position:associate professor

  • Ruha Benjamin : ‘We definitely can’t wait for Silicon Valley to become more diverse’
    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jun/29/ruha-benjamin-we-cant-wait-silicon-valley-become-more-diverse-prejudice

    The sociologist on how discrimination is embedded in technology – and how we go about building a fairer world Ruha Benjamin is an associate professor of African American studies at Princeton University, and lectures around the intersection of race, justice and technology. She founded the Just Data Lab, which aims to bring together activists, technologists and artists to reassess how data can be used for justice. Her latest book, Race After Technology, looks at how the design of technology (...)

    #algorithme #discrimination #GAFAM

    https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/514189e4635af958ac9e95f8d9286ee18e69a7db/0_187_4016_2408/master/4016.jpg

  • China working on data privacy law but enforcement is a stumbling block | South China Morning Post
    https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3008844/china-working-data-privacy-law-enforcement-stumbling-block

    En Chine des scientifiques s’inquiètent de la collection de données sans limites et des abus possibles par le gouvernment et des acteurs privés. Au niveau politique on essaye d’introduire des lois protégeant les données et la vie privée. D’après l’article les véritables problèmes se poseront lors de l’implémentation d’une nouvelle législation en la matière.

    Echo Xie 5 May, 2019 - Biometric data in particular needs to be protected from abuse from the state and businesses, analysts say
    Country is expected to have 626 million surveillance cameras fitted with facial recognition software by 2020

    In what is seen as a major step to protect citizens’ personal information, especially their biometric data, from abuse, China’s legislators are drafting a new law to safeguard data privacy, according to industry observers – but enforcement remains a major concern.

    “China’s private data protection law will be released and implemented soon, because of the fast development of technology, and the huge demand in society,” Zeng Liaoyuan, associate professor at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, said in an interview .

    Technology is rapidly changing life in China but relevant regulations had yet to catch up, Zeng said.

    Artificial intelligence and its many applications constitute a major component of China’s national plan. In 2017, the “Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan” called for the country to become the world leader in AI innovation by 2030.

    Biometrics authentication is used in computer science as an identification or access control. It includes fingerprinting, face recognition, DNA, iris recognition, palm prints and other methods.

    In particular, the use of biometric data has grown exponentially in key areas: scanning users’ fingerprints or face to pay bills, to apply for social security qualification and even to repay loans. But the lack of an overarching law lets companies gain access to vast quantities of an individual’s personal data, a practice that has raised privacy concerns.

    During the “two sessions” last month, National People’s Congress spokesman Zhang Yesui said the authorities had hastened the drafting of a law to protect personal data, but did not say when it would be completed or enacted.

    One important focus, analysts say, is ensuring that the state does not abuse its power when collecting and using private data, considering the mass surveillance systems installed in China.

    “This is a big problem in China,” said Liu Deliang, a law professor at Beijing Normal University. “Because it’s about regulating the government’s abuse of power, so it’s not only a law issue but a constitutional issue.”

    The Chinese government is a major collector and user of privacy data. According to IHS Markit, a London-based market research firm, China had 176 million surveillance cameras in operation in 2016 and the number was set to reach 626 million by 2020.

    In any proposed law, the misuse of data should be clearly defined and even the government should bear legal responsibility for its misuse, Liu said.

    “We can have legislation to prevent the government from misusing private data but the hard thing is how to enforce it.”

    Especially crucial, legal experts say, is privacy protection for biometric data.

    “Compared with other private data, biometrics has its uniqueness. It could post long-term risk and seriousness of consequence,” said Wu Shenkuo, an associate law professor at Beijing Normal University.

    “Therefore, we need to pay more attention to the scope and limitations of collecting and using biometrics.”

    Yi Tong, a lawmaker from Beijing, filed a proposal concerning biometrics legislation at the National People’s Congress session last month.

    “Once private biometric data is leaked, it’s a lifetime leak and it will put the users’ private data security into greater uncertainty, which might lead to a series of risks,” the proposal said.

    Yi suggested clarifying the boundary between state power and private rights, and strengthening the management of companies.

    In terms of governance, Wu said China should specify the qualifications entities must have before they can collect, use and process private biometric data. He also said the law should identify which regulatory agencies would certify companies’ information.

    There was a need to restrict government behaviour when collecting private data, he said, and suggested some form of compensation for those whose data was misused.

    “Private data collection at the government level might involve the need for the public interest,” he said. “In this case, in addition to ensuring the legal procedure, the damage to personal interests should be compensated.”

    Still, data leaks, or overcollecting, is common in China.

    A survey released by the China Consumers Association in August showed that more than 85 per cent of respondents had suffered some sort of data leak, such as their cellphone numbers being sold to spammers or their bank accounts being stolen.

    Another report by the association in November found that of the 100 apps it investigated, 91 had problems with overcollecting private data.

    One of them, MeituPic, an image editing software program, was criticised for collecting too much biometric data.

    The report also cited Ant Financial Services, the operator of the Alipay online payments service, for the way it collects private data, which it said was incompatible with the national standard. Ant Financial is an affiliate of Alibaba Group, which owns the South China Morning Post.

    In January last year, Ant Financial had to apologise publicly for automatically signing up users for a social credit programme without obtaining their consent.

    “When a company asks for a user’s private data, it’s unscrupulous, because we don’t have a law to limit their behaviour,” Zeng said.

    “Also it’s about business competition. Every company wants to hold its customers, and one way is to collect their information as much as possible.”

    Tencent and Alibaba, China’s two largest internet companies, did not respond to requests for comment about the pending legislation.

    #Chine #droit #vie_privée #surveillance #politique

  • Mini cheetah is the first four-legged robot to do a backflip

    Robot’s lightweight, high-power design is the perfect platform to share and play, developers say.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNeZWP5Mx9s

    MIT’s new mini cheetah robot is springy and light on its feet, with a range of motion that rivals a champion gymnast. The four-legged powerpack can bend and swing its legs wide, enabling it to walk either right-side up or upside down. The robot can also trot over uneven terrain about twice as fast as an average person’s walking speed.

    Weighing in at just 20 pounds — lighter than some Thanksgiving turkeys — the limber quadruped is no pushover: When kicked to the ground, the robot can quickly right itself with a swift, kung-fu-like swing of its elbows.

    Perhaps most impressive is its ability to perform a 360-degree backflip from a standing position. Researchers claim the mini cheetah is designed to be “virtually indestructible,” recovering with little damage, even if a backflip ends in a spill.

    MIT’s new mini cheetah robot is the first four-legged robot to do a backflip. At only 20 pounds, the limber quadruped can bend and swing its legs wide, enabling it to walk either right side up or upside down. The robot can also trot over uneven terrain about twice as fast as an average person’s walking speed.

    Video: Melanie Gonick/MIT

    In the event that a limb or motor does break, the mini cheetah is designed with modularity in mind: Each of the robot’s legs is powered by three identical, low-cost electric motors that the researchers engineered using off-the-shelf parts. Each motor can easily be swapped out for a new one.

    “You could put these parts together, almost like Legos,” says lead developer Benjamin Katz, a technical associate in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.

    The researchers will present the mini cheetah’s design at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation, in May. They are currently building more of the four-legged machines, aiming for a set of 10, each of which they hope to loan out to other labs.

    “A big part of why we built this robot is that it makes it so easy to experiment and just try crazy things, because the robot is super robust and doesn’t break easily, and if it does break, it’s easy and not very expensive to fix,” says Katz, who worked on the robot in the lab of Sangbae Kim, associate professor of mechanical engineering.

    Kim says loaning mini cheetahs out to other research groups gives engineers an opportunity to test out novel algorithms and maneuvers on a highly dynamic robot, that they might not otherwise have access to.

    “Eventually, I’m hoping we could have a robotic dog race through an obstacle course, where each team controls a mini cheetah with different algorithms, and we can see which strategy is more effective,” Kim says. “That’s how you accelerate research.”

    “Dynamic stuff”

    The mini cheetah is more than just a miniature version of its predecessor, Cheetah 3, a large, heavy, formidable robot, which often needs to be stabilized with tethers to protect its expensive, custom-designed parts.

    “In Cheetah 3, everything is super integrated, so if you want to change something, you have to do a ton of redesign,” Katz says. “Whereas with the mini cheetah, if you wanted to add another arm, you could just add three or four more of these modular motors.”

    Katz came up with the electric motor design by reconfiguring the parts to small, commercially available motors normally used in drones and remote-controlled airplanes.

    Each of the robot’s 12 motors is about the size of a Mason jar lid, and consists of: a stator, or set of coils, that generates a rotating magnetic field; a small controller that conveys the amount of current the stator should produce; a rotor, lined with magnets, that rotates with the stator’s field, producing torque to lift or rotate a limb; a gearbox that provides a 6:1 gear reduction, enabling the rotor to provide six times the torque that it normally would; and a position sensor that measures the angle and orientation of the motor and associated limb.

    Each leg is powered by three motors, to give it three degrees of freedom and a huge range of motion. The lightweight, high-torque, low-inertia design enables the robot to execute fast, dynamic maneuvers and make high-force impacts on the ground without breaking gearboxes or limbs.

    “The rate at which it can change forces on the ground is really fast,” Katz says. “When it’s running, its feet are only on the ground for something like 150 milliseconds at a time, during which a computer tells it to increase the force on the foot, then change it to balance, and then decrease that force really fast to lift up. So it can do really dynamic stuff, like jump in the air with every step, or run with two feet on the ground at a time. Most robots aren’t capable of doing this, so move much slower.”

    Flipping out

    The engineers ran the mini cheetah through a number of maneuvers, first testing its running ability through the hallways of MIT’s Pappalardo Lab and along the slightly uneven ground of Killian Court.

    In both environments, the quadruped bound along at about 5 miles per hour. The robot’s joints are capable of spinning three times faster, with twice the amount of torque, and Katz estimates the robot could run about twice as fast with a little tuning.

    The team wrote another computer code to direct the robot to stretch and twist in various, yoga-like configurations, showcasting its range of motion and ability to rotate its limbs and joints while maintaining balance. They also programmed the robot to recover from an unexpected force, such as a kick to the side. When the researchers kicked the robot to the ground, it automatically shut down.

    “It assumes something terrible has gone wrong, so it just turns off, and all the legs fly wherever they go,” Katz says.

    When it receives a signal to restart, the robot first determines its orientation, then performs a preprogrammed crouch or elbow-swing maneuver to right itself on all fours.

    Katz and co-author Jared Di Carlo, an undergraduate in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), wondered whether the robot could take on even higher-impact maneuvers. Inspired by a class they took last year, taught by EECS Professor Russ Tedrake, they set about programming the mini cheetah to perform a backflip.

    “We thought it would be a good test of robot performance, because it takes a lot of power, torque, and there are huge impacts at the end of a flip,” Katz says.

    The team wrote a “giant, nonlinear, offline trajectory optimizations” that incorporated the robot’s dynamics and actuator capabilities, and specified a trajectory in which the robot would start out in a certain, right-side-up orientation, and end up flipped 360 degrees. The program they developed then solved all the torques that needed to be applied to each joint, from each individual motor, and at every time period between start and end, in order to carry out the backflip.

    “The first time we tried it, it miraculously worked,” Katz says.

    “This is super exciting,” Kim adds. “Imagine Cheetah 3 doing a backflip — it would crash and probably destroy the treadmill. We could do this with the mini cheetah on a desktop.”

    The team is building about 10 more mini cheetahs, each of which they plan to loan out to collaborating groups, and Kim intends to form a mini cheetah research consortium of engineers, who can invent, swap, and even compete with new ideas.

    Meanwhile, the MIT team is developing another, even higher-impact maneuver.

    “We’re working now on a landing controller, the idea being that I want to be able to pick up the robot and toss it, and just have it land on its feet,” Katz says. “Say you wanted to throw the robot into the window of a building and have it go explore inside the building. You could do that.”

  • When the Camera Was a Weapon of Imperialism. (And When It Still Is.)

    I first saw the photograph some years ago, online. Later, I tracked it down to its original source: “In Afric’s Forest and Jungle: Or Six Years Among the Yorubans,” a memoir published in 1899 by the Rev. R.H. Stone. It shows a crowd in what is now Nigeria, but what was then Yorubaland under British colonial influence. The caption below the photograph reads: “A king of Ejayboo. Governor of Lagos on right. For years the rulers of this fierce tribe made the profession of Christianity a capital crime.” This description is familiar in tone from anthropological literature of the period, though the photograph is hard to date precisely. “Ejayboo” is what we would nowadays spell as “Ijebu,” a subgroup of Yoruba. That catches my attention: I am Yoruba and also Ijebu. This picture is a time capsule from a world to which I am connected but had not seen before, a world by colonial encounter.

    By the middle of the 19th century, through treaties and threats of force, the British had wrested control of the coastal city Lagos from its king. They then turned their efforts to improving access to the goods and services in the Yoruba hinterland. The Yoruba were already by that time a populous and diverse ethnic group, full of rivalrous kingdoms large and small, some friendly to the British, others less so.

    Stone, a Virginian sent by the Southern Baptist Convention, lived among them — lived among us — for two spells, in 1859-63 and 1867-69, before, during and after the American Civil War. He had this to say about Yoruba people: “They are reasonable, brave and patriotic, and are capable of a very high degree of intellectual culture.” It is praise, but must be understood in the context of a statement he makes earlier in his book about living “among the barbarous people” of that part of the world. In any case, the Ijebu in the mid-19th century were largely wealthy traders and farmers who did not want to give the British right of way to the interior of the country; only through diplomacy, subterfuge and violence were they finally overcome.

    This photograph was made in the aftermath. The white governor of Lagos — based on the plausible dates, it is probably John Hawley Glover — sits under an enormous umbrella. On one side of him is another high-ranking colonial officer. On the other side is the Ijebu king, or oba, probably the Awujale of the Ijebu kingdom, Oba Ademuyewo Fidipote.

    The oba wears a beaded crown, but the beads have been parted and his face is visible. This is unusual, for the oba is like a god and must be concealed when in public. The beads over his face, with their interplay of light and shadow, are meant to give him a divine aspect. Why is his face visible in this photograph? Some contravention of customary practice has taken place. The dozens of men seated on the ground in front of him are visibly alarmed. Many have turned their bodies away from the oba, and several are positioned toward the camera, not in order to look at the camera but in order to avoid looking at the exposed radiance of their king.

    The invention of the daguerreotype was announced in 1839. By the 1840s, photography had spread like wildfire and become a vital aspect of European colonialism. It played a role in administrative, missionary, scientific and commercial activities. As the Zimbabwean novelist Yvonne Vera put it: “The camera has often been a dire instrument. In Africa, as in most parts of the dispossessed, the camera arrives as part of the colonial paraphernalia, together with the gun and the bible. ...”

    Photography in colonialized societies was not only a dire instrument. Subject peoples often adopted photography for their own uses. There were, for instance, a number of studios in Lagos by the 1880s, where elites could go to pose for portraits. But such positive side effects aside, photography during colonial rule imaged the world in order to study, profit from and own it. The colonial gaze might describe as barbarous both the oba’s beaded crown and his regal right to conceal himself. This was one of the repeated interactions between imperial powers and the populations that they sought to control: The dominant power decided that everything had to be seen and cataloged, a task for which photography was perfectly suited. Under the giant umbrella of colonialism, nothing would be allowed to remain hidden from the imperial authorities.

    Imperialism and colonial photographic practices both flourished in the 19th century, and both extended themselves, with cosmetic adaptations, into the 20th. In 1960, during the horrific French war on Algeria, the French military assigned a young soldier, Marc Garanger, to photograph people in an internment camp in the Kabylia region of Northern Algeria. Thousands of people had been confined in the region under armed guard, and the French military commander had decreed that ID cards were mandatory. A picture of each prisoner was required. Many of the women were forced to remove their veils. These were women who did not wish to be seen, made to sit for photographs that were not for them. (Photography played a different military role in the numerous aerial reconnaissance missions by the French, which resulted in thousands of negatives mapping the region.)

    Garanger’s photographs both record an injustice and occasion it. His alternative, not an easy one, would have been to refuse the order and go to prison. His pictures show us what we ought not to see: Young and old women, their hair free flowing or plaited, one face after the other, in the hundreds. They collectively emanate refusal. The women of Kabylia look through the photographer, certainly not considering him an ally. Their gazes rise from the surface of the photograph, palpably furious.

    When we speak of “shooting” with a camera, we are acknowledging the kinship of photography and violence. The anthropological photographs made in the 19th century under the aegis of colonial powers are related to the images created by contemporary photojournalists, including those who embed with military forces. Embedding is sometimes the only way to get a direct record, no matter how limited, of what is happening in an armed conflict. On occasion such an arrangement leads to images whose directness displeases the authorities, but a more common outcome has been that proximity to an army helps bolster the narrative preferred by the army.

    Still, photographic reportage has the power to quicken the conscience and motivate political commitments. Examples abound of photographs acting as catalysts in the public’s understanding of vital issues, from the images of Bergen-Belsen in 1945 to the photograph of the Syrian toddler Alan Kurdi in 2015. And yet, perhaps even more insistently, on a day-by-day, week-by-week basis, photography implicitly serves the powers that be. To insist that contemporary photographic practice — and I mean to include a majority of the international news coverage in newspapers like this one — is generally made (and published) for the greater good is to misconstrue history, because it leaves out the question of “Good for whom?” Such pictures aren’t for their subjects any more than the photograph in Stone’s book was for the Ijebus and their king.

    Certain images underscore an unbridgeable gap and a never-to-be-toppled hierarchy. When a group of people is judged to be “foreign,” it becomes far more likely that news organizations will run, for the consumption of their audiences, explicit, disturbing photographs of members of that group: starving children or bullet-riddled bodies. Meanwhile, the injury and degradation of those with whom readers perceive a kinship — a judgment often based on racial sympathy and class loyalties — is routinely treated in more circumspect fashion. This has hardly changed since Susan Sontag made the same observation in “Regarding the Pain of Others” (2003), and it has hardly changed because the underlying political relationships between dominant and subject societies have hardly changed.

    Without confronting this inequality, this misconstrual of history, photography will continue to describe itself as one thing (a force for liberation) while obdurately remaining another (an obedient appendage of state power). It will continue to be like the organs of the state that “spread democracy” and change regimes. Even when it appears to go against the state, it will only do so selectively, quaintly, beautifully, piteously, in terms that do not question the right of the state to assert power.

    For how long will these radically unequal societal realities endure? Many affecting photographs have been made during the huge waves of international migration of the past few years. These pictures issue, as usual, from the presumed rights of photographers to depict the suffering of people “out there” for the viewing of those “back home.” But in looking at these images — images of war, of starvation, of capsized boats and exhausted caravans — we must go beyond the usual frames of pity and abjection. Every picture of suffering should elicit a question stronger than “Why is this happening?” The question should be “Why have I allowed this to happen?”

    This is what the scholar Ariella Azoulay calls the “citizenship” of photography, its ability, when practiced thoughtfully, to remind us of our mutual responsibilities. When I look at the bewildering photographs of refugee camps in Richard Mosse’s recent book, “The Castle,” I feel indicted. The imperial underpinnings of Mosse’s project are inescapable: Using military-grade thermal cameras, he makes extremely complex panoramic images (stitched together from hundreds of shots) of landscapes in the Middle East and Europe in which refugees have gathered or have been confined. His pictures echo the surveillance to which these bodies are already subjected. But the thermal imaging renders the images very dark, with the humans showing up as white shapes (almost like a negative). The picture conceals what it reveals. We see people, but they remain hidden.

    This technique makes for uncanny images in which distressed people move about like the figures you see in dreams, indistinct but full of ghostly presence. At the Moria camp in Greece, it is snowing. We see a long snaking line of people, waiting. What are they waiting for? For some material handout, probably, for food or blankets or documents. But their waiting represents the deeper waiting of all those who have been confined in the antechamber of humanity. They are waiting to be allowed to be human.

    Mosse’s images, formally striking as they are, are unquestionably part of the language of visual domination. With his political freedom of movement and his expensive technical equipment, he makes meticulous pictures of suffering that end up in exquisite books and in art galleries. He is not the first photographer to aestheticize suffering, nor will he be the last. And yet, by suppressing color, by overwhelming the viewer with detail, by evoking racial horror rather than prettily displaying it and by including in his work philosophical considerations of the scenes he shows — “The Castle” contains essays by Judith Butler, Paul K. Saint-Amour and Mosse himself and a poem by Behrouz Boochani — he does something quite different from most photojournalists. He unsettles the viewer.

    Photography’s future will be much like its past. It will largely continue to illustrate, without condemning, how the powerful dominate the less powerful. It will bring the “news” and continue to support the idea that doing so — collecting the lives of others for the consumption of “us” — is a natural right. But with a project like “The Castle,” I have a little bit of hope that an ethic of self-determination can be restored. I have hope that the refugees of Moria, Athens, Berlin and Belgrade will gain a measure of privacy. The women of Kabylia will cover their faces and return to themselves as they wish to be. The oba’s beaded crown will fall back into place, shadowing his face. Photography writes with light, but not everything wants to be seen. Among the human rights is the right to remain obscure, unseen and dark.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/magazine/when-the-camera-was-a-weapon-of-imperialism-and-when-it-still-is.html

    #photographie #colonialisme #post-colonialisme #impérialisme
    ping @albertocampiphoto @philippe_de_jonckheere

    Reçu via la mailing-list Migreurop avec le commentaire suivant de Emmanuel Blanchard:

    L’auteur fait notamment référence au travail récent de #Richard_Mosse (exposition et ouvrage « The Castle ») dont il fait un compte rendu à la critique et laudatif. Un point de vue qui peut lui-même être critiqué... dans un sens plus critique.
    Pour accéder à quelques images de Richard Mosse :

    https://vimeo.com/302281332


    https://wsimag.com/art/33291-richard-mosse-the-castle
    https://bit.ly/2NglY08

    #réfugiés #asile #migrations #images #image

    The Castle

    Richard Mosse has spent the past few years documenting the ongoing refugee and migration crisis, repurposing military-grade camera technology to confront how governments and societies perceive refugees. His latest book The Castle is a meticulous record of refugee camps located across mass migration routes from the Middle East and Central Asia into the European Union via Turkey. Using a thermal video camera intended for long-range border enforcement, Mosse films the camps from high elevations to draw attention to the ways in which each interrelates with, or is divorced from, adjacent citizen infrastructure. His source footage is then broken down into hundreds of individual frames, which are digitally overlapped in a grid formation to create composite heat maps.

    Truncating time and space, Mosse’s images speak to the lived experience of refugees indefinitely awaiting asylum and trapped in a Byzantine state of limbo. The book is divided into 28 sites, each presenting an annotated sequence of close-up images that fold out into a panoramic heat map. Within this format, Mosse underscores the provisional architecture of the camps and the ways in which each camp is variously marginalised, concealed, regulated, militarized, integrated, and/or dispersed. His images point to the glaring disconnect between the brisk free trade of globalized capitalism and the dehumanizing erosion of international refugee law in European nation-states. Named after Kafka’s 1926 novel, The Castle prompts questions about the ‘visibility’ of refugees and the erosion of their human rights.

    The book comes with a separate book of texts, including a poem by Behrouz Boochani, the journalist, novelist and Iranian refugee currently held by the Australian government in confinement on Manus island, an essay by Paul K. Saint-Amour, associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, an essay by philosopher Judith Butler, and a text by Richard Mosse.


    #livre

  • Can We Really Inherit #Trauma? - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/10/health/mind-epigenetics-genes.html

    “These are, in fact, extraordinary claims, and they are being advanced on less than ordinary evidence,” said Kevin Mitchell, an associate professor of genetics and neurology at Trinity College, Dublin. “This is a malady in modern science: the more extraordinary and sensational and apparently revolutionary the claim, the lower the bar for the evidence on which it is based, when the opposite should be true.”

    Investigators in the field say the critique is premature: the science is still young and feeling its way forward. Studies in mice, in particular, have been offered as evidence of such trauma-transmission, and as a model for studying the mechanisms. “The effects we’ve found have been small but remarkably consistent, and significant,” said Moshe Szyf, a professor of pharmacology at McGill University. “This is the way science works. It’s imperfect at first and gets stronger the more research you do.”

    The debate centers on genetics and biology. Direct effects are one thing: when a pregnant woman drinks heavily, it can cause fetal alcohol syndrome. This happens because stress on a pregnant mother’s body is shared to some extent with the fetus, in this case interfering directly with the normal developmental program in utero.

    But no one can explain exactly how, say, changes in brain cells caused by abuse could be communicated to fully formed sperm or egg cells before conception. And that’s just the first challenge. After conception, when sperm meets egg, a natural process of cleansing, or “rebooting,” occurs, stripping away most chemical marks on the genes. Finally, as the fertilized egg grows and develops, a symphony of genetic reshuffling occurs, as cells specialize into brain cells, skin cells, and the rest. How does a signature of trauma survive all of that?

    #épigénétique

  • Opinion | Anti-Zionism Isn’t the Same as Anti-Semitism - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/07/opinion/rashida-tlaib-israel-antisemitism.html

    A consensus set in “that Jewish identity can be reduced to Israelism,” Eliyahu Stern, an associate professor of modern Jewish history at Yale, told me. “That’s something that takes place over the second half of the 20th century in America.”

    The centrality of Israel to American Jewish identity has at times put liberal American Jews in an awkward position, defending multiethnic pluralism here, where they’re in the minority, while treating it as unspeakable in Israel, where Jews are the majority.

    #sionisme #Israel #anti-sémitisme #progressisme

  • Advanced Programming in C++ (Spanish) in Madrid—Daniel Garcia
    http://isocpp.org/feeder/?FeederAction=clicked&feed=All+Posts&seed=http%3A%2F%2Fisocpp.org%2Fblog%2F2

    This course is offered in Spanish (might be available in English on demand).

    Advanced Programming in C++ by Daniel Garcia

    About the course:

    The course is a 3 full-days training (24 hours) covering C++11, C++14, and an introduction to C++17 at March 25th, 26th, 27th, 2019 in Madrid. It is structured in 4 modules: Language (Generalities and type system, Initialization, classes, global novelties, generic programming support). Standards library (Metaprogramming support, utilities, STL, strings). Concurrency (Introduction to concurrency, memory model, threads, mutual exclusion, futures and promises). Introduction to C++17 About the trainer: J. Daniel Garcia is an Associate Professor in Computer Architecture at University Carlos III of (...)

    #News,_Training,

  • What You Don’t Know About Human Intuition Can Hurt You
    https://hackernoon.com/what-you-dont-know-about-human-intuition-can-hurt-you-e9a12db2433e?sourc

    Learn from the Flaws of Human IntuitionNir’s Note: This guest post is by Francesca Gino, an associate professor of #business Administration at Harvard Business School and the author of “Sidetracked: Why Our Decisions Get Derailed, and How We Can Stick to the Plan”A few years ago, Joe Marks, then Disney’s vice president of research, visited Tokyo Disneyland and was puzzled by a particular behavior he observed there. Park visitors were standing in line, often for many hours at a time, outside a shop in the park’s Frontierland. Marks found out that they were waiting to buy an inexpensive (less than $10) leather bracelet on which they could have a name painted or embossed.Why were the bracelets in such demand? Joe wondered. And why weren’t other stores in the park selling the same bracelets, so (...)

    #tech #human-intuition #entrepreneurship #startup

  • The tip-off from a Nazi that saved my grandparents
    https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-45919900

    When Alexander Bodin Saphir’s Jewish grandfather was measuring a high-ranking Nazi for a suit in Copenhagen 75 years ago he got an important tip-off - the Jews were about to be rounded up and deported. It has often been described as a “miracle” that most of Denmark’s Jews escaped the Holocaust. Now it seems that the country’s Nazi rulers deliberately sabotaged their own operation.

    It was a cold October night 75 years ago when my grandparents, Fanny and Raphael Bodin, stood on the dock of a harbour on the east coast of Denmark with their 15-month-old daughter, Lis, in their arms.

    I imagine they peered into the darkness, nervously awaiting the fisherman who would take them across the water to the safety of neutral Sweden. Until that point the Jews of Denmark - unlike those in other parts of occupied Europe - had been free to go about their business. But now the order had been given to transport them to Germany “for processing”.

    So my grandparents and aunt fled. As they boarded the fishing boat they handed the fisherman a substantial sum of money for the hour-long boat trip across the Oresund - the narrow stretch of water between Denmark and Sweden. Then it started to rain and my aunt began to cry. The fisherman, fearing the Germans would hear her cries, ordered my grandparents either to leave their child on the dock or get off the boat. They chose the latter and watched as the boat cast off for Sweden with their money and perhaps their last chance of escape.

    Fortunately, it wasn’t their last chance. They succeeded in making the crossing the very next night - after giving their daughter a sleeping pill to ensure she remained silent - and lived out the rest of the war in Sweden.

    Their story mirrors that of the vast majority of Danish Jews. According to Sofie Lene Bak, associate professor in history at Copenhagen University, 7,056 of them escaped to Sweden, with only 472 captured and deported to Theresienstadt.

    #shoa #seconde_guerre_mondiale #antisémitisme #nazi

  • Opinion | The Federal Agency That Fuels the Opioid Crisis - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/17/opinion/drugs-dea-defund-heroin.html

    Every day, nearly 200 people across the country die from drug overdoses. Opioids have been the primary driver of this calamity: first as prescription painkillers, then heroin and, more recently, illicitly manufactured fentanyl. The death toll has risen steadily over the past two decades.

    The Drug Enforcement Administration, the agency that most directly oversees access to opioids, deserves much of the blame for these deaths. Because of its incompetence, the opioid crisis has gone from bad to worse. The solution: overhauling the agency, or even getting rid of it entirely.

    A decade into the crisis, more and more prescription drug users turned to the black market. Even though the D.E.A. had tried to “eradicate” illicit drugs for nearly 50 years, users could easily buy stolen and counterfeit pills, along with a cheaper option, heroin. Soon, some began injecting. Outbreaks of H.I.V. and hepatitis C followed. Meanwhile, people who sought evidence-based treatment were rarely able to access it because of the agency’s evolving regulatory and enforcement strategies, like blocking the expansion of mobile methadone clinics and shutting down addiction treatment providers without arranging alternatives for affected patients.

    The Drug Enforcement Administration has had over 40 years to win the war on drugs. Instead its tactics have fueled the opioid crisis. To finally make a dent in this national emergency, we need to rethink the agency from the bottom up.

    Leo Beletsky, an associate professor of law and health sciences at Northeastern University, is the faculty director of the Health in Justice Action Lab, where Jeremiah Goulka is a senior fellow.

    #Opioides #DEA #War_on_drug

  • Even in Better Times, Some Americans Seem Farther Behind. Here’s Why. - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/14/business/economy/income-inequality.html

    Dans la majorité des cas la vie n’est vraiment facile que pour les Blancs avec un diplôme d’études supérieures.

    For upwardly mobile African-Americans, and to a lesser extent Hispanics, achieving the American dream has had a peculiar side effect. They tend to encounter more discrimination because they live and work in predominantly white environments, said Cynthia Colen, an associate professor at Ohio State University’s College of Public Health.

    “They’re playing the game, and yet they’re still facing discrimination in workplaces and neighborhoods,” she said. “It absolutely harms their mental health and their physical health.”

    [...]

    The feeling of decline among the groups lagging behind is well founded, Ms. Williams said. “What’s at issue here is whether they’re going to interpret that decline through the lens of race or through the lens of class,” she said. “There’s a war over interpretation.”

    #Etats-Unis

  • Bleak New Estimates in Drug Epidemic: A Record 72,000 Overdose Deaths in 2017 - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/15/upshot/opioids-overdose-deaths-rising-fentanyl.html

    Fentanyl is a big culprit, but there are also encouraging signs from states that have prioritized public health campaigns and addiction treatment.

    By Margot Sanger-Katz

    Aug. 15, 2018

    Drug overdoses killed about 72,000 Americans last year, a record number that reflects a rise of around 10 percent, according to new preliminary estimates from the Centers for Disease Control. The death toll is higher than the peak yearly death totals from H.I.V., car crashes or gun deaths.

    Analysts pointed to two major reasons for the increase: A growing number of Americans are using opioids, and drugs are becoming more deadly. It is the second factor that most likely explains the bulk of the increased number of overdoses last year.

    A large government telephone survey suggests that around 2.1 million Americans had opioid use disorders in 2016, but that number may be an undercount because not all drug users have telephones and some may not mention their drug use because of the stigma. Dr. Ciccarone said the real number could be as high as four million.

    The number of opioid users has been going up “in most places, but not at this exponential rate,” said Brandon Marshall, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Brown University School of Public Health. “The dominant factor is the changing drug supply.”

    Strong synthetic opioids like fentanyl and its analogues have become mixed into black-market supplies of heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and the class of anti-anxiety medicines known as benzodiazepines. Unlike heroin, which is derived from poppy plants, fentanyl can be manufactured in a laboratory, and it is often easier to transport because it is more concentrated.

    Congress is debating a variety of bills to fight the epidemic. Many of the measures, which have passed the House but have not reached the Senate floor, are focused on reducing medical prescriptions of opioids, and are meant to reduce the number of new drug users. But the package also includes measures that could expand treatment for people who already use opioids.

    The epidemic could also intensify again. One worrying sign: Dr. Jones said there is some early evidence that drug distributors are finding ways to mix fentanyl with black tar heroin, which could increase death rates in the West. If that becomes more widespread, the overdose rates in the West could explode as they have in parts of the East.

    #Opioides

  • The Creative Ways Your Boss Is Spying on You | WIRED
    https://www.wired.com/story/the-creative-ways-your-boss-is-spying-on-you

    The most common snooping techniques are relatively subtle. A system called #Teramind —which lists #BNP_Paribas and the telecom giant #Orange as customers on its website—sends pop-up warnings if it suspects employees are about to slack off or share confidential documents. Other companies rely on tools like Hubstaff to record the websites that workers are visiting and how much they’re typing.

    Such software “solutions” pitch themselves as ways to enhance productivity. But trouble emerges, critics say, when employers invest too much significance in these metrics.

    That’s because data has never been able to capture the finer points of creativity and the idiosyncratic nature of work. Where one account manager might do her best thinking behind a desk, another knows he’s sharpest on an afternoon stroll—a behavior that algorithms could blithely declare deviant. This then creates “a hidden layer of management,” says Jason Schultz, director of the NYU School of Law’s Technology Law & Policy Clinic. Those midday walkers might never find out why they’ve been passed over for a promotion. Once established, the image of the “ideal” employee sticks.

    Try to hide from this all-seeing eye of corporate America—and you might make matters worse. Even the cleverest spoofing hacks can backfire. “The more workers try to be invisible, the more managers have a hard time figuring out what’s happening, and that justifies more #surveillance,” says Michel Anteby, an associate professor of organizational behavior at Boston University. He calls it the “cycle of coercive surveillance.” Translation: lose/lose.

  • Rollin’ With the Dragon: Opioids Are Gaining Popularity in the Club Scene | Alternet
    https://www.alternet.org/drugs/rolling-dragon-opioids-gaining-popularity-club-scene

    The EDM scene has long been known for drug use, but the researchers warn that the turn to opioids is a dangerous trend that should not be ignored.

    “We’ve always known that electronic dance music party attendees are at high risk for use of club drugs such as ecstasy or Molly, but we wanted to know the extent of opioid use in this population,” said Palamar, the study’s lead author and an associate professor of population health at NYU School of Medicine.

    The most popular prescription opioid reported in this scene was Oxycontin, which, like many prescription opioids, is used to relieve pain, but also produces euphoric effects, inducing relaxation and happiness. Following close behind were Vicodin, Percocet, codeine, and Purple Drank. About 15 percent of opioid users reported snorting them, while 11 percent reported injecting them, both forms of ingestion more likely to result in dependence.

    People who had already used opioids reported a much higher propensity for using them again than did people who had never used them. Among previous users, nearly three-quarters (73.4 percent) said they would do them again, while only about 6 percent of non-users said they would try them if offered.

    #Opioides #Dance_music

  • #Art, #Information, and #Mapping

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

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

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

    Commentaire :

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

    –----

    Doug McCune
    Data Artist

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

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

    –-----

    Ekene Ijeoma

    http://studioijeoma.com

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

    –-----------

    Data & Art Miscellanea from Jer Thorp

    http://blog.blprnt.com

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

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

    –----

    Sarah Williams

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

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

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

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

    #cartographie

  • One in five women suicide because they saw domestic violence as children
    http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/one-in-five-women-suicide-because-they-saw-domestic-violence-as-children-201

    The report also found nearly half of all people who committed suicidehad experienced domestic violence, either as victims or as perpetrators. http://dvvic.org.au/publications/today-is-a-day-for-victoria-to-be-proud

    Domestic Violence Victoria CEO Fiona McCormack said the research was heart-breaking.

    “This is a critical national emergency. More than one woman is murdered every week and these family violence deaths are on top of that. The federal government must make this a priority because what they are doing is just not enough.”

    The research used data from police to examine both reported and unreported histories of domestic violence in the lives of those who took their own lives from July to December 2013.

    Previous research showed a clear connection between those who think about suicide and their experience of family violence but this is the first study in Australia to show the link. Researchers said there was no reason to believe this pattern was any different across Australia.

    Domestic violence researcher Michael Flood, associate professor at Queensland University of Technology, said the reasons men assault their partners and the reasons they kill themselves overlapped.

    "From those numbers, it’s clear that if we fix family violence

  • Gauging urban change with Google Street View | Harvard Gazette
    http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/07/gauging-urban-change-with-google-street-view

    Nikhil Naik, Scott Duke Kominers, and their collaborators are hoping to transform the way scientists study urban environments, with an assist from Google.

    In joint work with Edward L. Glaeser, the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard, and César A. Hidalgo and Ramesh Raskar, associate professors at the MIT Media Lab, Kominers, an associate professor in the entrepreneurial management unit at Harvard Business School (HBS) and the department of economics, and Naik, a Prize Fellow in economics, history, and politics, authored a study that uses computer vision algorithms to examine millions of Google Street View images to measure how urban areas are changing.

    #urban_matter via Renaud Epstein sur Twitter

  • MAYANTHI FERNANDO /// Muslim French and the Contradiction of Secularism - THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE
    https://thefunambulist.net/podcast/mayanthi-fernando-muslim-french-contradiction-secularism
    https://anthro.ucsc.edu/faculty/singleton.php?&singleton=true&cruz_id=mfernan3


    https://soundcloud.com/the-funambulist/mayanthi-fernando-muslim-french-and-the-contradiction-of-secularism

    This conversation with Mayanthi Fernando constitutes a new episode in a series of discussions with US-based researchers whose terrain of political investigations is situated in France. After Crystal Marie Flemming and Mehammed Amadeus Mack, Mayanthi describes her methodology and her work that she articulated in her book, The Republic Unsettled that was published in 2014. We talk about the ideological, legal, and discursive framework through which secularism (laicité) is approached, and often politically instrumentalized in the French Republic. In a second part, we describe the aspirations of the Muslim French community between “a right to difference” and “a right to indifference,” as well as the political activism that is undertaken in resistance to structural islamophobia in France.

    Mayanthi Fernando is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her first book, The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism (Duke University Press, 2014), alternates between an analysis of Muslim French politics, ethics, and social life and the contradictions of French secularity (laïcité) that this new Muslim subjectivity reflects and refracts. It explores how Muslim French draw on both Islamic and secular-republican traditions as they create new modes of ethical and political engagement, reconfiguring those traditions to imagine a future for France. It also examines how the institutions, political and legal practices, and dominant discourses that comprise French secularity regulate and govern–and profoundly disrupt–Muslim life. In so doing, it traces a series of long-standing tensions immanent to laïcité, tensions not so much generated as precipitated by the presence of Muslim French. It argues, ultimately, that “the Muslim question” is actually a question about secularism.

  • People of ACM - Fei-Fei Li on May 30, 2017

    You have said that computer vision—how computers identify and understand images—will be the cornerstone technology of AI advances going forward. Can you explain why computer vision is so central?

    Let’s borrow a metaphor from nature. 540 million years ago, the first pair of eyes in the animal world became the biggest driving force of evolution’s Big Bang—the Cambrian Explosion, during which animal species exploded. Vision was the main factor to change the behaviors of animals, and to accelerate the development of brains. Humans, the most intelligent animals we know, use vision as the main sensory system for survival, navigation, manipulation, communication and everything else. In fact, it is estimated that more than half of the brain is involved in visual processing and visual intelligence. Now let’s look at our digital world. Due to the explosion of sensors, smartphones, self-driving cars, etc., the predominant form of cyberspace data is in pixels. Cisco has estimated that more than 80% of the data on the Internet is in some kind of pixel form. YouTube alone sees hundreds of hours of videos uploaded to its servers every 60 seconds! So just like in the animal world, vision is going to be a major driving force of the evolution of machine intelligence. It is a universal application across every single vertical industry, and it is one of the most important capabilities that an intelligent machine should have, whether it is a self-driving car, or a healthcare diagnostic system, or a smart classroom, or the future of manufacturing.

    http://www.acm.org/articles/people-of-acm/2017/fei-fei-li

    Fei-Fei Li is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. She is also the Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) and the Stanford Vision Lab

    Et les institutions de renseignements, les plus grands conomateurs ET investisseurs dans le domaine, ils font aussi ça pour reconnaitre leur chien sur leurs photos de vacance ?
    Elle n’oublie pas, elle évite tout vocabulaire concernant le flicage, la surveillance, la terreur, que ses premiers clients nous imposent.

    Pour une introduction au groupe ACM : http://www.acm.org/about-acm/about-the-acm-organization

  • The great British Brexit robbery : how our democracy was hijacked
    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hijacked-democracy

    A shadowy global operation involving big data, billionaire friends of Trump and the disparate forces of the Leave campaign influenced the result of the EU referendum. As Britain heads to the polls again, is our electoral process still fit for purpose?

    Très longue enquête. Je note des extraits qui me paraissent particulièrement pertinents.

    #surveillance #big_data

    There are three strands to this story. How the foundations of an authoritarian surveillance state are being laid in the US. How British democracy was subverted through a covert, far-reaching plan of coordination enabled by a US billionaire. And how we are in the midst of a massive land grab for power by billionaires via our data. Data which is being silently amassed, harvested and stored. Whoever owns this data owns the future.

    (…)

    #Psyops

    “That was before we became this dark, dystopian data company that gave the world Trump,” a former #Cambridge_Analytica employee who I’ll call Paul tells me. “It was back when we were still just a psychological warfare firm.”

    Was that really what you called it, I ask him. Psychological warfare? “Totally. That’s what it is. Psyops. Psychological operations – the same methods the military use to effect mass sentiment change. It’s what they mean by winning ‘hearts and minds’. We were just doing it to win elections in the kind of developing countries that don’t have many rules.”

    (…)

    Finding “persuadable” voters is key for any campaign and with its treasure trove of data, Cambridge Analytica could target people high in neuroticism, for example, with images of immigrants “swamping” the country. The key is finding emotional triggers for each individual voter.

    (…)

    Tamsin Shaw, an associate professor of philosophy at New York University, helps me understand the context. She has researched the US military’s funding and use of psychological research for use in torture. “The capacity for this science to be used to manipulate emotions is very well established. This is military-funded technology that has been harnessed by a global plutocracy and is being used to sway elections in ways that people can’t even see, don’t even realise is happening to them,” she says. “It’s about exploiting existing phenomenon like nationalism and then using it to manipulate people at the margins. To have so much data in the hands of a bunch of international plutocrats to do with it what they will is absolutely chilling.

    (…)

    Complexe militaro-industriel

    What’s been lost in the US coverage of this “data analytics” firm is the understanding of where the firm came from: deep within the military-industrial complex. (…) SCL/Cambridge Analytica was not some startup created by a couple of guys with a Mac PowerBook. It’s effectively part of the British defence establishment. This is not just a story about social psychology and data analytics. It has to be understood in terms of a military contractor using military strategies on a civilian population.

    #Facebook

    Facebook was the source of the psychological insights that enabled Cambridge Analytica to target individuals. It was also the mechanism that enabled them to be delivered on a large scale.

    L’enquête détaille enfin comme différentes structures de la campagne pour le Brexit ont toutes acheté discrètement les services de Agregate IQ, entreprise canadienne appartenant à #Robert_Mercer et affiliée à Cambridge_Analytica.

  • What did Tillerson’s Russia trip achieve?

    http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2017/04/tillerson-lavrov-russia-meeting.html

    ❝Moscow also seized the moment of direct contact with the top US diplomat to clarify its own positions. On Syria, the departure of President Bashar al-Assad was and remains a non-starter for Russia. What neither Lavrov nor Putin would probably say to Tillerson, but do expect him to understand, is that Russia has invested so much into Syria now, politically and militarily, that Moscow’s primary concern is less about Assad than about the principle, power and prestige of maintaining its position. Hence, any plan that might move Moscow from this standing would have to involve some face-saving mechanism that the Kremlin could package as a win-win internationally, and as a “decision made in Russia’s best interest” domestically.

    So far, the US vision has been to get Russia on board by offering Moscow an opportunity to “play a constructive role in the humanitarian and political catastrophe in the Middle East.” That approach misses a critical point in Russian political psychology: The Kremlin believes it has already stepped up as a constructive player to counter the increasingly destructive forces unleashed by the United States. This belief — no matter how uncomfortably it sits with anyone — is not entirely groundless. Many players in the region perceive Russia in this capacity, even if it’s just for their own political reasons.

    A senior Russian diplomat speaking with Al-Monitor not for attribution said: “[Russia] stepping aside from Assad would mean, among other things, an ultimate win for the US regime-change policy. It would indicate that no matter how long you resist this policy, you’ll be made to surrender. That’s a serious red line in Russia’s foreign policy thinking, the one that President Putin cannot afford to be crossed — not for all the tea in China, or should I say, a chocolate cake in Mar-a-Lago?”

    Therefore, Tillerson’s statement on the importance of Assad’s departure in a “structural, organized manner” is seen in Moscow as a positive outcome. It leaves open the prospect of returning to the political process that was underway for several months before the gas attack and the airstrikes.

    However, it might be much more difficult to achieve now, as the parties focus on reinforcing their respective and contradictory narratives. Reports of US intelligence intercepting communications between Syrian military and chemical experts about preparations for a sarin nerve gas attack in Idlib are a powerful argument for the audience that shares the “American narrative” — as Moscow sees it. However, it is producing counternarratives on the Russian side. One such narrative, according to the Russian Defense Ministry, suggests that of all “12 facilities that stored Syrian chemical weapons, 10 were destroyed in the timeline between 2013 and 2016 under the watch of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons … [while] the remaining two compounds are out of reach for the Syrian government since they are located in the territory controlled by the so-called opposition.”

    Also, as Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, put it: “The recitation of mantras on the necessity of Assad’s departure” won’t budge Moscow’s position an inch, nor will it help with a political solution to the Syria crisis. On the contrary, it will only reinforce Russia’s position on Assad. So far, Moscow has been operating on the principle of presumed innocence and calling for an “unbiased probe” into the Syria attack. To Russia, a refusal to have such an investigation would show that the case against Assad is being pursued for political rather than humanitarian reasons.

    Remarkably, a recent Mir interview with Putin indicates Moscow hasn’t reached a concrete conclusion on exactly who perpetrated the attacks. Putin’s statement that it could have been the Syrian opposition or the Islamic State (IS) is based primarily on the opposition’s hope of saving itself in a losing battle and on previous IS chemical attacks in Iraq. On factual grounds, however, Russia’s arguments look as shaky as the West’s “confidence” that Assad did it. Yet this state of affairs leaves enough space for US-Russia cooperation on investigating the case, if only inspired by a solid political will.

    Though it seems counterintuitive, Russia’s veto of the UN resolution on Syria proposed by the United States, the UK and France hours after the Tillerson-Lavrov press conference is an important sign of Russia’s commitment to work with the United States. Deputy Russian UN Ambassador Vladimir Safronkov explained the veto by saying the resolution assigned guilt “before an independent and objective investigation” could be conducted.

    However, Russia probably had decided to veto the resolution even before Tillerson and Lavrov met, to give itself more time to think through the negotiation results. Moscow wanted to come up with a fresh proposal at the UN that would reflect a more engaging approach for both US and Russian interests. Hence came Safronkov’s heated and scandalous lashing out against British diplomat Matthew Rycroft, whom he accused of trying to derail a potential agreement on Syria and Assad’s fate that Moscow had hoped to reach with Washington. "Don’t you dare insult Russia!” he said at the UN Security Council meeting April 12.

    Rycroft had accused Moscow of supporting Assad’s “murderous, barbaric” regime.

    In general, the visit left a feeling in Moscow that the initiatives Lavrov and Tillerson discussed will face intense scrutiny in Washington. The confrontational rhetoric flying from both capitals will remain prevalent. But the parties have articulated a need and agreed on some — though not many — concrete steps toward managing the situation. It’s not likely to lead to a “great-power alliance” or help both parties accomplish much together. But it might be just what’s needed to take the two back from the brink of a direct military clash and spare the world even more uncertainty. Given the current circumstances, this might be the most comfortable paradigm for the bilateral relations — at least until Putin and Trump meet face to face.

    MAXIM A. SUCHKOV
    Editor, Russia-Mideast 
    Maxim A. Suchkov, PhD is the Editor of Al-Monitor’s Russia-Mideast coverage as well as an expert of the Russian International Affairs Council. He is also an Associate Professor of International Relations and Deputy Director for Research at the School of International Relations, Pyatigorsk State University based in the North Caucasus, Russia. Formerly he was a Fulbright visiting fellow at Georgetown University (2010-11) and New York University (2015). He is the author of the “Essays on Russian Foreign Policy in the Caucasus and the Middle East.” On Twitter: @Max_A_Suchkov

    #Russie #Syrie #Etats-Unis

  • HTNM Lecture - Fred Turner, “The Democratic Surround” - YouTube
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOoUCXmnhVM

    Ajoutée le 25 nov. 2014
    The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties by Fred Turner

    Today we find ourselves surrounded by screens – on our iPhones, our tablets, our desktop computers. Little do we know that we are living out the multimedia dreams of several dozen Cold War social scientists and propagandists, a handful of Bauhaus artists, and the musician John Cage. Stanford professor Fred Turner tracks those dreams from World War II to the psychedelic sixties and lays bare the long-buried cultural roots of an American media revolution.

    Fred Turner is an Associate Professor of Communication at Stanford University. He is the author of several books, including the widely acclaimed From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, and most recently, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties. His essays have tackled topics ranging from the rise of reality television to the role of the Burning Man festival at Google and can be found online here: http://fredturner.stanford.edu.

    The History and Theory of New Media Lecture Series brings to campus leading humanities scholars working on issues of media transition and technological emergence. The series promotes new, interdisciplinary approaches to questions about the uses, meanings, causes, and effects of rapid or dramatic shifts in techno-infrastructure, information management, and forms of mediated expression. Presented by the Berkeley Center for New Media, this event is free and open to the public.

    #cfeditions #Fred_Turner #Democratic_surround

  • #Hans_Rosling: ’A kind and constantly curious genius’ | Ann Lindstrand | Global development | The Guardian
    https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/feb/10/hans-rosling-remembered-a-kind-and-constantly-curious-genius-ann-lindst

    Hans Rosling was a kind and constantly curious genius. He was truly committed to the poorest people in this world, passionate about statistics and dedicated to communicating a fact-based worldview. His knowledge, virtuosity and humour infused his unique data visualisations with a life of their own, encouraging people around the world to engage with facts about population, global health and inequality that might otherwise have passed them by.

    I first met him in his messy, overloaded office at Uppsala University in Sweden, where he was associate professor of internal medicine, in 1992. He showed me his now famous bubble graph on world statistics on handwritten overheads, and from that moment on he constantly provoked me to think and to become better.

    #visualisation #statistiques

  • A Japanese Researcher Tweets Vintage Photos Colorized Using Neural Networks · Global Voices
    https://globalvoices.org/2017/01/05/a-japanese-researcher-tweets-vintage-photos-colorized-using-neural-net

    https://twitter.com/hwtnv

    Hidenori Watanave, an associate professor at Tokyo Metropolitan University, has been exploring a tool created by researchers at Japan’s Waseda University that colorizes images using neural networks and posting some of his results to Twitter.

    Waseda University’s online project, called Neural Network-based Automatic Image Colorization, was developed by researchers Satoshi Iizuka, Edgar Simo-Serra and Hiroshi Ishikawa. Neural networks are computer systems that work in a way that’s similar to the human brain. Anyone can use their web-based tool to add color to black-and-white images.

    #photographie #colorisation

  • UNH Research: Microbial Traits, not Plants, Determine Abundance of Soil Organic Matter | New Hampshire Agricultural Experiment Station
    https://colsa.unh.edu/nhaes/article/2016/12/soilorganicmatter

    Healthy soil is rich in organic matter, but scientists have yet to fully understand exactly how that organic matter is formed. Now a team of University of New Hampshire scientists have uncovered evidence that microbial pathways – not plants – are the chief originator of the organic matter found in stable soil carbon pools.

    The new insight provides promise for designing agricultural systems that promote microbial communities to optimize soil organic matter formation.

    The research was conducted by Cynthia Kallenbach, former UNH graduate student now at Colorado State University, her advisor, Stuart Grandy, associate professor of natural resources at UNH, and Serita Frey, professor of natural resources at UNH. Their results were published in the paper “Direct evidence for microbial-derived soil organic matter formation and its ecophysiological controls” in the journal Nature Communications, and comes from work supported by the NH Agricultural Experiment Station.

    In the paper, UNH scientists suggest that soil organic matter accumulates from inputs of dead microbial cells and microbial byproducts formed when microbes eat plant roots and residues, rather than from plants themselves, as previously thought.

    #sols #matières_organiques