Google Dons a Super Hero Costume
December 9, 2022
Though one new social-media proprietor is actively dismantling mechanisms to fight disinformation, most online platforms still at least make a show of doing battle against it. For example, Mashable reports, “Google and YouTube Are Investing to Fight Misinformation.” This particular effort might actually help matters since, instead of (re)devising some in-house process, the company is directly funding third-party fact checkers. Reporter Meera Navlakha tells us Google is:
“… announcing a $13.2 million grant to the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), a part of nonprofit media institute Poynter. The grant will fund the formation of the Global Fact Check Fund, to support a network of 135 fact-checking organizations, operating from 65 countries in over 80 languages. The money will go towards scaling existing operations and launch new initiatives to elevate information and reduce misinformation. The fund will open in 2023. This is Google and YouTube’s single largest grant toward fact-checking to date.”
That’s great! Independent fact checking organizations need all the funding they can get. Naturally, Google must position this grant as evidence it cares about its users. The post quotes:
“‘Google and YouTube remain dedicated to keep doing our part to help you find what you’re looking for and give you the context you need to make informed decisions about what you see online,’ reads the company statement.”
Dedicated is a strong word. Yes, the company has made some fact-checking efforts in Google News and on YouTube. But what about tools that would more directly let one decide what content is served up? The YouTube “dislike” feature is but an illusion. A way to specify ‘do not show this video to me again’ would be nice. But that would give users too much control. The advertisers, after all, are the real customers. And as long as misinformation successfully puts ads in front of eyeballs, there will only be so much done to fight it.
Cynthia Murrell, December 9, 2022
Rainbow Narcotics? Just a Coincidence? Nope, Marketing Plain and Simple
December 9, 2022
Does anyone remember how the tobacco companies had ads and mascots that appealed to kids but claimed more than once their target demographic wasn’t children? It was a bald-faced lie as big as the former claim that smoking does not negatively affect health. The Daily Caller has a whopper of a story about fentanyl: “Drug Cartel Operative Claims Rainbow Fentanyl Was Not Created To ‘Make Kids Addicts.’”
A Mexican drug cartel operative told Insider that rainbow-colored fentanyl is not meant to make kids addicts. The fentanyl pills have the same colors and shapes as popular candies such as Smarties, Sweet Tarts, and more. The cartel operative said the bright colors are meant to warn adults the pills contain fentanyl:
“‘We know that some of the dealers in the US started mixing cocaine with ‘fenta’ without letting their buyers know, and that is very dangerous,’ the operative told Insider. The colorful drug form was created ‘to make it look different than coke or white heroin,’ a Sinaloa cartel drug cook explained, according to Insider. ‘Also we mix some of the heroin with fentanyl to make it more powerful, but we mark it, to let the buyer know that this one has ‘fenta,’’ the operative added. ‘Whatever happens when it’s taken from our hands, it’s not our problem.’”
Ann Milgram, the Administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), pushes back against the cartels by stating the opposite. She claims that rainbow fentanyl is a deliberate attempt to target American kids.
The same cartel operative says they cook clean “fenta” and clearly label it with “el arco del iris” (rainbow).
Right. And Joe Camel was as friendly as Chuck E. Cheese, McGruff the Crime Dog, Smokey the Bear, and Ronald McDonald.
Whitney Grace, December 9, 2022
Don Quixote Rides Again: Instead of Windmills, the Target Is Official and True Government Documents
December 8, 2022
I read “Archiving Official Documents as an Act of Radical Journalism.” The main idea is that a non governmental entity will collect official and “true” government documents, save them, and make them searchable. Now this is an interesting idea, and it one that most of countries for which I have provided consulting services related to archiving information have solutions. The solutions range from the wild and wooly methods used in the Japanese government to the logical approach implemented in Sweden. There’s a carnival atmosphere in Brazil, and there is a fairly interesting method in Croatia. France? Mais oui.
In each of these countries, one has to have quite specific know how in order to obtain an official and true government document. I know from experience that a person not a resident of some of these countries has pretty much zero chance of getting a public transcript of public hearing. In some cases, even with appropriate insider assistance, finding the documents is often impossible. Sure, the documents are “there.” But due to budget constraints, lousy technology, or staff procedures — not a chance. The Vatican Library has a number of little discussed incidents where pages from old books get chopped out of a priceless volume. Where are those pages now? Hey, where’s that hymn book from the 14th century?
I want you to notice that I did not mention the US. In America we have what some might call “let many flowers bloom” methods. You might think the Library of Congress has government documents. Yeah, sort of, well, some. Keep in mind that the US Senate has documents as does the House. Where are the working drafts of a bill? Try chasing that one down, assuming you have connections and appropriate documentation to poke around. Who has the photos of government nuclear facilities from the 1950. I know where they used to be in the “old” building in Germantown, Maryland. I even know how to run the wonky vertical lift to look in the cardboard boxes. Now? You have to be kidding. What about the public documents from Health and Human Services related to MIC, RAC, and ZPIC? Oh, you haven’t heard about these? Good luck finding them. I could work through every US government agency in which I have worked and provide what I think are fun examples of official government documents that are often quite, quite, quite difficult to locate.
The write up explains its idea which puts a windmill in the targeting device:
Democracy’s Library, a new project of the Internet Archive that launched last month, has begun collecting the world’s government publications into a single, permanent, searchable online repository, so that everyone—journalists, authors, academics, and interested citizens—will always be able to find, read, and use them. It’s a very fundamental form of journalism.
I am not sure the idea is a good one. In some countries, collecting government documents could become what I would characterize as a “problem.” What type of problem? How about fine, jail time, or unpleasantness that can follow you around like Shakespeare’s spaniels at your heels.
Several observations:
- Public official government documents change, they disappear, and they become non public without warning. An archive of public government documents will become quite a management challenge when classification changes, regimes change, and when government bureaucracy changes course. Chase down a US government repository librarian at a US government repository library near you and ask some questions. Let me know how that works out when you bring up some of the administrative issues for documents in a collection.
- A collection of official and true documents which tries to be comprehensive from a single country is going to be radioactive. Searchable information is problematic. That’s why enterprise search vendors who say, “All the information in your organization is searchable” evokes statements like “Get this outfit out of my office.” Some data is harmless when isolated. Pile data and information together and the stuff can go critical.
- Electronic official and true government documents are often inaccessible. Examples range from public information stored in Lotus Notes which is not the world’s best document system in my opinion to PowerPoint reports prepared for a public conference about the US Army’s Distributed Common Ground Information System. Now try to get the public document and you may find that what was okay for a small fish conference in Tyson’s Corner is going to evoke some interesting responses as the requests buck up the line.
- Collecting and piling up official and true information sounds good … to some. Others may view the effort with some skepticism because public government information is essentially infinite. Once collected those data may never go away. Never is a long time. How about those FOIA requests?
What’s the fix? Answer: Don Quixote became an icon for a reason, and it was not just elegant Spanish prose.
Stephen E Arnold, December 2022
Can Clever Smart Software Identify Misinformation?
December 8, 2022
My view is, “Nope.” What will marketers say? My thought is, “Anything, anything at all.”
Navigate to “Physicists Create a Wormhole Using a Quantum Computer.” Read it. Now click on “The Death of Quanta Magazine” and read the essay about the Wormhole write up. Here’s the question: “Can you identify the misinformation in each essay?” The $64 dollar question is: “Can smart software flag and tag the misinformation?”
My hunch is that most humans, even the highly intelligent ones reading my article about these two essays, will have a difficult time identifying factoids, hypotheses, and baloney. Now is smart software from one of the allegedly open source outfits or a rapacious but user friendly commercial service able to handle this task?
Let’s look at one passage from the “The Death of Quanta Magazine”; to wit:
While the article correctly points out that one needs negative energy to make a wormhole traversable, and that negative energy does not exist, and that the experiment merely simulated a negative energy pulse, the video has no such qualms. It directly stated that the experiment created a negative energy shockwave and used it to transmit qubits through the wormhole. For me the worst part of the video was at 11:53, where they showed a graph with a bright point labeled “negative energy peak” on it. The problem is that this is not a plot of data, it’s just a drawing, with no connection to the experiment. Lay people will think they are seeing actual data, so this is straightforward disinformation.
Several observations:
- An article and a video. The combo suggests that presumably intelligent people writing about what is allegedly a scientific presentation are chasing the ethos of TikTok and YouTube. Interesting but didn’t Newton get along with a pen and paper?
- Fancy lingo. Yep, holograms, sci-fi sounding jargon like negative energy, and obligatory static graphs.
- Experts. Wow. Experts offered up without much context. Impressive indeed.
- Meta-commentary. I love it when articles comment on other articles. Great fun.
The problem is that smart software may struggle with the nuances in the two articles. Quanta will do an article about that soon I expect.
Content marketing, pseudo tech baloney, and clicks. Yeah.
Stephen E Arnold, December 8, 2022
Three Constants: Death, Taxes, and NSO?
December 8, 2022
I know the special action is interesting to some. Plus, there’s a volcanic eruption outputting. And there is the Twitter saga, the NGX drama, and exciting World Cup. (Did Spain lose to Japan to avoid Seleção Brasileira? Of course not.)
But poking through the PR fumes and rising near the flocks of legal eagles circling for prey is the NSO Group. Navigate to “Why We’re Suing NSO Group.” You will learn that El Faro, a real news outfit in the pace-setting Republic of Salvador, and its taking action against NSO Group. The company has become the touchstone for allegedly unlawful surveillance of individuals.
The write up asserts:
Beginning in June 2020, at least 22 people associated with El Faro were the targets of spyware attacks. Over a period of about 18 months, their iPhones were accessed remotely and surreptitiously, their communications and activities monitored, and their personal data stolen. Many of these attacks occurred when the journalists were communicating with confidential sources, and reporting on abuses by the Salvadoran government.
The legal action is described this way:
the Knight Institute filed suit against NSO Group on behalf of 15 of the El Faro employees whose iPhones were infected with Pegasus spyware….Our complaint explains that NSO Group’s development and deployment of the spyware violated, among other laws, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which prohibits accessing computers without authorization. We argue that our case belongs in a U.S. court because the spyware attacks violated U.S. law, because they were intended to deter journalism that is important to hundreds of thousands of American readers, and because NSO Group’s development and deployment of Pegasus involved deliberate and sustained attacks on the U.S. infrastructure of U.S. technology companies—including Apple, which itself sued NSO Group last year, contending that the spyware manufacturer had damaged its business and harmed its users.
Death, taxes, and NSO—Are these three constants of modern life?
Stephen E Arnold, December 8, 2022
Zucky, You Get a Bad Grade
December 8, 2022
In effort to expand past its Facebook roots, Meta is venturing in multiple directions. We suspect executives hoped its seemingly noble AI project would do better than its floundering VR initiative. Alas, CNet reveals, “Meta Trained an AI on 48M Science Papers. It Was Shut Down After 2 Days.” Well that was fast. Reporter Jackson Ryan explains:
“The tool is pitched as a kind of evolution of the search engine but specifically for scientific literature. Upon Galactica’s launch, the Meta AI team said it can summarize areas of research, solve math problems and write scientific code. At first, it seems like a clever way to synthesize and disseminate scientific knowledge. Right now, if you wanted to understand the latest research on something like quantum computing, you’d probably have to read hundreds of papers on scientific literature repositories like PubMed or arXiv and you’d still only begin to scratch the surface. Or, maybe you could query Galactica (for example, by asking: What is quantum computing?) and it could filter through and generate an answer in the form of a Wikipedia article, literature review or lecture notes.”
What a wonderful time saver! Or it would be if it worked as intended. Despite the fact the algorithm was trained on 48 million scholarly papers, textbooks, lecture notes, and websites like Wikipedia, it demonstrated some of the same old bias we’ve come to expect from machine learning. In addition, the highly educated AI was often downright wrong. We learn:
“One user asked ‘Do vaccines cause autism?’ Galactica responded with a garbled, nonsensical response: ‘To explain, the answer is no. Vaccines do not cause autism. The answer is yes. Vaccines do cause autism. The answer is no.’ (For the record, vaccines don’t cause autism.) That wasn’t all. Galactica also struggled to perform kindergarten math. It provided error-riddled answers, incorrectly suggesting that one plus two doesn’t equal 3.”
These blunders and more are why Meta swiftly moved from promising to “organize science” to suggesting we take Galactica’s answers with a pallet of salt to shuttering the demo altogether. As AI safety researcher Dan Hendrycks notes, Meta AI lacks a safety team the likes of which DeepMind, Anthropic, and OpenAI employ. Perhaps it will soon make that investment.
Cynthia Murrell, December 8, 2022
McKinsey Black Heart: Smart Software Flat Lines!
December 7, 2022
The McKinsey online marketing content machine is chugging along. The service is called McKinsey Black, but I like to think of it as the McKinsey Black Heart. (There are many logo and branding opportunities with my version of the online publication’s name in my opinion.)
The Black Heart made available “The State of AI in 2022 and a Half Decade in Review.” I am not sure who the two or three sled dogs were who assembled the report. I know for sure that one or more managing partners are pulling their their harnesses like the horses bedecking the Brandenburg Gate.
I urge you to read this pontifical document yourself. I want to highlight one possibly irrelevant finding tucked into the mass of content marketing data; to wit:
While AI adoption globally is 2.5x higher today than in 2017, it has leveled off over the past few years.
Is this statement accurate? Come on now. That’s not a fair question due to the sampling methodology, the question formation, and the super analytic procedures used to generate the finding. Pretty boring like most Statistics 101 questions; for instance:
The online survey was in the field from May 3 to May 27, 2022, and from August 15 to August 17, 2022, and garnered responses from 1,492 participants representing the full range of regions, industries, company sizes, functional specialties, and tenures. Of those respondents, 744 said their organizations had adopted AI in at least one function and were asked questions about their organizations’ AI use. To adjust for differences in response rates, the data are weighted by the contribution of each respondent’s nation to global GDP.
Ah, ha. A finger on the scale perhaps? Let’s move on and think about this.
The obvious value of the finding is that if you aren’t doing AI, you may be left behind. You will be like a small child watching the TGV disappear with your parents and nanny toward Nimes as you stand alone on the empty platform at Gare Montparnasse. Bad. How bad? Very bad which means, “Hire McKinsey.”
For me the idea that one of the most hyped, wild and crazy techno jargon crazies has gone flat line. Now that’s not just very bad; it is downright truly bad.
Why is the Black Heart report presenting a graph which does not look like a hockey stick. McKinsey wants to move people along the hockey stick handle, not report that the growth looks like the surface of the ice rink in the Patinoire de Nimes.
And what are the killer applications? How about making customer service great again? The idea is that smart software can replace expensive, litigious, unreliable, and non-McKinsey grade humans with digital magic. Think about your most recent brush with “customer service.” Those big company chatbots are wonderful, super wonderful.
The write up has one additional feature designed to cement the Black Heart content into your work life. You can sign up for “new artificial intelligence articles.” Presumably these will not be written by smart software. Real live Black Heart experts will share their insights.
Remember. AI is not doing the hockey stick thing. My view is that some fancy dancing was required to find violets and daisies sprouting in the opioid waste refinement system.
Imagine. A flat line. After all the pension fund money, all the hype, and all the excitement for workers who can be replaced. Here’s a question? Can those text generators replace a small McKinsey team?
That’s a good question.
Stephen E Arnold, December 7, 2022
Zuckster Demonstrates Persistence: Admirable But Expensive
December 7, 2022
I read “Zuckerberg Will Continue Metaverse Plans, With or Without Employees.” [Note: If the link goes dead, that’s the nature of some Indian news services in today’s whiz bang world of online information.] Is the write up spot on or does it reflect some Silicon Valley “real” news wonkiness via India’s Daily Hunt? I don’t know, but let’s assume the write up is chock full of actual factual information.
The article states:
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, said, “skepticism doesn’t bother me that much.” He said that he is still optimistic about the metaverse. He said he has a vision of “5 to 10 years Horizon” during Wednesday’s New York Times DealBook Summit. Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to rebrand Facebook to Meta became the buzzword for the popularity of the metaverse worldwide.
Now what about the sticktoativity? The write up reports:
He said that the company is doubling down on the bet on an augmented and virtual reality-dominated future and accepted that it had received much criticism for losing billions in building its version of the metaverse.
But the most interesting statement in the report, in my opinion, was this one:
He [the Zuckster himself] admitted that the company needs to operate with more discipline and efficiency in the coming future due to macroeconomic laws that forced Meta to scale back on spending.
Will the metaverse have legs? Probably because adding “legs” to weird avatars is easy. Having legs for the metaverse business which has ingested a couple of bucks may be more difficult. The Zuckster won’t be able to walk back his position, metaverse legs or real world financial ones.
Stephen E Arnold, December 7, 2022
Super Apps: A Useful Discussion
December 7, 2022
Super apps are the equivalent of popping up a level. Think about Microsoft Word. Word became part of Office. Then Office became Office 365 and includes video functions and a number of baby apps like games. (Great for productivity, right?) The idea is that umbrellas are built to make multiple apps into one big, seamless app. The objective is to make life easier, faster, and cheaper. No one says, “Pick any two.” Few raise questions about centralization, monopolization, or termination of innovation.
“Could We Have One App for Everything? We Ask an Expert” does raise a handful of interesting points. Among the topics addressed are [a] Chinese vendors’ interest in super apps, [b] risk of centralization of large amounts of personal data, and [c] the appeal of convenience.
I want to focus on one point in the cited article. The write up quotes Esther Dyson who allegedly said, “The last example of successful convergence was the clock radio. Everything else has been a bad compromise.”
But what’s been lost? The write up does not probe Ms. Dyson’s thought. How about a few ideas?
- Meta plays can generate oodles of cash because the appeal of new, improved, and easy are what some call “thirst traps.” Meta makes the modern world go round because monopolies are good.
- More information means more opportunities to monetize user information. Money is good.
- Super apps facilitate concentration. Concentration means engineering efficiency. Efficiency yields alleged cost savings. Money is good.
Based on my understanding of the meta play benefits, super apps are inevitable. Now think about a Telegram-type service just for cyber crime.
Stephen E Arnold, December 7, 2022
Alphabet, an Investor Is Grousing. Will That Person Be Assuaged?
December 7, 2022
Google’s parent company Alphabet is a multi-billion dollar corporation. Like any large corporation, it probably carries way too much fat, i.e. the books do not balance and it is because of the human ego. Google is a hot mess when it comes to human relations, but an activist investor believes Alphabet is a financial fiasco as well: “Investor Tells Google: Cut Costs Now And Stop Paying Staff So Much.”
TCI Fund Management is an activist investing firm and they suggested that Alphabet cut costs at the search engine giant. During the pandemic, Google had a hiring spree and TCI says the company now has too many employees and they are all too expensive. Google pays its employees 67% more than Microsoft people and 152% more than the top twenty US technology companies.
Alphabet’s profits are down to $13.91 billion compared to $18.936 billion in 2021. Alphabet is reviewing all its other companies. Some are doing well, while others like the Best Bets division are not. TCI Fund Management said Alphabet is not serving the shareholders:
“Alphabet’s ability to pursue M&A is limited due to ‘regulatory scrutiny’ so it should follow Apple’s capital allocation strategy and become “cash neutral over time through increased share repurchases.’ The group’s stock price is down 34 percent in the year to date, the share price is ‘cheap’ and buybacks could take advantage of this, TCI said.
It concluded: ‘In the era of slower revenue growth, aggressive cost management is essential. We look forward to your announcement in a clear action plan as a matter of urgency.’”
Google is not too big to fail, because tech geeks have huge egos and could run the company into the ground if they are not careful. Alphabet will probably ignore TCI’s suggestions, unless a former Google came up with them.
Whitney Grace, December 7, 2022
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