Another White Knight for Journalism, Real Journalism
July 19, 2018
The scourge of fake news is becoming an insurmountable problem for journalists. The algorithms and cleverness of fake news mongers seems to always be a step or two ahead of the good guys. With that in mind, some are turning to Blockchain to ferret out the frauds. We learned more from a recent CoinDesk story, “With Journalists on Ethereum, Will Fake News Meet Its Match?”
According to the story:
“The blockchain might also allow Civil to conduct an experiment in decentralized governance using an Ethereum-based ERC-20 token. Through what Coolidge called the “Civil economic game,” newsrooms and readers might soon be able to enforce journalistic standards on a media industry that seems determined to forget them.”
This entire idea is getting looked at in closer detail on a new podcast called “ZigZag” where two journalists explore the world of blockchain, civil, and they way in which it can potentially influence the future of news. The unique thing about this project is the real-time feel of watching this technology emerge and to see if an impact can be made. Essentially, listeners are given a front row seat to see if Civil succeeds. Blockchain holds many promises. Now delivering salvation is among them.
Patrick Roland, July 19, 2018
Speed Shifting Cultural Gears
July 18, 2018
Social scientists have often speculated what percentage of a population must object to a behavior before that behavior is seen as abnormal (sexual harassment in the workplace, for example). Due to the complexity of the issue, it has been a difficult statistic to pin down; conclusions have ranged from 10% to 40% of the population. Classically, conventional wisdom has called for an even higher tipping point of 51%. According to a blog post from the U. of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, “Research Finds Tipping Point for Large-Scale Social Change,” we now have a more accurate answer. We learn:
“In this study, ‘Experimental Evidence for Tipping Points in Social Convention,’ coauthored by Joshua Becker, Ph.D., Devon Brackbill, Ph.D., and Andrea Baronchelli, Ph.D., 10 groups of 20 participants each were given a financial incentive to agree on a linguistic norm. Once a norm had been established, a group of confederates — a coalition of activists that varied in size — then pushed for a change to the norm.,,, When a minority group pushing change was below 25% of the total group, its efforts failed. But when the committed minority reached 25%, there was an abrupt change in the group dynamic, and very quickly the majority of the population adopted the new norm. In one trial, a single person accounted for the difference between success and failure. The researchers also tested the strength of their results by increasing the payments people got for adhering to the prevailing norm. Despite doubling and tripling the amount of money for sticking with the established behavior, Centola and his colleagues found that a minority group could still overturn the group norm.”
The real world being what it is, the researchers allow for the need to adjust that 25% target according to circumstances. The study’s lead author Damon Centola says his team’s research can inform political activism online, or can empower organizations to engineer their environments to “push people in pro-social directions” through purposely shifting their underlying beliefs. Interesting observations; see the article for more details.
Cynthia Murrell, July 18, 2018
Changing How Electronics Are Done
July 18, 2018
I read “DARPA Plans a Major Remake of US Electronics.” The write up reports that the US government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is funding activities to “radically alter how electronics are made.” The idea is to make an engineer skilled in the anticipated art to become more productive. If the funding generates innovation and applied research deliverables, “the effect could be to make small groups of engineers capable of feats that take 100 engineers to achieve today.”
There are some interesting observations presented in the write up. These are attributed to Bill Chappell, who is the DARPA directors for this initiative. The write up is important because the stated objectives are one that will allow some technical and process roadblocks to be removed; for example, acceleration of innovation, increasing productivity, and stepping up activity for open source hardware.
However, there are several ideas percolating in the statements in my opinion.
First, the US is not producing what we call in Harrod’s Creek “home grown electronics engineers.” In part, the initiative is to increase US activity. China and Russia, two cite two nation states, are creating more technical professionals. Now the US has to do more with less.
Second, big picture problems are not what some US projects accomplish. The way innovation works is to make incremental advances within often quite specific scopes of interest. This new initiative is more big picture and less improving the efficiency of an advertising server’s predictive matching in silicon or some equally narrow focus.
Third, the program suggests to me that some insightful US government professionals are concerned about the US electronics industry. The idea that technology from another nation state could create an unknown vulnerability is sufficiently troubling to warrant this big picture program.
In short, the failures of the US electronics sector have become a concern. One hopes that this project will address, in part, this significant issue. In my DarkCyber video news program to be released on July 24, 2018, I comment about the forthcoming Chinese made blockchain phone. I ask one question, “Does this device have the capability to phone home to the manufacturer? Could the device be monitored by an entity in the country of origin?”
Stephen E Arnold, July 18, 2018
Oracle: A Leader in a Blockchain Service Which Is Fast, Efficient, and Cost Effective
July 18, 2018
Neither Amazon’s nor Oracle’s blockchain capabilities have captured the imagination of die hard Facebookers or Tweet drones. I read “Global Businesses Turn to Oracle Blockchain Service to Speed Transactions Securely.” The write up struck me as a content marketing type document, but I am skeptical of much of the information I sift each day.
The main point of the write up struck me as an argument for Oracle as the blockchain tool chest and service provider for an organization wanting to avail themselves of the distributed database technology. Oracle suggests in the write up that its approach can transform, provide efficiency, and cost effectiveness.
I noted this statement:
Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service provides customers with a development platform to build their own networks, and to quickly integrate with Oracle SaaS and third-party applications they already use, as well as other blockchain networks and Oracle PaaS services. It also enables users to provision blockchain networks, join other organizations, and deploy and run smart contracts to update and query the ledger. Oracle’s blockchain platform leverages the company’s decades of experience across industries and its extensive partner ecosystem to reliably share and conduct trusted transactions with suppliers, banks, and other trade partners through blockchain.
There is a nod to Linux and the uptime of the Oracle cloud. That would be welcome news to any Oracle customer who tried to take advantage of Amazon discount day deals. My understanding is that Amazon Prime was a different cut of beef yesterday, but I could be mistaken. Cloud services do have their issues, and even the vaunted Google stumbled with streaming video, a technology which I thought was nailed down.
Back to Oracle.
As interesting was the use of Oracle’s blockchain service to verify the virginity of olive oil, I noted this factoid:
“As a company dedicated to making business-to-business payments and supply chain finance secure, frictionless and ubiquitous using blockchain, we are able to significantly accelerate the time to onboard corporations, their suppliers and banks by using Oracle’s blockchain platform,” said Amit Baid, CEO, TradeFin. “It provides a REST API-driven platform with rich integration options in Oracle Cloud Platform, allowing us to quickly onboard existing customers. Additionally, Oracle Scaleup Ecosystem provides access to the platform itself, cloud credits, mentoring, and a number of Oracle resources that can help start-ups like ours grow quickly.”
After reading the write up, it struck me that there were some parallels between Oracle’s service and Amazon’s Ethereum and Hyper Ledger capabilities. The API angle is interesting because Oracle, like Amazon, can knit together other functions and services to create quite specific implementations of the technology.
I did not three things:
First, there was no mention of the number of Amazon professionals who now work at Oracle. Our research suggests that like IBM, Oracle has been able to lure some of Amazon’s own experts with relevant work experience and perhaps some patent highway miles under his or her belt.
Second, Oracle emphasizes cost effectiveness. I assume that quite a few Oracle customers will be delighted with that news. Oracle’s products, services, and engineering support can be expensive when compared to some competitors’ offerings. Microsoft Azure has allegedly been aggressive with some pricing deals, but that may be idle chatter. After all, the high end Surface notebook is supposed to run fast and cool.
Third, the evidence for the value of the speedy Oracle blockchain implementation is none other than IDC. That’s quite an outfit. I wonder if the firm has realigned its compass after selling my reports on Amazon without obtaining permission in writing or paying me for helping make IDC so darned smart. Great and credible source for something as important as blockchain is IDC. But that’s just my normal skepticism.
Stephen E Arnold, July 18, 2018
Elsevier: An Open Source Flag Carrier?
July 17, 2018
According to this article at the Guardian, the European Union is to be applauded for its goal of open access to all scientific publications by 2020. However, writer and Open Science advocate Jon Tennant condemns one key decision in, “Elsevier Are Corrupting Open Science in Europe.” He tells us:
“However, a cursory glance at the methodological note reveals something rather odd. The subcontractor for the monitor is Elsevier, the publisher and data analytics provider. Within scholarly communications, Elsevier has perhaps the single worst reputation. With profit margins around 37%, larger than Apple and big oil companies, Elsevier dominate the publishing landscape by selling research back to the same institutes that carried out the work. It gets worse too. Throughout the methods, you can see that there is an overwhelming bias towards Elsevier products and services, such as Scopus, Mendeley, and Plum Analytics. These services provide metrics for researchers such as citation counts and social media shares, as well as data-sharing and networking platforms. There are now dozens of comments in the note pointing out the clear bias towards Elsevier and the overlooking of alternatives. It is worth highlighting some of the key issues here that the Commission seems to have ignored in subcontracting to Elsevier.”
One such issue is Elsevier’s alleged track record of working against openness in order to protect its own financial interests. Also, many throughout the EU, including prominent research institutes, have turned against the publisher in distrust. Last but not least, naming an entity that stands to benefit as the Open Science Monitor is an obvious conflict of interest, Tennant declares with understandable incredulity. See the article for details on each of these points. The author is clearly aghast the appointment was allowed in the first place, and recommends the European Commission remove Elsevier from the position posthaste.
Worth watching via open source information, of course.
Cynthia Murrell, July 17, 2018
Cambridge Analytica: A Few More Alleged Factoids
July 17, 2018
It is 2018 and the 2016 US presidential election remain news. Nature wrote an interesting article that digs into the data used to target Facebook users: “The Scant Science Behind Cambridge Analytica’s Controversial Marketing Techniques.” It was revealed in March that Cambridge Analytica collected Facebook user data without consent and that was later used to send false news to voters. It involves something called psychographic targeting.
Psychographic targeting, in which psychographic marketing is based on, uses people’s personality traits to send them targeted information, such as ads. The scary thing is that psychographic targeting actually works, at least when it comes to shopping. Voting is a different matter:
“But these effects were small in absolute terms, points out Brendan Nyhan, a political researcher at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. And what works in consumer purchasing might not apply to voting, he says. “It’s surely possible to leverage personality information for political persuasion in some way, but, as far as I know, such effects are not proven or known to be of a substantively meaningful magnitude,” Nyhan adds. He points to other studies3,4,5 that suggest that political ‘microtargeting’ — sending specific kinds of messages to specific voters — has limited effectiveness.”
Cambridge Analytica might have built a model from the Facebook data, but no one is sure. In fact, no one is exactly sure how to even copy Cambridge Analytica’s methods. Some scientists are trying to reverse engineer the firm’s methods and a journalist and academic group is trying to get Cambridge Analytica to share its data.
Whitney Grace, July 17, 2018
DarkCyber for July 17, 2018, Now Available
July 17, 2018
DarkCyber for July 17, 2018, is now available. You may view the nine minute news program about the Dark Web and lesser known Internet services at www.arnoldit.com/wordpress or Vimeo at this link. This week’s program covers:
This week’s program covers four stories.
The first story reviews the enhanced capabilities of Webhose.io’s Dark Web and Surface Web monitoring service. Tor Version 3 is supported. The content collection system can now access content on Dark Web and i2p services. Plus, Webhose’s system now scans compressed attachments and can access obfuscated sites with Captcha and user name and password requirements.
The second story reports that NSO, an Israeli intelligence services firm, suffered an insider breach. NSO’s Pegasus platform can extract email, text messages, SIM card and cell network information, GPS location data, keychain passwords, including Wi-Fi and router, and voice and image data. The NSO Pegasus system was advertised on the Dark Web. The insider was identified and arrested.
The third story takes a look at Dark Web money laundering services. Mixers, tumblers, and flip concepts are explained. These services are becoming more popular and are coming under closer scrutiny by law enforcement.
The fourth story explains Diffeo’s approach to next generation information access. Diffeo was one of the technology vendors for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Memex Dark Web indexing program. The commercial version of Diffeo’s analytic tool is in use at major financial institutions and the US Department of Defense.
Enjoy.
Kenny Toth, July 17, 2018
An Algorithm for Fairness and Bias Checking
July 16, 2018
I like the idea of a meta algorithm. This particular meta algorithm is described in “New Algorithm Limits Bias in Machine Learning.” The write up explains what those not working with smart software have known for—what is it?—decades? A century? Here’s the explanation of what happens when algorithms are slapped together:
But researchers have found that machine learning can produce unfair determinations in certain contexts, such as hiring someone for a job. For example, if the data plugged into the algorithm suggest men are more productive than women, the machine is likely to “learn” that difference and favor male candidates over female ones, missing the bias of the input. And managers may fail to detect the machine’s discrimination, thinking that an automated decision is an inherently neutral one, resulting in unfair hiring practices.
If you want to see how bias works, just run a query for “papa john pizza.” Google dutifully reports via its smart algorithm hits about Papa John’s founder getting evicted from his office, Papa John’s non admission of racial bias, and colleges cut ties to Papa John’s founder.” Google also provides locations and a a link to the a Twitter account. The result displayed for me this morning (July 16, 2018) at 940 am US Eastern was:
The only problem with my query “papa john pizza” is that I wanted the copycat recipe at this link. Google’s algorithm made certain that I would know about the alleged dust up among and within the pizza empire and that I could navigate to a store in Louisville. The smart software made it quite difficult for me to locate the knock off information. Sure, I could have provided Google with more clues to what I wanted like Six Sisters, the word “copycat”, the word “recipe”, and the word “ingredient.” But that’s what smart software is supposed to render obsolete. Boolean has no role in what algorithms expose to users. That’s why results are often interesting. That’s why smart software delivers off kilter results. The intent is to be useful. Often smart software is anything but.
Are the Google results biased? If I were Papa John, it is possible to take umbrage at the three headlines about bias.
Algorithms, if the write up is correct, will ameliorate this type of smart software dysfunctionality.
The article explains:
In a new paper published in the Proceedings of the 35th Conference on Machine Learning, SFI Postdoctoral Fellow Hajime Shimao and Junpei Komiyama, a research associate at the University of Tokyo, offer a way to ensure fairness in machine learning. They’ve devised an algorithm that imposes a fairness constraint that prevents bias.
The developers is quoted as saying:
“So say the credit card approval rate of black and white [customers] cannot differ more than 20 percent. With this kind of constraint, our algorithm can take that and give the best prediction of satisfying the constraint,” Shimao says. “If you want the difference of 20 percent, tell that to our machine, and our machine can satisfy that constraint.”
Just one question: What if a system incorporates two or more fairness algorithms?
Perhaps a meta fairness algorithm will herd the wandering sheep? Georg Cantor was troubled with this infinity of infinities type issues.
Fairness may be in the eye of the beholder. The statue of justice wears a blindfold, not old people magnifiers. Algorithms? You decide. Why not order a pizza or make your own clone of a Papa John pizza if you can find the recipe. Pizza and algorithms to verify algorithms. Sounds tasty.
If I think about algorithms identifying fake news, I may need to order maximum strength Pepcid and receive many, many smart advertisements from Amazon.
Stephen E Arnold, July 16, 2018
Enterprise Search: Long Documents Work, Short Documents, Not So Much
July 16, 2018
Enterprise Search goals are notoriously wordy and complex. Is this just a symptom of a complicated system that cannot be explained any other way? Probably not, and it’s all one venture capitalist’s idea, according to Business Insider’s recent story: “One Simple Management Trick to Improve Performance, According to John Doer.”
According to the story which is about Doerr’s book “Measure What Matters.”
“[It] explains the thinking behind the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) goal-setting process famously used by companies like Google, MyFitness Pal, and Intel…. “The theory explains that hard goals “drive performance more effectively than easy goals,” and that “specific hard goals ‘produce a higher level of output’ than vaguely worded ones.”
According to Skyword, there are things you and your vendors can do to reverse this trend (Some may not want to reverse. Hey, it’s your world.). Mainly, it deals with understanding your audience and giving them what they crave.
However, short documents often make sense in context; that is, metadata, information about the sender / author and reader / person looking for information, category tags, and other useful information. Enterprise search, despite the wide availability of low cost or no cost solutions, struggle to make sense of short messages like:
“Doesn’t work.”
Videos, encrypted messages, audio, compound documents—Enterprise search systems struggle and often fail. More OPUD.
Patrick Roland, July 16, 2018
Social Media: Mass Behavior Modification and Revenue
July 16, 2018
File this one under “Things That Are Not Big Shock,” but experts have recently been taking a closer look at the trends in social media that tend to ruin this platform. Big surprise, the fact that money is to be made is usually the root of a lot of bad behavior, as we discovered from this cheeky, but somewhat useful Guardian story, “Six Reasons Why Social Media is a Bummer.”
While it lists its gripes against social media in alphabetical order, the points are pretty good, like:
“The mass behavior modification machine is rented out to make money. The manipulations are not perfect, but they are powerful enough that it becomes suicidal for brands, politicians, and other competitive entities to forgo payments to Bummer enterprises. Universal cognitive blackmail ensues, resulting in a rising global spend on Bummer.”
It’s difficult to imagine that social media will change its tune or suddenly go non-profit. Not with the fact that it is a platform custom made to attract the eyes and wallets of millions of users. Just look in the news and you’ll see a controversy that bubbled up on Twitter nearly every day. We can’t see patterns changing when so much money is to be made from so much attention.
Patrick Roland, July 16, 2018
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