection, she is anything but dutifully silent.

    Shakespeare’s women repeatedly subvert such teachings, perhaps most radically in The Winter’s Tale, another drama of male cruelty. There the noblewoman Paulina, scorned by King Leontes as “a most intelligencing bawd” with a “boundless tongue,” bears fierce witness against him (no man dares to) when he wrongly accuses Queen Hermione of adultery and imprisons her. As in so many of the comedies, a more enlightened society emerges in the end because the women’s values triumph.

    I was stunned to realize that the year The Winter’s Tale was likely completed, 1611, was the same year Bassano published her book of poetry, Salve Deus Rex Judæorum. Her writing style bears no obvious resemblance to Shakespeare’s in his plays, though Hudson strains to suggest similarities. The overlap lies in the feminist content. Bassano’s poetry registers as more than conventional religious verse designed to win patronage (she dedicates it to nine women, Mary Sidney included, fashioning a female literary community). Scholars have observed that it reads as a “transgressive” defense of Eve and womankind. Like a cross-dressing Shakespearean heroine, Bassano refuses to play by the rules, heretically reinterpreting scripture. “If Eve did err, it was for knowledge sake,” she writes. Arguing that the crucifixion, a crime committed by men, was a greater crime than Eve’s, she challenges the basis of men’s “tyranny” over women.

    “I always feel something Italian, something Jewish about Shakespeare,” Jorge Luis Borges told The Paris Review in 1966. “Perhaps Englishmen admire him because of that, because it’s so unlike them.” Borges didn’t mention feeling “something female” about the bard, yet that response has never ceased to be part of Shakespeare’s allure—embodiment though he is of the patriarchal authority of the Western canon. What would the revelation of a woman’s hand at work mean, aside from the loss of a prime tourist attraction in Stratford-upon-Avon? Would the effect be a blow to the cultural patriarchy, or the erosion of the canon’s status? Would (male) myths of inexplicable genius take a hit? Would women at last claim their rightful authority as historical and intellectual forces?

    I was curious to take the temperature of the combative authorship debate as women edge their way into it. Over more tea, I tested Hudson’s room for flexibility. Could the plays’ many connections to Bassano be explained by simply assuming the playwright knew her well? “Shakespeare would have had to run to her every few minutes for a musical reference or an Italian pun,” he said. I caught up with Mark Rylance, the actor and former artistic director of the Globe, in the midst of rehearsals for Othello (whose plot, he noted, comes from an Italian text that didn’t exist in English). A latitudinarian doubter—embracing the inquiry, not any single candidate—Rylance has lately observed that the once heretical notion of collaboration between Shakespeare and other writers “is now accepted, pursued and published by leading orthodox scholars.” He told me that “Emilia should be studied by anyone interested in the creation of the plays.” David Scott Kastan, a well-known Shakespeare scholar at Yale, urged further exploration too, though he wasn’t ready to anoint her bard. “What’s clear is that it’s important to know more about her,” he said, and even got playful with pronouns: “The more we know about her and the world she lived in, the more we’ll know about Shakespeare, whoever she was.”
    Related Stories

    Such Ado: The Fight for Shakespeare’s Puns
    Shakespeare in Love, or in Context

    In the fall, I joined the annual meeting of the Shakespeare Authorship Trust—a gathering of skeptics at the Globe—feeling excited that gender would be at the top of the agenda. Some eyebrows were raised even in this company, but enthusiasm ran high. “People have been totally frustrated with authorship debates that go nowhere, but that’s because there have been 200 years of bad candidates,” one participant from the University of Toronto exclaimed. “They didn’t want to see women in this,” he reflected. “It’s a tragedy of history.”

    He favored Sidney. Others were eager to learn about Bassano, and with collaboration in mind, I wondered whether the two women had perhaps worked together, or as part of a group. I thought of Bassano’s Salve Deus, in which she writes that men have wrongly taken credit for knowledge: “Yet Men will boast of Knowledge, which he tooke / From Eve’s faire hand, as from a learned Booke.”

    The night after the meeting, I went to a performance of Antony and Cleopatra at the National Theatre. I sat enthralled, still listening for the poet in her words, trying to catch her reflection in some forgotten bit of verse. “Give me my robe, put on my crown,” cried the queen, “I have / Immortal longings in me.” There she was, kissing her ladies goodbye, raising the serpent to her breast. “I am fire and air.”

  • The Challenge of Going Off Psychiatric Drugs | The New Yorker
    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-challenge-of-going-off-psychiatric-drugs

    Laura had always assumed that depression was caused by a precisely defined chemical imbalance, which her medications were designed to recalibrate. She began reading about the history of psychiatry and realized that this theory, promoted heavily by pharmaceutical companies, is not clearly supported by evidence. Genetics plays a role in mental disorder, as do environmental influences, but the drugs do not have the specificity to target the causes of an illness. Wayne Goodman, a former chair of the F.D.A.’s Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee, has called the idea that pills fix chemical imbalances a “useful metaphor” that he would never use with his patients. Ronald Pies, a former editor of Psychiatric Times, has said, “My impression is that most psychiatrists who use this expression”—that the pills fix chemical imbalances—“feel uncomfortable and a little embarrassed when they do so. It’s kind of a bumper-sticker phrase that saves time.”

    Dorian Deshauer, a psychiatrist and historian at the University of Toronto, has written that the chemical-imbalance theory, popularized in the eighties and nineties, “created the perception that the long term, even life-long use of psychiatric drugs made sense as a logical step.” But psychiatric drugs are brought to market in clinical trials that typically last less than twelve weeks. Few studies follow patients who take the medications for more than a year. Allen Frances, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Duke, who chaired the task force for the fourth edition of the DSM, in 1994, told me that the field has neglected questions about how to take patients off drugs—a practice known as “de-prescribing.” He said that “de-prescribing requires a great deal more skill, time, commitment, and knowledge of the patient than prescribing does.” He emphasizes what he called a “cruel paradox: there’s a large population on the severe end of the spectrum who really need the medicine” and either don’t have access to treatment or avoid it because it is stigmatized in their community. At the same time, many others are “being overprescribed and then stay on the medications for years.” There are almost no studies on how or when to go off psychiatric medications, a situation that has created what he calls a “national public-health experiment.”

    Roland Kuhn, a Swiss psychiatrist credited with discovering one of the first antidepressants, imipramine, in 1956, later warned that many doctors would be incapable of using antidepressants properly, “because they largely or entirely neglect the patient’s own experiences.” The drugs could only work, he wrote, if a doctor is “fully aware of the fact that he is not dealing with a self-contained, rigid object, but with an individual who is involved in constant movement and change.”

    A decade after the invention of antidepressants, randomized clinical studies emerged as the most trusted form of medical knowledge, supplanting the authority of individual case studies. By necessity, clinical studies cannot capture fluctuations in mood that may be meaningful to the patient but do not fit into the study’s categories. This methodology has led to a far more reliable body of evidence, but it also subtly changed our conception of mental health, which has become synonymous with the absence of symptoms, rather than with a return to a patient’s baseline of functioning, her mood or personality before and between episodes of illness.

    Antidepressants are now taken by roughly one in eight adults and adolescents in the U.S., and a quarter of them have been doing so for more than ten years. Industry money often determines the questions posed by pharmacological studies, and research about stopping drugs has never been a priority.

    Barbiturates, a class of sedatives that helped hundreds of thousands of people to feel calmer, were among the first popular psychiatric drugs. Although leading medical journals asserted that barbiturate addiction was rare, within a few years it was evident that people withdrawing from barbiturates could become more anxious than they were before they began taking the drugs. (They could also hallucinate, have convulsions, and even die.)

    Valium and other benzodiazepines were introduced in the early sixties, as a safer option. By the seventies, one in ten Americans was taking Valium. The chief of clinical pharmacology at Massachusetts General Hospital declared, in 1976, “I have never seen a case of benzodiazepine dependence” and described it as “an astonishingly unusual event.” Later, though, the F.D.A. acknowledged that people can become dependent on benzodiazepines, experiencing intense agitation when they stop taking them.

    In the fifth edition of the DSM, published in 2013, the editors added an entry for “antidepressant discontinuation syndrome”—a condition also mentioned on drug labels—but the description is vague and speculative, noting that “longitudinal studies are lacking” and that little is known about the course of the syndrome. “Symptoms appear to abate over time,” the manual explains, while noting that “some individuals may prefer to resume medication indefinitely.”

    Audrey Bahrick, a psychologist at the University of Iowa Counseling Service, who has published papers on the way that S.S.R.I.s affect sexuality, told me that, a decade ago, after someone close to her lost sexual function on S.S.R.I.s, “I became pretty obsessive about researching the issue, but the actual qualitative experience of patients was never documented. There was this assumption that the symptoms would resolve once you stop the medication. I just kept thinking, Where is the data? Where is the data?” In her role as a counsellor, Bahrick sees hundreds of college students each year, many of whom have been taking S.S.R.I.s since adolescence. She told me, “I seem to have the expectation that young people would be quite distressed about the sexual side effects, but my observation clinically is that these young people don’t yet know what sexuality really means, or why it is such a driving force.”

    #Psychiatrie #Big_Pharma #Addiction #Anti_depresseurs #Valium

    • Le problème, c’est que les psychiatres ont surtout le temps pour prescrire, pas pour creuser. Et que le temps de guérison entre frontalement en conflit avec le temps de productivité.

      Le temps de guérir est un luxe pour les gens bien entourés et avec assez de moyens financiers.

      Et il manque toujours la question de base : qu’est-ce qui déclenche ses réponses psychiques violentes ?

      J’aurais tendance à dire : un mode de vie #normatif et étroit qui force certaines personnes à adopter un mode de vie particulièrement éloigné de ce qu’elles sont, de ce qu’elles veulent. Notre société est terriblement irrespectueuse et violente pour tous ceux qui ne se conforme nt pas au #modèle unique de la personne sociale, dynamique et surtout, bien productive !

      #dépression

  • Food Sovereignty

    Food Sovereignty is a term that refers to both a movement and an idea (Wittman et al., 2010) however, as with most political concepts, it is essentially contested. This contested nature stems partly from the conviction of many of its transnational advocates that food sovereignty needs to be defined ‘from the bottom-up’ and as such it evades a precise single definition. While there is merit in such an approach given the diverse political and agro-ecological settings in which food sovereignty has emerged as a rallying cry for change, it also raises the question of whether food sovereignty can be relational without bounds [1].

    Whilst the lack of distinction of the food sovereignty concept continues to form a theoretical problem, which according to some prevents the further development of the debate[2], in practice the issue areas that food sovereignty advocates concern themselves with are very clear. The primary documentation issued by organisations like La Via Campesina and the declarations issued at the two Nyéléni meetings, include calls for the democratisation of the food system and the protection of the rights of small farmers. It also expresses a commitment to address the multiple inequalities reproduced within the current corporate-dominated food system. As such, food sovereignty builds upon a rights-based approach to food, but adds a qualifier to such rights. Human beings do not merely have a right to food, but rather ‘a right to food that is healthy and culturally appropriate, produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods’, which are defined by people instead of corporations or unaccountable governments [3]. In this manner, food sovereignty represents a radical alternative to the food security paradigm, which holds central the benefits of free food markets and seeks to solve the problem of world hunger through scientific innovation and increased market liberalisation.

    Whilst the precise origins of food sovereignty remain somewhat unclear, Edelman (2014) has put forward a strong case that it was first articulated in Mexico [4]. Additionally, as a result of Latin American peasant farmer organisation La Via Campesina’s use of the term and the fact that some of the movement’s key international meetings were deliberately held in the global South (at Nyéléni in Mali) so as to make a statement, food sovereignty itself is often seen as a ‘southern’ rallying cry. In part this is because it is associated with smallholder farming which is exercised more extensively within the global South. This is not to say that smallholder farmers do not exist within Europe or the United States,[5] or that the aspirations of small holder producers in Latin America, East Asia or elsewhere may not align with the food export-oriented framework that is conventionally understood as driven by ‘northern’ actors [6]. Nor is it to suggest that food sovereignty – where it pertains to democratisation and exercising ownership over a given food system – has no place in American and European societies. The geographic dimensions of food sovereignty, however, do serve to communicate that the negative socio-economic impacts resulting from the proliferation of large-scale industrialised food production elsewhere has been predominantly felt in the global South.

    Reflecting on the structure of the global food economy, it has been suggested that the fundamental interests of geographically differently located actors may be at odds with one another, even if they collectively mobilise behind the banner of food sovereignty [7]. Food sovereignty activists stand accused of taking a ‘big bag fits all’ approach (Patel) and brushing over the contradictions inherent in the movement. As already indicated above, however, whilst the broad geographic delineations may help to explain existing inequalities, the reproduction of binary North-South oppositions is not always conducive to better understanding the mechanisms through which such inequalities are reproduced. For example, factors such as the interaction between local elites and transnational capital or the role of food culture and dietary change are not easily captured through territorial markers such as ‘North’ and ‘South’.

    Essential Reading

    Holt-Gimenez, Eric & Amin, Samir, (2011) Food movements unite!: Strategies to transform our food system (Oakland: Food First Books).

    Alonso-Fradejas, A., Borras Jr, S. M., Holmes, T., Holt-Giménez, E., & Robbins, M. J. (2015). Food sovereignty: convergence and contradictions, conditions and challenges. Third World Quarterly, 36(3), 431-448.

    Patel, Raj. (2009). Food sovereignty. Journal of Peasant Studies, 36:3, 663-706

    Further reading

    Andrée P, Ayres J, Bosia MJ, Mássicotte MJ. (eds.) (2014). Globalization and food sovereignty: global and local change in the new politics of food (Toronto: University of Toronto Press).

    Carolan, Michael. (2014). “Getting to the core of food security and food sovereignty: Relationality with limits?” Dialogues in Human Geography 4, no. 2, pp. 218-220.

    Holt-Giménez, E. (2009). From food crisis to food sovereignty: the challenge of social movements. Monthly Review, 61(3), 142.

    Shiva, Vandana (1997). Biopiracy: The plunder of nature and knowledge (Cambridge: South End Press).

    Wittman, Hannah (ed.) (2011). Food sovereignty: reconnecting food, nature & community (Oxford: Pambazuka Press).

    Zurayk, R. (2016). The Arab Uprisings through an Agrarian Lens. In Kadri. A. (ed). Development Challenges and Solutions after the Arab Spring. Hampshire, England: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 139-152.

    https://globalsocialtheory.org/concepts/food-sovereignty
    #souveraineté_alimentaire #alimentation #définition

  • Undercover agents target cybersecurity watchdog who detailed Israeli firm NSO’s link to #Khashoggi scandal
    Haaretz.Com
    https://www.haaretz.com/misc/article-print-page/.premium-undercover-agents-target-watchdog-who-detailed-israeli-firm-nso-s-

    Operatives with fake identities are pursuing members of #Citizen_Lab, the group that uncovered the connection between Jamal Khashoggi’s murder and Israel’s surveillance company #NSO
    The Associated Press | Jan. 26, 2019 | 4:19 PM

    The researchers who reported that Israeli software was used to spy on Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s inner circle before his gruesome death are being targeted in turn by international undercover operatives, The Associated Press has found.

    Twice in the past two months, men masquerading as socially conscious investors have lured members of the Citizen Lab internet watchdog group to meetings at luxury hotels to quiz them for hours about their work exposing Israeli surveillance and the details of their personal lives. In both cases, the researchers believe they were secretly recorded.

    Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert described the stunts as “a new low.”

    “We condemn these sinister, underhanded activities in the strongest possible terms,” he said in a statement Friday. “Such a deceitful attack on an academic group like the Citizen Lab is an attack on academic freedom everywhere.”

    Who these operatives are working for remains a riddle, but their tactics recall those of private investigators who assume elaborate false identities to gather intelligence or compromising material on critics of powerful figures in government or business.

    Citizen Lab, based out of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, has for years played a leading role in exposing state-backed hackers operating in places as far afield as Tibet , Ethiopia and Syria . Lately the group has drawn attention for its repeated exposés of an Israeli surveillance software vendor called the NSO Group, a firm whose wares have been used by governments to target journalists in Mexico , opposition figures in Panama and human rights activists in the Middle East .

    In October, Citizen Lab reported that an iPhone belonging to one of Khashoggi’s confidantes had been infected by the NSO’s signature spy software only months before Khashoggi’s grisly murder. The friend, Saudi dissident Omar Abdulaziz, would later claim that the hacking had exposed Khashoggi’s private criticisms of the Saudi royal family to the Arab kingdom’s spies and thus “played a major role” in his death.

    In a statement, NSO denied having anything to do with the undercover operations targeting Citizen Lab, “either directly or indirectly” and said it had neither hired nor asked anyone to hire private investigators to pursue the Canadian organization. “Any suggestion to the contrary is factually incorrect and nothing more than baseless speculation,” NSO said.

    NSO has long denied that its software was used to target Khashoggi, although it has refused to comment when asked whether it has sold its software to the Saudi government more generally.

    The first message reached Bahr Abdul Razzak, a Syrian refugee who works as a Citizen Lab researcher, Dec. 6, when a man calling himself Gary Bowman got in touch via LinkedIn. The man described himself as a South African financial technology executive based in Madrid.

    “I came across your profile and think that the work you’ve done helping Syrian refugees and your extensive technical background could be a great fit for our new initiative,” Bowman wrote.

    Abdul Razzak said he thought the proposal was a bit odd, but he eventually agreed to meet the man at Toronto’s swanky Shangri-La Hotel on the morning of Dec. 18.

    The conversation got weird very quickly, Abdul Razzak said.

    Instead of talking about refugees, Abdul Razzak said, Bowman grilled him about his work for Citizen Lab and its investigations into the use of NSO’s software. Abdul Razzak said Bowman appeared to be reading off cue cards, asking him if he was earning enough money and throwing out pointed questions about Israel, the war in Syria and Abdul Razzak’s religiosity.

    “Do you pray?” Abdul Razzak recalled Bowman asking. “Why do you write only about NSO?” ’’Do you write about it because it’s an Israeli company?" ’’Do you hate #Israel?"

    Abdul Razzak said he emerged from the meeting feeling shaken. He alerted his Citizen Lab colleagues, who quickly determined that the breakfast get-together had been a ruse. Bowman’s supposed Madrid-based company, FlameTech, had no web presence beyond a LinkedIn page, a handful of social media profiles and an entry in the business information platform Crunchbase. A reverse image search revealed that the profile picture of the man listed as FlameTech’s chief executive, Mauricio Alonso, was a stock photograph.

    “My immediate gut feeling was: ’This is a fake,’” said John Scott-Railton, one of Abdul Razzak’s colleagues.

    Scott-Railton flagged the incident to the AP, which confirmed that FlameTech was a digital facade.

    Searches of the Orbis database of corporate records, which has data on some 300 million global companies, turned up no evidence of a Spanish firm called FlameTech or Flame Tech or any company anywhere in the world matching its description. Similarly, the AP found no record of FlameTech in Madrid’s official registry or of a Gary Bowman in the city’s telephone listings. An Orbis search for Alonso, the supposed chief executive, also drew a blank. When an AP reporter visited Madrid’s Crystal Tower high-rise, where FlameTech claimed to have 250 sq. meters (2,700 sq. feet) of office space, he could find no trace of the firm and calls to the number listed on its website went unanswered.

    The AP was about to publish a story about the curious company when, on Jan. 9, Scott-Railton received an intriguing message of his own.

    This time the contact came not from Bowman of FlameTech but from someone who identified himself as Michel Lambert, a director at the Paris-based agricultural technology firm CPW-Consulting.

    Lambert had done his homework. In his introductory email , he referred to Scott-Railton’s early doctoral research on kite aerial photography — a mapping technique using kite-mounted cameras — and said he was “quite impressed.

    We have a few projects and clients coming up that could significantly benefit from implementing Kite Aerial Photography,” he said.

    Like FlameTech, CPW-Consulting was a fiction. Searches of Orbis and the French commercial court registry Infogreffe turned up no trace of the supposedly Paris-based company or indeed of any Paris-based company bearing the acronym CPW. And when the AP visited CPW’s alleged office there was no evidence of the company; the address was home to a mainly residential apartment building. Residents and the building’s caretaker said they had never heard of the firm.

    Whoever dreamed up CPW had taken steps to ensure the illusion survived a casual web search, but even those efforts didn’t bear much scrutiny. The company had issued a help wanted ad, for example, seeking a digital mapping specialist for their Paris office, but Scott-Railton discovered that the language had been lifted almost word-for-word from an ad from an unrelated company seeking a mapping specialist in London. A blog post touted CPW as a major player in Africa, but an examination of the author’s profile suggests the article was the only one the blogger had ever written.

    When Lambert suggested an in-person meeting in New York during a Jan. 19 phone call , Scott-Railton felt certain that Lambert was trying to set him up.

    But Scott-Railton agreed to the meeting. He planned to lay a trap of his own.

    Anyone watching Scott-Railton and Lambert laughing over wagyu beef and lobster bisque at the Peninsula Hotel’s upscale restaurant on Thursday afternoon might have mistaken the pair for friends.

    In fact, the lunch was Spy vs. Spy. Scott-Railton had spent the night before trying to secret a homemade camera into his tie, he later told AP, eventually settling for a GoPro action camera and several recording devices hidden about his person. On the table, Lambert had placed a large pen in which Scott-Railton said he spotted a tiny camera lens peeking out from an opening in the top.

    Lambert didn’t seem to be alone. At the beginning of the meal, a man sat behind him, holding up his phone as if to take pictures and then abruptly left the restaurant, having eaten nothing. Later, two or three men materialized at the bar and appeared to be monitoring proceedings.

    Scott-Railton wasn’t alone either. A few tables away, two Associated Press journalists were making small talk as they waited for a signal from Scott-Railton, who had invited the reporters to observe the lunch from nearby and then interview Lambert near the end of the meal.

    The conversation began with a discussion of kites, gossip about African politicians, and a detour through Scott-Railton’s family background. But Lambert, just like Bowman, eventually steered the talk to Citizen Lab and NSO.

    “Work drama? Tell me, I like drama!” Lambert said at one point, according to Scott-Railton’s recording of the conversation. “Is there a big competition between the people inside Citizen Lab?” he asked later.

    Like Bowman, Lambert appeared to be working off cue cards and occasionally made awkward conversational gambits. At one point he repeated a racist French expression, insisting it wasn’t offensive. He also asked Scott-Railton questions about the Holocaust, anti-Semitism and whether he grew up with any Jewish friends. At another point he asked whether there might not be a “racist element” to Citizen Lab’s interest in Israeli spyware.

    After dessert arrived, the AP reporters approached Lambert at his table and asked him why his company didn’t seem to exist.
    He seemed to stiffen.

    “I know what I’m doing,” Lambert said, as he put his files — and his pen — into a bag. Then he stood up, bumped into a chair and walked off, saying “Ciao” and waving his hand, before returning because he had neglected to pay the bill.

    As he paced around the restaurant waiting for the check, Lambert refused to answer questions about who he worked for or why no trace of his firm could be found.

    “I don’t have to give you any explanation,” he said. He eventually retreated to a back room and closed the door.

    Who Lambert and Bowman really are isn’t clear. Neither men returned emails, LinkedIn messages or phone calls. And despite their keen focus on NSO the AP has found no evidence of any link to the Israeli spyware merchant, which is adamant that it wasn’t involved.

    The kind of aggressive investigative tactics used by the mystery men who targeted Citizen Lab have come under fire in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse scandal. Black Cube, an Israeli private investigation firm apologized after The New Yorker and other media outlets revealed that the company’s operatives had used subterfuge and dirty tricks to help the Hollywood mogul suppress allegations of rape and sexual assault.

    Scott-Railton and Abdul Razzak said they didn’t want to speculate about who was involved. But both said they believed they were being steered toward making controversial comments that could be used to blacken Citizen Lab’s reputation.

    “It could be they wanted me to say, ’Yes, I hate Israel,’ or ’Yes, Citizen Lab is against NSO because it’s Israeli,’” said Abdul Razzak.
    Scott-Railton said the elaborate, multinational operation was gratifying, in a way.

    “People were paid to fly to a city to sit you down to an expensive meal and try to convince you to say bad things about your work, your colleagues and your employer,” he said.

    “That means that your work is important.”

  • Jamal Khashoggi’s private WhatsApp messages may offer new clues to killing - CNN
    https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/02/middleeast/jamal-khashoggi-whatsapp-messages-intl/index.html

    Le téléphone de #khashoggi espionné grâce à un logiciel israélien.

    Abdulaziz first spoke publicly about his contact with Khashoggi last month after researchers at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab reported his phone had been hacked by military-grade spyware.

    According to Bill Marczak, a research fellow at the Citizen Lab, the software was the invention of an Israeli firm named NSO Group, and deployed at the behest of the Saudi Arabian government.
    Marczak said at least two other Saudi dissidents have been targeted with NSO tools: an activist named Yahya Assiri and a staff member who had been involved in Amnesty International’s work on Saudi Arabia.
    Danna Ingleton, an Amnesty deputy program director, said its technology experts studied the staff member’s phone and confirmed it was targeted with the spyware. Amnesty is currently exploring potential recourse against NSO Group and last week wrote a letter to the Israeli Ministry of Defense requesting it revoke NSO’s export license, Ingleton said.
    On Sunday, Abdulaziz’s lawyers filed a lawsuit in Tel Aviv, alleging NSO broke international laws by selling its software to oppressive regimes, knowing it could be used to infringe human rights. “NSO should be held accountable in order to protect the lives of political dissidents, journalists and human rights activists,” said the Jerusalem-based lawyer Alaa Mahajna, who is acting for Abdulaziz.
    The lawsuit follows another filed in Israel and Cyprus by citizens in Mexico and Qatar.

    *#mbs #israël

  • In the Age of A.I., Is Seeing Still Believing ? | The New Yorker
    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/in-the-age-of-ai-is-seeing-still-believing

    In a media environment saturated with fake news, such technology has disturbing implications. Last fall, an anonymous Redditor with the username Deepfakes released a software tool kit that allows anyone to make synthetic videos in which a neural network substitutes one person’s face for another’s, while keeping their expressions consistent. Along with the kit, the user posted pornographic videos, now known as “deepfakes,” that appear to feature various Hollywood actresses. (The software is complex but comprehensible: “Let’s say for example we’re perving on some innocent girl named Jessica,” one tutorial reads. “The folders you create would be: ‘jessica; jessica_faces; porn; porn_faces; model; output.’ ”) Around the same time, “Synthesizing Obama,” a paper published by a research group at the University of Washington, showed that a neural network could create believable videos in which the former President appeared to be saying words that were really spoken by someone else. In a video voiced by Jordan Peele, Obama seems to say that “President Trump is a total and complete dipshit,” and warns that “how we move forward in the age of information” will determine “whether we become some kind of fucked-up dystopia.”

    “People have been doing synthesis for a long time, with different tools,” he said. He rattled off various milestones in the history of image manipulation: the transposition, in a famous photograph from the eighteen-sixties, of Abraham Lincoln’s head onto the body of the slavery advocate John C. Calhoun; the mass alteration of photographs in Stalin’s Russia, designed to purge his enemies from the history books; the convenient realignment of the pyramids on the cover of National Geographic, in 1982; the composite photograph of John Kerry and Jane Fonda standing together at an anti-Vietnam demonstration, which incensed many voters after the Times credulously reprinted it, in 2004, above a story about Kerry’s antiwar activities.

    “In the past, anybody could buy Photoshop. But to really use it well you had to be highly skilled,” Farid said. “Now the technology is democratizing.” It used to be safe to assume that ordinary people were incapable of complex image manipulations. Farid recalled a case—a bitter divorce—in which a wife had presented the court with a video of her husband at a café table, his hand reaching out to caress another woman’s. The husband insisted it was fake. “I noticed that there was a reflection of his hand in the surface of the table,” Farid said, “and getting the geometry exactly right would’ve been really hard.” Now convincing synthetic images and videos were becoming easier to make.

    The acceleration of home computing has converged with another trend: the mass uploading of photographs and videos to the Web. Later, when I sat down with Efros in his office, he explained that, even in the early two-thousands, computer graphics had been “data-starved”: although 3-D modellers were capable of creating photorealistic scenes, their cities, interiors, and mountainscapes felt empty and lifeless. True realism, Efros said, requires “data, data, data” about “the gunk, the dirt, the complexity of the world,” which is best gathered by accident, through the recording of ordinary life.

    Today, researchers have access to systems like ImageNet, a site run by computer scientists at Stanford and Princeton which brings together fourteen million photographs of ordinary places and objects, most of them casual snapshots posted to Flickr, eBay, and other Web sites. Initially, these images were sorted into categories (carrousels, subwoofers, paper clips, parking meters, chests of drawers) by tens of thousands of workers hired through Amazon Mechanical Turk. Then, in 2012, researchers at the University of Toronto succeeded in building neural networks capable of categorizing ImageNet’s images automatically; their dramatic success helped set off today’s neural-networking boom. In recent years, YouTube has become an unofficial ImageNet for video. Efros’s lab has overcome the site’s “platform bias”—its preference for cats and pop stars—by developing a neural network that mines, from “life style” videos such as “My Spring Morning Routine” and “My Rustic, Cozy Living Room,” clips of people opening packages, peering into fridges, drying off with towels, brushing their teeth. This vast archive of the uninteresting has made a new level of synthetic realism possible.

    In 2016, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) launched a program in Media Forensics, or MediFor, focussed on the threat that synthetic media poses to national security. Matt Turek, the program’s manager, ticked off possible manipulations when we spoke: “Objects that are cut and pasted into images. The removal of objects from a scene. Faces that might be swapped. Audio that is inconsistent with the video. Images that appear to be taken at a certain time and place but weren’t.” He went on, “What I think we’ll see, in a couple of years, is the synthesis of events that didn’t happen. Multiple images and videos taken from different perspectives will be constructed in such a way that they look like they come from different cameras. It could be something nation-state driven, trying to sway political or military action. It could come from a small, low-resource group. Potentially, it could come from an individual.”

    As with today’s text-based fake news, the problem is double-edged. Having been deceived by a fake video, one begins to wonder whether many real videos are fake. Eventually, skepticism becomes a strategy in itself. In 2016, when the “Access Hollywood” tape surfaced, Donald Trump acknowledged its accuracy while dismissing his statements as “locker-room talk.” Now Trump suggests to associates that “we don’t think that was my voice.”

    “The larger danger is plausible deniability,” Farid told me. It’s here that the comparison with counterfeiting breaks down. No cashier opens up the register hoping to find counterfeit bills. In politics, however, it’s often in our interest not to believe what we are seeing.

    As alarming as synthetic media may be, it may be more alarming that we arrived at our current crises of misinformation—Russian election hacking; genocidal propaganda in Myanmar; instant-message-driven mob violence in India—without it. Social media was enough to do the job, by turning ordinary people into media manipulators who will say (or share) anything to win an argument. The main effect of synthetic media may be to close off an escape route from the social-media bubble. In 2014, video of the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner helped start the Black Lives Matter movement; footage of the football player Ray Rice assaulting his fiancée catalyzed a reckoning with domestic violence in the National Football League. It seemed as though video evidence, by turning us all into eyewitnesses, might provide a path out of polarization and toward reality. With the advent of synthetic media, all that changes. Body cameras may still capture what really happened, but the aesthetic of the body camera—its claim to authenticity—is also a vector for misinformation. “Eyewitness video” becomes an oxymoron. The path toward reality begins to wash away.

    #Fake_news #Image #Synthèse

  • Bots at the Gate A Human Rights Analysis of Automated Decision. Making in Canada’s Immigration and Refugee System

    A new report from the Citizen Lab and the International Human Rights Program at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law investigates the use of artificial intelligence and automated decision-making in Canada’s immigration and refugee systems. The report finds that use of automated decision-making technologies to augment or replace human judgment threatens to violate domestic and international human rights law, with alarming implications for the fundamental human rights of those subjected to these technologies.

    The ramifications of using automated decision-making in the sphere of immigration and refugee law and policy are far-reaching. Marginalized and under-resourced communities such as residents without citizenship status often have access to less robust human rights protections and less legal expertise with which to defend those rights. The report notes that adopting these autonomous decision-making systems without first ensuring responsible best practices and building in human rights principles at the outset may only exacerbate pre-existing disparities and can lead to rights violations including unjust deportation.

    Since at least 2014, Canada has been introducing automated decision-making experiments in its immigration mechanisms, most notably to automate certain activities currently conducted by immigration officials and to support the evaluation of some immigrant and visitor applications. Recent announcements signal an expansion of the uses of these technologies in a variety of immigration decisions that are normally made by a human immigration official. These can include decisions on a spectrum of complexity, including whether an application is complete, whether a marriage is “genuine”, or whether someone should be designated as a “risk.”

    The report provides a critical interdisciplinary analysis of public statements, records, policies, and drafts by relevant departments within the Government of Canada, including Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, and the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat. The report additionally provides a comparative analysis to similar initiatives occurring in similar jurisdictions such as Australia and the United Kingdom. In February, the IHRP and the Citizen Lab submitted 27 separate Access to Information Requests and continue to await responses from Canada’s government.

    The report concludes with a series of specific recommendations for the federal government, the complete and detailed list of which are available at the end of this publication. In summary, they include recommendations that the federal government:

    1. Publish a complete and detailed report, to be maintained on an ongoing basis, of all automated decision systems currently in use within Canada’s immigration and refugee system, including detailed and specific information about each system.

    2. Freeze all efforts to procure, develop, or adopt any new automated decision system technology until existing systems fully comply with a government-wide Standard or Directive governing the responsible use of these technologies.

    3. Adopt a binding, government-wide Standard or Directive for the use of automated decision systems, which should apply to all new automated decision systems as well as those currently in use by the federal government.

    4. Establish an independent, arms-length body with the power to engage in all aspects of oversight and review of all use of automated decision systems by the federal government.

    5. Create a rational, transparent, and public methodology for determining the types of administrative processes and systems which are appropriate for the experimental use of automated decision system technologies, and which are not.

    6. Commit to making complete source code for all federal government automated decision systems—regardless of whether they are developed internally or by the private sector—public and open source by default, subject only to limited exceptions for reasons of privacy and national security.

    7. Launch a federal Task Force that brings key government stakeholders alongside academia and civil society to better understand the current and prospective impacts of automated decision system technologies on human rights and the public interest more broadly.


    https://citizenlab.ca/2018/09/bots-at-the-gate-human-rights-analysis-automated-decision-making-in-canad
    #frontières #surveillance #migrations #catégorisation #tri #Droits_Humains #rapport #Canada #réfugiés #protection_des_données #smart_borders #frontières_intelligentes #algorithme #automatisme
    signalé par @etraces sur seenthis

  • Bots at the Gate
    https://citizenlab.ca/2018/09/bots-at-the-gate-human-rights-analysis-automated-decision-making-in-canad

    A Human Rights Analysis of Automated Decision Making in Canada’s Immigration and Refugee System A new report from the Citizen Lab and the International Human Rights Program at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law investigates the use of artificial intelligence and automated decision-making in Canada’s immigration and refugee systems. The report finds that use of automated decision-making technologies to augment or replace human judgment threatens to violate domestic and international (...)

    #algorithme #frontières #migration #discrimination #solutionnisme #CitizenLab

  • THE RISE OF THE CYBER-MERCENARIES
    What happens when private firms have cyberweapons as powerful as those owned by governments?
    https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/31/the-rise-of-the-cyber-mercenaries-israel-nso
    https://foreignpolicymag.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/1_cyber_weapon_final1.jpg?w=1024&h=1536&crop=0,0,0

    he first text message showed up on Ahmed Mansoor’s phone at 9:38 on a sweltering August morning in 2016. “New secrets about torture of Emiratis in state prisons,” it read, somewhat cryptically, in Arabic. A hyperlink followed the words. Something about the number and the message, and a similar one he received the next day, seemed off to Mansoor, a well-known human rights activist in the United Arab Emirates. He resisted the impulse to click on the links.

    Instead, Mansoor sent the notes to Citizen Lab, a research institute based at the University of Toronto specializing in human rights and internet security. Working backward, researchers there identified the hyperlinks as part of a sophisticated spyware program built specifically to target Mansoor. Had he clicked on the links, the program would have turned his phone into a “digital spy in his pocket,” Citizen Lab later wrote in a report—tracking his movements, monitoring his messages, and taking control of his camera and microphone.

    But the big revelation in the report wasn’t so much the technology itself; intelligence agencies in advanced countries have developed and deployed spyware around the world. What stood out was that Citizen Lab had traced the program to a private firm: the mysterious Israeli NSO Group. (The name is formed from the first initials of the company’s three founders.) Somehow, this relatively small company had managed to find a vulnerability in iPhones, considered to be among the world’s most secure cellular devices, and had developed a program to exploit it—a hugely expensive and time-consuming process. “We are not aware of any previous instance of an iPhone remote jailbreak used in the wild as part of a targeted attack campaign,” the Citizen Lab researchers wrote in their report.

  • Egypt
    Study: Blocked access to websites, ad redirects and cryptocurrency mining in Egypt traced to Sandvine’s PacketLogic devices | MadaMasr
    https://www.madamasr.com/en/2018/03/12/feature/politics/study-blocked-access-to-websites-ad-redirects-and-cryptocurrency-mining-in

    The technology used to block access to Mada Masr and hundreds of websites, blogs, proxy and virtual private networks (VPNs) on Egypt’s service providers is also being used to redirect traffic to revenue-generating content, such as advertising pages and cryptocurrency mining scripts, according to a report published by The University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab.

    The Egyptian advertisement and cryptocurrency redirect scheme, which Citizen Lab researchers have dubbed “AdHose,” is an attempt to “covertly raise money,” the Friday report, titled Bad Traffic, asserted.

    Beyond identifying the specifics of the revenue-generation scheme, the researchers also developed a digital fingerprint for the deep packet inspection (DPI) observed in Egypt and Turkey and matched it to a second-hand PacketLogic device produced by Sandvine/Procera Networks, one of several facts that they argue points to the US company’s implication in malicious activity.

  • Numéro spécial de la revue #Fennia sur l’édition scientifique (très très bienvenu).

    Can research quality be measured quantitatively? (2017-11-07)
    Michael Richard Handley Jones

    In this article I reflect on ways in which the neoliberal university and its administrative counterpart, new public management (NPM), affect academic publishing activity. One characteristic feature of NPM is the urge to use simple numerical indicators of research output as a tool to allocate funding and, in practice if not in theory, as a means of assessing research quality. This ranges from the use of journal impact factors (IF) and ranking of journals to publication points to determine what types of work in publishing is counted as meritorious for funding allocation. I argue that it is a fallacy to attempt to assess quality of scholarship through quantitative measures of publication output. I base my arguments on my experiences of editing a Norwegian geographical journal over a period of 16 years, along with my experiences as a scholar working for many years within the Norwegian university system.

    PDF

    Reclaiming value from academic labor: commentary by the Editors of Human Geography (2017-11-07)
    John C. Finn Christopher Newport University Richard Peet Graduate School of Geography, Clark University Sharlene Mollett University of Toronto, Scarborough John Lauermann Medgar Evers College, City University of New York

    There have long been discussions about the need for an alternative publishing model for academic research. This has been made clear by the September 2017 scandal involving Third World Quarterly. The editor’s deeply problematic decision to publish an essay arguing in favor of colonialism was likely meant as click-bate to drive clicks and citations. But we should not lose sight of the fact that this latest scandal is only one recent manifestation of a long-simmering problem that has periodically commanded significant attention in the academic literature, blogs, email lists, conference sessions, and the popular press. As a direct result, over the last decade or more, new journals have been created that specifically endeavor to offer routes around corporate/capitalist academic publishing, and several existing journals have removed themselves from this profit-driven ecosystem. In this commentary, the editorial team of the journal Human Geography weighs in on what we see as the nature of the problem, what we are doing in response, what our successes have been, and what challenges remain.

    PDF

    Say ‘Yes!’ to peer review: Open Access publishing and the need for mutual aid in academia (2017-11-22)
    Simon Springer University of Victoria Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch Claudia Villegas Levi Gahman

    Scholars are increasingly declining to offer their services in the peer review process. There are myriad reasons for this refusal, most notably the ever-increasing pressure placed on academics to publish within the neoliberal university. Yet if you are publishing yourself then you necessarily expect someone else to review your work, which begs the question as to why this service is not being reciprocated. There is something to be said about withholding one’s labour when journals are under corporate control, but when it comes to Open Access journals such denial is effectively unacceptable. Make time for it, as others have made time for you. As editors of the independent, Open Access, non-corporate journal ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, we reflect on the struggles facing our daily operations, where scholars declining to participate in peer review is the biggest obstacle we face. We argue that peer review should be considered as a form of mutual aid, which is rooted in an ethics of cooperation. The system only works if you say ‘Yes’!

    PDF

    Evaluating otherwise: hierarchies and opportunities in publishing practices (2017-11-30)
    Derek Ruez University of Tampere

    This short paper responds to the provocations set out in Kirsi Pauliina Kallio’s recent editorial on ‘Subtle radical moves in scientific publishing’ and emerges out of my participation in a Fennia-organized panel at the 2017 Nordic Geographers’ Meeting where participants reflected on the challenges and opportunities of creating a more equitable and pluralistic international publishing environment. Given the dominance of English language publishing in international academic work and the broader geopolitics of knowledge production through which some contexts, approaches, and modes of knowledge are regularly devalued, I suggest that—to the extent that publishing outlets are evaluated or ranked—they should be evaluated and ranked, in part, based on their contribution to a pluralistically international academy. This revaluation could help shape the informal assessments made by scholars in the context of hiring, funding, and other key decisions. It could also be integrated into more formal channels, such as within the deliberations of the boards who produce publication rankings in, for example, Finland’s Publication Forum. Such a tactic need not preclude other work to contest rankings hierarchies and audit cultures as they advance the neoliberalization of academic work, but it does 1) suggest the importance of paying attention to what and how scholars value when we evaluate publishing outlets and 2) point toward the potential of critical and creative engagement with the range of processes (i.e. indexing, accrediting, measuring, ranking etc.) that surround and subsist within academic publishing.

    PDF

    Socially just publishing: implications for geographers and their journals (2017-11-26)
    Simon Batterbury Lancaster University

    There have been a range of protests against the high journal subscription costs, and author processing charges (APCs) levied for publishing in the more prestigious and commercially run journals that are favoured by geographers. But open protests across the sector like the ‘Academic Spring’ of 2012, and challenges to commercial copyright agreements, have been fragmented and less than successful. I renew the argument for ‘socially just’ publishing in geography. For geographers this is not limited to choosing alternative publication venues. It also involves a considerable effort by senior faculty members that are assessing hiring and promotion cases, to read and assess scholarship independently of its place of publication, and to reward the efforts of colleagues that offer their work as a public good. Criteria other than the citation index and prestige of a journal need to be foregrounded. Geographers can also be publishers, and I offer my experience editing the free online Journal of Political Ecology.

    PDF

    English: lingua franca or disenfranchising? (2017-12-04)
    Sara Fregonese University of Birmingham, United Kingdom

    Conceiving academic publishing as a long-term process that often includes oral communication and knowledge exchange at academic conferences, this commentary offers a critical take on English as lingua franca. Contrarily to the historical use of lingua franca as a simplified system of transnational communication that facilitates the pragmatics of economic and cultural exchange, academic English is instead used vernacularly and becomes an excluding barrier. In the writing and peer review stages of publishing, the linguistic positionality of both authors and peer reviewers thus needs more reflection in order for academic English not to become once again part of a disenfranchising process.

    https://fennia.journal.fi/forthcoming/view/index

    #revue #édition_scientifique #publications_scientifiques #université #peer_review #anglais #langue #impact_factor #open_source #indicateurs

  • Hole the Size of Maine Opens in Antarctica Ice
    http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/10/sea-ice-hole-antarctica-southern-ocean-spd


    Winter sea ice blankets the Weddell Sea around Antarctica with massive extra-tropical cyclones hovering over the Southern Ocean in this satellite image from September 25, 2017. The blue curves represent the ice edge. The polynya is the dark region of open water within the ice pack.
    PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF MODIS-AQUA VIA NASA WORLDVIEW; SEA ICE CONTOURS FROM AMSR2 ASI VIA UNIVERSITY OF BREMEN

    A mysterious hole as big as the state of Maine has been spotted in Antarctica’s winter sea ice cover.

    The hole was discovered by researchers about a month ago. The team, comprised of scientists from the University of Toronto and the Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling (SOCCOM) project, was monitoring the area with satellite technology after a similar hole opened last year.

    #polynie #Antarctique

  • Children’s books with humans have greater moral impact than animals, study finds | Books | The Guardian
    https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/01/only-childrens-books-with-humans-have-moral-impact-study-finds

    Forget the morals that millennia of children have learned from the Hare and the Tortoise and the Fox and the Crow: Aesop would have had a greater effect with his fables if he’d put the stories into the mouths of human characters, at least according to new research from the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE).

    In the Canadian study, researchers read one of three stories to almost 100 children between four and six years old: Mary Packard’s Little Raccoon Learns to Share, in which anthropomorphic animals learn that sharing makes you feel good; a version of the story in which the animal illustrations were replaced with human characters; or a control book about seeds.

  • This Simple Philosophical Puzzle Shows How Difficult It Is to Know Something - Facts So Romantic
    http://nautil.us/blog/-this-simple-philosophical-puzzle-shows-how-difficult-it-is-to-know-something

    What is knowledge? Well, thinkers for thousands of years had more or less taken one definition for granted: Knowledge is “justified true belief.” But Edmund Gettier showed, using little short stories, that this intuitive definition of knowledge was flawed.Photograph by Sandy Roberts / Flickr.In the 1960s, the American philosopher Edmund Gettier devised a thought experiment that has become known as a “Gettier case.” It shows that something’s “off” about the way we understand knowledge. This ordeal is called the “Gettier problem,” and 50 years later, philosophers are still arguing about it. Jennifer Nagel, a philosopher of mind at the University of Toronto, sums up its appeal. “The resilience of the Gettier problem,” she says, “suggests that it is difficult (if not impossible) to develop any (...)

  • The Lodz Ghetto Photographs of Henryk Ross | AGO
    http://agolodzghetto.com

    “Overexposed and Underexposed: The Many Faces of the Lodz Ghetto

    Doris L. Bergen and Sylwia Szymańska-Smolkin

    Overexposed and Underexposed was written for this site by Doris Bergen, the Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor of Holocaust Studies in the Department of History at the University of Toronto and Sylwia Szymańska-Smolkin who is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History and Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. Read their full biographies here.
    What were ghettos in the Holocaust?

    During World War II, Nazi Germans forced Jews into designated areas of cities and towns known as “ghettos.” There were more than 1,000 ghettos. All of them were sites of death, yet also of Jewish life. Ghettos are a well-known part of the Holocaust, although much about them is poorly understood.
    Characteristics of ghettos

    In ghettos, people of all ages and genders lived together, often as families. Concentration and labour camps, by contrast, separated prisoners by sex and excluded the youngest and oldest members of the population. Ghettos had an element of self-administration – Jewish Councils – that the Germans used to carry out their commands. Compared to prisons and camps, German presence in the ghettos was limited. The Germans typically used local police, who worked under German supervision, to guard the ghetto from the outside. For instance Polish police were posted around the Warsaw Ghetto, and Lithuanian police guarded the Kovno Ghetto. Internal matters were left to Jewish police, who officially worked under the supervision of the Jewish Council but were subordinate to the non-Jewish police and often subjected to direct German pressure.

    Ghettos varied enormously. The Germans set up ghettos in some territories but not others. In western Poland, they began to establish ghettos in 1939, just months after the defeat of Poland. But in parts of eastern Poland and Ukraine, they did not create ghettos; instead they shot most Jews there in the months after they invaded in 1941. Ghettos were not used in western Europe (France, the Netherlands, Belgium), nor were there ghettos in Germany itself, although starting in 1938, Jews were confined to certain buildings, the “Jew houses.”

    Some ghettos were large, in effect cities within cities. Others encompassed only one or two buildings and a handful of people. Some lasted for years, whereas others were short-lived. In Hungary, the Germans worked with local officials to set up ghettos in 1944 that existed only for a few weeks, until transports of Jews – to labour battalions, to camps and to Auschwitz-Birkenau for killing – could be arranged. Ghettos also varied in how tightly they were sealed. In some, walls, fences and guards blocked contact between Jews and the outside world. In others, Jewish workers passed in and out to workplaces outside the ghetto. The Germans only set up ghettos for Jews, although Roma were sometimes held in these same ghettos.”

  • The Polluted Brain
    http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/01/brain-pollution-evidence-builds-dirty-air-causes-alzheimer-s-dementia

    The link between air pollution and dementia remains controversial—even its proponents warn that more research is needed to confirm a causal connection and work out just how the particles might enter the brain and make mischief there. But a growing number of epidemiological studies from around the world, new findings from animal models and human brain imaging studies, and increasingly sophisticated techniques for modeling #PM2.5 exposures have raised alarms. Indeed, in an 11-year epidemiological study to be published next week in Translational Psychiatry, USC researchers will report that living in places with PM2.5 exposures higher than the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) standard of 12 µg/m3 nearly doubled dementia risk in older women. If the finding holds up in the general population, air pollution could account for roughly 21% of dementia cases worldwide, says the study’s senior author, epidemiologist Jiu-Chiuan Chen of the Keck School of Medicine at USC.

    Deepening the concerns, this month researchers at the University of Toronto in Canada reported in The Lancet that among 6.6 million people in the province of Ontario, those living within 50 meters of a major road—where levels of fine pollutants are often 10 times higher than just 150 meters away—were 12% more likely to develop dementia than people living more than 200 meters away.

    #pollution #air #cerveau #démence #santé

    • Plus prosaïquement, comme bouseuse étudiant à Paris, j’avais noté de subtiles mais bien réelles différences de performances cognitives entre la ville et la cambrousse. Après, il y a de fortes chances que ce soit multifactoriel : la pollution, certes, et une sorte de sous-oxygénation du cerveau, mais aussi la sur-stimulation permanente du milieu urbain, un état de stress récurrent, l’agression sonore à laquelle on ne peut échapper, la difficulté à voir loin, la rareté de la ligne d’horizon, etc.

  • This Simple Philosophical Puzzle Shows How Difficult It Is to Know Something - Facts So Romantic
    http://nautil.us/blog/this-simple-philosophical-puzzle-shows-how-difficult-it-is-to-know-something

    In the 1960s, the American philosopher Edmund Gettier devised a thought experiment that has become known as a “Gettier case.” It shows that something’s “off” about the way we understand knowledge. This ordeal is called the “Gettier problem,” and 50 years later, philosophers are still arguing about it. Jennifer Nagel, a philosopher of mind at the University of Toronto, sums up its appeal. “The resilience of the Gettier problem,” she says, “suggests that it is difficult (if not impossible) to develop any explicit reductive theory of knowledge.” What is knowledge? Well, thinkers for thousands of years had more or less taken one definition for granted: Knowledge is “justified true belief.” The reasoning seemed solid: Just believing something that happens to be true doesn’t necessarily make it (...)

  • Iranians connected to phishing attempt on tortured Syrian activist / Boing Boing
    http://boingboing.net/2016/08/02/iranians-connected-to-phishing.html

    Former Syrian National Council vice-president Nour Al-Ameer fled to Turkey after being arrested and tortured by the Assad regime — that’s when someone attempted to phish her and steal her identity with a fake Powerpoint attachment purporting to be about the crimes of the Assad regime.

    Al-Ameer smelled a phish and sent the email to the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab (previously), who traced the attack and found a seemingly accidentally exposed logfile on the phishing site that points to the attack having an Iranian connection; “possibly a privateer and likely working for either the Syrian or Iranian governments (or both).”

    #Syrie #Iran #guerre

  • Un article sur Imad Barghouthi dans Nature:

    “Politics: Israel must release Palestinian physicist”
    Ahmed Abbes CNRS and IHES, Paris, France.
    Jean Bricmont Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium.
    Chandler Davis University of Toronto, Canada.
    Freeman Dyson Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, USA.
    Ivar Ekeland Université Paris-Dauphine, France
    Michael Harris Columbia University, New York, USA.
    David Klein California State University, Northridge, USA.
    Robert S. MacKay University of Warwick, UK.
    Mario Martone University of Cincinnati, USA.
    David Mumford Brown University, Providence, USA.
    Chanda Prescod-Weinstein University of Washington, Seattle, USA.
    Vincent Rivasseau Université Paris-Sud, France.
    Jonathan Rosenhead London School of Economics, UK.
    Alan Sokal New York University, USA; and University College London, UK.

    Nature 535:231, 14 July 2016, doi:10.1038/535231a
    http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v535/n7611/full/535231a.html

    On 24 April, the distinguished Palestinian astrophysicist Imad Ahmad Barghouthi was arrested and detained without charge by the Israeli military — for the second time in less than 18 months (see Nature http://doi.org/bk44 ; 2016). We protest against his imprisonment and renew the call for his release.

    Once again, it was alleged that Barghouthi made statements on Facebook and on television in opposition to Israeli military attacks and occupation. Subsequent international pressure again contributed to a ruling by the military court of appeals a month later for his release (see http://go.nature.com/299v9nd ). This has not happened. Barghouthi has instead been transferred to a facility run by Israel’s internal security service, Shin Bet, for further interrogation.

    #Palestine #Imad_Barghouthi #Nature

  • Cartographer’s Toolkit

    http://www.gretchenpeterson.com/blog/review-etc

    Cartographer’s Toolkit

    https://dl.dropbox.com/s/vv21tk2zm335rlr/cartographertoolkit.png

    I’m a little late to the party, but the University of Toronto journal Cartographica reviewed Cartographer’s Toolkit last year. You can read the two page review here. For the most part, the reviewer enjoyed the book and felt it is a useful tool for cartographers. “The overall quality of this book is superb,” for example.

    #cartographie #sémiologie #toolkit #boite_à_outil

  • #NSA Leaks Could Inspire a Global Boom in Intrusive #Surveillance | MIT Technology Review
    http://www.technologyreview.com/view/521561/nsa-leaks-could-inspire-a-global-boom-in-intrusive-surveillance

    Reports of the National Security agency’s surveillance programs (...) will prove inspirational [to governments and security services in developing economies,] according to a report (...) from the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, which studies online security and privacy.

    (...)

    Ron Deibert, director of Citizen Lab, (...) says that many companies already face “complex” and “frustrating” requests from “newly emerging markets” for data on their users. He believes that the NSA revelations will cause those to become even more common, with unwelcome results.

    (...)

    India, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia, for example, have already demanded that BlackBerry add interception technology to its services, notes Deibert. He says that insisting that companies add such “backdoors” to their services introduces serious security risks, because they could be discovered and abused by others.

  • One of Canada’s largest student association endorses BDS against

    Haaretz Daily Newspaper

    http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/one-of-canada-s-largest-student-association-endorses-bds-against-israel-1.5

    One of the largest student association in Canada passed a resolution endorsing the global boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel.

    With the passage late last week of the resolution, York University’s student association joins two others in Canada - the University of Toronto and Concordia University graduate student associations - in endorsing the BDS campaign, according to the York University Excalibur.

    • Jewish student groups at York complained that they were not given advance notice of the vote and had little time to prepare an argument against the resolution.

      Les services officiels de la Hasbara sont en panne ou les arguments sont-ils introuvables ?

  • One of Canada’s largest student association endorses BDS against Israel - Jewish World News - Israel News | Haaretz Daily Newspaper
    http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/one-of-canada-s-largest-student-association-endorses-bds-against-israel-1.5

    One of the largest student association in Canada passed a resolution endorsing the global boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel.

    With the passage late last week of the resolution, York University’s student association joins two others in Canada - the University of Toronto and Concordia University graduate student associations - in endorsing the BDS campaign, according to the York University Excalibur.

    #BDS