Orwell's Bad Dream Lives

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False news travels faster

Steve Lorhr's  “Why we are easily seduced by false news” recalls an old adage: It takes two to tango.

Yes the IRA attacked America in the soft underbelly known as the Facebook newsfeed, but what made that tummy so flaccid? It was not just the broadcaster - the broadcaster found receivers - many of them. Oafs, retired and semiretired; students, part time and less; nightwatchmen and nightwatchwomen, clicking on their smart phones.

They danced with the Ruskie night riders. And they danced on the winds of false news, which, Lohr reports, follows a unique trajectory. He focuses on an the MIT study that found false news travels faster than true news - that false claims were 70% more likely than the truth to be shared on Twitter

It took true stories about six times longer than false ones to reach 1500 people the MIT study disclosed.

The research was published in Science magazine. It examined stories posted to Twitter from 2006 until 2017, tracking 126,000 stories tweeted by roughly 3.0 million people more than 4.5 million times. News was defined broadly.

What is it about people that makes them more likely to share the false news? It's said here that true news inspired more anticipation, sadness and joy - while false claims elicited greater surprise and disgust. I guess you can say what is false is more visceral.

Should journalism classes be required of citizens in the 21st-century democracy? As I recall, the 20th century journalism teachers told us -- first day of class -- that you did not have to go to journalism school to be a journalist. We're people different then? Was the environment different than today's? - Jack Vaughan


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I remember in the run up to the election losing my temper with all the false things I was seeing - cant say really understood what was going on but I really wailed away on Facebook . Visceral, one night. Yes, yes. Take this y'all who is reposteth Breitbart, I railed too.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/08/technology/twitter-fake-news-research.html

Facebook faces breach

Bannon at the controls of the
Cambridge Analytica voter vaporizer.

Gonna tell you a little story that'll make The Man From Uncle sound like Howdy Doody. Bear with me.

THere is a train coming down the track.One is Cambridge Analytca - which is a big data operation HQ'd in Britain. The other is the IRA, the Internet Research Agency, a Russian social media hack.

Cambridge Analytica comprises a bunch of statisticians and programmers who found some warm fuzzy US political venture money and joined forces with an impish devil.

They set up a data gathering project, “thisisyourdigitallife,” that offered a personality prediction, and billed itself on Facebook as “a research app used by psychologists.” (I'd add a bit more on the brains and funding of thisisyourditigallife if I get the chance.) The test could go something like: Do you like Manfred Mann AND Joni Mitchell? You are a precious introvert. What about Ted Nugent AND Deep Purple? You are outgoing extrovert. I digress.

thisisyourditigallife paid users small sums to take a personality quiz and download an app, which would scrape some private information from their profiles and those of their friends - activity that Facebook more or less kinda permitted at the time.

That profile helped them to figure out if you were a conspiracy buff, and that in that case you could be pitched posts that fed that inclindation, which you could have shared, and so on.

This resulted in 50 million raw profiles that were forwarded to Cambridge Analytica... A principle officer in Cambridge Analytica was Steve "The Imp of the Perverse" Bannon. (It should be noted that their VC backers originally sought to help Ted Cruz - it took a while to find the right potion or carrier.)

Here comes the second train: The Internet Research Agency aka Glavset, the Trolls from Olgino or kremlebots. It has been charged by US DoJ with criminal interfrence with the 2016 election. These trolls thrived on hacked data like such drawn from innocouous personality tests you might take online.

As far as I am aware, a link between IRA and Cambridge Analytica has not been established - I stand before you today to sibmit that it seems like a distinct possibility. (It is all dark and complicated - not like the good old days where the president had a tape recorder rolling while he plotted nefariously, and there was a fully functioning congress and opposition party also by the way.)

If you read the attached Facebook press release you get some of the gist of what is afoot in the convoluted James Bond scenario called Cambridge Analytica.

Since the first release there has been an amendment. One press account described what happened as a hack or a hijack, so Facebook responded. What Facebook asks you to do is to not think of all this as a hack of your data but to instead understand that their policies were insuficient 2-4 years ago but have been updated. Democracy in America at Facebook HQ today is about covering its hinder.

See Facebook release March 16, 2018 - Suspending Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group from Facebook
https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/03/suspending-cambridge-analytica/


Facebook spurred GDPR, in only in small part. Let's tune into a recent podcast I did on that topic.

Cybernetic Sutra

I'd had an opportunity in college days to study comparative world press under professor Lawrence Martin Bittman, who introduced BU journalism students to the world of disinformation, a discipline he'd learned first hand in the 1960s, before his defection to the West, as a head of Czech Intelligence. We got a view into the information wars within the Cold War. This gave me a more nuanced view of the news than I might otherwise have known. Here I am going to make a jump. 

I'd begun a life-long dance with the news. 

I'd also begun a life-long study of cybernetics. 

And lately the two interests have begun oddly to blend. 

It was all on the back of Really Simple Syndication -RSS- and its ability to feed humongous quantities of online content in computer-ready form-It made me a publisher, as able as Gutenberg, and my brother a publisher, and my brother-in-law a publisher, and on ...

Cybernetics was a promising field of science that seemed ultimately to fizzle. After World War II, led by M.I.T.'s Norbert Wiener and others, cybernetics arose as, in Wiener's words, "the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine."

It burst rather as a movement upon the mass consciousness at a time when fear of technology and the dehumanization of science were a growing concern. - As the shroud of war time secrecy dispersed, in 1948 penned Cybernetics, which was followed by a popularization.

Control, communication, feedback, regulation. It took its name for the Greek root cyber. Wiener - Brownian motion - artillery tables - development of the thermostat, autopilot, differential analyzer, radar, neural networks, back propagation.

Cybernetics flamed out in a few years, tho made an peculiar reentry in the era of the WWW. Flamed out but, somewhat oddly, continued as an operational style in the USSR for quite some time more. Control, communication, feedback, regulation played out there somewhat differently.

A proposal for a Soviet Institute of Cybernetics included "the subjects of logic, control, statistics, information theory, semiotics, machine translation, economics, game theory, biology, and computer programming."1 It came back to mate with cybernetics on the web in the combination of agitprop and social media, known as Russian meddling, that slightly tipped the scales, arguably, of American politics.

1 http://web.mit.edu/slava/homepage/reviews/review-control.pdf

Pixie dust of technology

Back in the day, the Obama campaign got good press for its efforts to employ technology and then-new social media platforms to organize a large political base. Part of the effort was Dipayan Ghosh, who served in the Obama White House. Like others, Ghosh is having second - or deeper thoughts - on the subject. In a report on "#DigitalDeceit" he and a coauthor ruminate on the Internet giant's (Google's and Facebook's) alignment with advertising motivations - and the resultant penchant for misinformation. Comment: Technology always exists within the a larger context, and will eventually be subsumed thereto. What it will do is cast a haze of pixie dust over ethos, established mores, institutional memory. The haze gradually recedes. -- Jack Vaughan

AI drive spawns new takes on chip design

As soon as we solve machine
learning we will fix printer.

It is has been interesting to see a re-mergence in interest in new chip architectures. Just when you think it is all been done and there's nothing new. Bam! For sure.

The driver these days is A.I. but more particularly the machine learning aspect of AI. GPUs jumped out of the gamer console and onto the Google and Facebook data center. But there was more in the way of hardware tricks to come. The effort is to get around the tableau I here repeatedly cited: the scene is the data scientist sitting there thumb twiddling while the neural machine slowly does its learning.

I know when I saw that Google had created a custom ASIC for Tensor Flow processing, I was taken aback. If new chips are what is needed to succeed in this racket, it will be a rich man's game.

Turns out a slew of startups are on the case. This article by Cade Metz suggests that at least 45 startups are working on chips for AI type applications such as speech recognition and self-driving cars. It seems the Nvidia GPU that has gotten us to where we are, may not be enough going forward. Co processors for co processors, chips that shuttle data about in I/O roles for GPUs, may be the next frontier.

Metz names a number of AI chip startups: Cerbras, Graphcore, Wave Computing, Mythic, Nervana (now part of Intel). - Jack Vaughan

Related
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/14/technology/artificial-intelligence-chip-start-ups.html

What is the risk of AI?

Happy New Year from all of us at the DataDataData blog. Let's start the year out with a look at Artificial Intelligence - actually a story thereof. That is, "Leave Artificial Intelligence Alone" by Andrew Burt, appearing in last Friday's NYTimes' Op-Ed section.

Would that people could leave AI alone! You cant pick up a the supermarket sales flyer without hearing someone's bit on the subject. As Burt points out, a lot of the discussion is unnecessarily - and unhelpfully - doomy and gloomy. Burt points out that AI lacks definition. You can see the effect in much of the criticism, which lashes out with haymakers at a phantom - one that really comprises very many tributary technologies - quite various ones at that.

Some definition, some narrowing of the problem scope is in order.

If you study the history of consumer data privacy you discover, as Burt reminds, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974. Consider it as a pathway for data privacy that still can be followed.

Burt also points to SR 11-7 regulations that are intended to provide breadcrumbs back to how and why trading models were constructed, so that there is good understanding of risk involved in the automated pits of Wall Street.

Within the United States’ vast framework of laws and regulatory agencies already lie answers to some of the most vexing challenges created by A.I. In the financial sector, for example, the Federal Reserve enforces a regulation called SR 11-7, which addresses the risks created by the complex algorithms used by today’s banks. SR 11-7’s solution to those challenges is called “effective challenge,” which seeks to embed critical analysis into every stage of an algorithm’s life cycle — from thoroughly examining the data used to train the algorithm to explicitly outlining the assumptions underlying the model, and more. While SR 11-7 is among the most detailed attempts at governing the challenges of complex algorithms, it’s also one of the most overlooked.

Burt sees such staged algorithm analysis as a path for understanding AI and machine learning going forward.

It is good to see there may be previous experience that can be tapped when looking at how to handle AI decision making - as opposed to jumping up and down and yelling 'the sky is falling.'

As he says, it is better to distinguish the elements of AI application according to use cases, and look at regulation specifically in verticals - where needed. 

Spoke with Andrew Burt last year as part of my work for SearchDataManagement - linked to here: Machine learning meets Data Governance.  - Jack Vaughan

Paradise Graph Papers

The Paradise Papers files expose offshore holdings of political leaders and their financiers as well as household-name companies that slash taxes through transactions conducted in secret. Financial deals of billionaires and celebrities are also revealed in the documents. 1.4 TB of data – 13.4 million documents – includes information leaked from trust company Asiaciti and from Appleby, a 100-year-old offshore law firm specializing in tax havens as well as information leaked.more to come


Related

https://www.icij.org/investigations/paradise-papers/about/

https://neo4j.com/blog/neo4j-power-behind-paradise-papers/

https://neo4j.com/blog/depth-graph-analysis-paradise-papers/

https://linkurio.us/blog/big-data-technology-fraud-investigations/

Does data make baseball duller?

Let's not talk quality of life and data, lets talk baseball and data. Moneyball was an eye opener in the rise of big data analytics as a popular meme. And why not? It had Brad Pitt. Well the movie did. It showed a guy thinking outside of the box could re-imagine the game. The hell with 'he looks like a ball player' hello to can he take a walks? For a small market team - a tonic. But now we are seeing a great downside of worshiping at the altar of data: Really boring baseball. Removing too many pitchers too soon...Embracing strikeouts...Avoiding ground ball and liner hits...focus on homer... Still one wonders if some of these move do auger obvious counter moves for those outside of box thinkers of today... in the face of elaborate boring shifts... why not bunt?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-downside-of-baseballs-data-revolutionlong-games-less-action-1507043924