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coopdigitalnewsletter · 4 years ago

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10 August 2020: Is Covid-proof a marketing strategy?

Hello, this is the Co-op Digital newsletter - it looks at what's happening in the internet/digital world and how it's relevant to the Co-op, to retail businesses, and most importantly to people, communities and society. Thank you for reading - send ideas and feedback to @rod on Twitter. Please tell a friend about it!

[Image: Beeple - see events, below]

Is “Covid-proof” a marketing strategy?

Will store safety end up being an essential “hygiene factor”? Will it be a marketing strategy in future? If a shop or a supply chain can be assured as “Covid-proof”, are you more likely to shop there? Or will you go back to shopping everywhere when everything “returns to normal”?

💥 Why this matters: the virus won’t be “solved” quickly and has sufficiently accelerated change, so there’s no longer a “normal before” to return to. So safety will remain an important consideration.

Two good quotes from that article:

"Cleanliness has moved from a compliance responsibility to something that is part of the customer experience."

“Previous to COVID, you would try to do a lot of cleanliness and janitorial practices out of sight of customers. Now you want them to be visible, because you want to send a message to customers that things are safer”

Managing queues inside and outside Co-op stores during the pandemic. That’s a great read about how the Co-op pulled a team together, researched remotely, planned, tested, iterated and ultimately improved ways to give shoppers useful information and to manage queues at shops.

There has been encouraging news on vaccines, but even so it looks like the coronavirus is a "around a long time, live with it" thing. So beyond the current social distancing and hand sanitation measures what might a COVID-proof shop look like, materially? Unfortunately, fears about the virus have driven shoppers back to single use plastic shopping bags, which sounds bad for everyone except the plastics industry. Similarly, delivered grocery uses a *lot* of single-use plastic bags. So perhaps there will be reusable bags and containers with anti-viral coatings.

Refitting is a longer-term option. You can imagine today’s self-serve sanitation stations becoming automated and permanently built into store thresholds and shelf displays. Perhaps some shops will refit for infection control, replacing plastic and steel door handles and work surfaces with copper, or refitting fabrics and materials impregnated with silver? There are some small-scale architecture ideas and set ups for outdoor eating (like Arup, Rockwell).

Amazon Go in the UK

Amazon will launch 10 or more checkoutless Go stores in UK by the end of the year, the first of them in London.

Sainsbury’s piloted a checkoutless store in London in 2019, but ended the pilot because the need to download and register on a dedicated mobile app discouraged passing trade.

💥 Why this matters: Amazon continues to experiment with retail formats. Go stores are a marketing beachhead for selling the technology to other retailers.

Also Amazon:

The 16% investment in Deliveroo is approved.

UK drone deliveries team grows.

Uber: moving meals not people

Ridehailing giant Uber has always looked like a next generation taxi service, with some incremental businesses (delivery) tacked on. But Uber’s second financial quarter results just saw food delivery revenue overtake ridehail revenue! Ride bookings were down 73%, food delivery orders (Uber Eats) were up 113%. This doesn’t mean that Uber’s main business is over: Uber will expand to 170 locations in the UK by buying Autocab. But the main thing and the side gig are swapping places. Or more accurately: Uber’s core business is moving vehicles around, not moving people around.

💥 Why this matters: the virus turns industries upside down and forces organisations to reinvent. Reinvention often looks like digital transformation but it feels scary if your organisation is really optimised for doing the thing that *used* to work.

Can machine learning write like humans write?

GPT-3 is a machine learning system which doesn’t understand language but does write it. It’s

“an auto-complete tool that is a skilled predictor of which word comes next. And yet it’s capable, to varying degrees, of writing music; playing chess; telling jokes; and talking about philosophy. This is surprising, since we think our own ability to do all these things is due to capacities that GPT-3 lacks - understanding, perception, agency.”

💥 Why this matters: When machines can generate content that is plausibly written by humans, and when the internet gives you infinite ways to publish that content (and even attribute it to others), there will be a crisis in trust. So you’d expect to see a lot of work in future on how content could be provably authenticated as “authored by this human”.

GPT-3 is sufficiently good at predicting the next word that you can make search engines with it. It had a clunky predecessor called GPT-2, which you can try out on the internet. If you give it the first sentence of this story, GPT-2 will write things like this:

“GPT-3 is a machine learning system which doesn’t understand language but does write it. This post explains what this machine learning system is, how it can be used and how it is going to help me to understand better how I ’ve been taught to write. Let me explain. There are some things that machine learning can't do. One of them is understanding how you write. We need to learn how to write something. This is the goal of machine learning. We need to learn to write something , so we will write about a system that can write that . What I will show you is a model which can make an accurate estimate of how you write”

If you were a human that made a living writing, you might find that reassuring, threatening and critical all at the same time. It’s not great writing, but GPT-3 is apparently much better. The “try GPT-3 out” websites aren’t often online because it costs the creators a lot of money just to let newsletter writers see if they’ve still got jobs. However there is a “friendly competition” online to see whether humans or GPT-3 can write the better performing headlines (further reinforcing the dispiriting view that click through rates should be the critical measure of online content quality! :( )

Signals/numbers

Procter & Gamble sales rise 4% as consumers buy more cleaning products.

WH Smith may cut 1,500 jobs after sales plummet.

'Staggering' levels of plastic pollution by 2040 - 1.3 billion tonnes.

UK electrical waste mountain growing - 1.45 million tonnes a year.

Various things

Bill English: Computer mouse co-creator dies at 91 - “In an experiment, the pair asked users to try out the mouse alongside other pointing devices such as a light pen or joystick - and found that the mouse was the clear favourite.”

Neobank Monzo’s annual report makes its community nervous - though accounting rules make expected losses look extra painful.

Entrepreneur's 'free rice ATMs' for Vietnam's poor.

After those poor Boston Robotics robodogs get rescued by the RSPCA from the people that used to kick them, they get jobs where they are loved. Like Fluffy, who now works at Ford, laser scanning its factories, and being loved by its manager. You could imagine that being used for gap scanning the aisles of a supermarket.

Co-op Digital news and events

Federation - free events:

Andy’s Man Club – Gentleman's Peer to Peer Mental Health Meet Up – Mondays 7pm

Self Care – Online Workshops – Various dates/times in July

Virtual Data Expedition – Online Workshop – 11 Aug – 10am

NW Drupal User Group – Meet Up – 11 Aug – 7pm

Beginners Guide to Retrofit – Webinar – 12 Aug – 6pm

Women in Tech – Networking – 13 Aug – 8.30am

Motion North – Animation & design Showcase – 13 Aug - 7pm. Motion North is an animation & motion design enterprise at Federation House. Their online event features not one but two stateside speakers! First up is GMUNK. A designer and director who uses a fusion of science-fiction themes and psychedelic palettes to produce enigmatic and atmospheric work. Following on is Beeple Crap, renowned for his “everydays” producing a piece of work every day with the purpose of developing and getting “better at different things”.

Meteoric Meters – Acoustic & Spoken Word Open Mic Night – 20 Aug – 6pm

LGBTQIA – Hackathon – 28-30 Aug

Paid for events:

Invisible Cities - Online Tours of Manchester or Edinburgh – Various Dates & Times

Mandala Yoga – Online Yoga Sessions - Various Dates & Times

Tech Ethics – Meet Up – Various Dates & Times

More detail on Federation House’s events. You can also see how The Federation is planning for a safe return to the co-working floor.

Thank you for reading

Thank you, beloved readers and contributors. Please continue to send ideas, questions, corrections, improvements, etc to @rod on Twitter. If you have enjoyed reading, please tell a friend! If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog. Previous newsletters.

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tastydregs · 5 years ago

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Facial Recognition and Digital Surveillance Are Ending Anonymous Protest

It’s been almost two weeks since people first took to the streets in Minneapolis to protest police brutality following the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of the police. Since then, demonstrations have gained momentum and spread to cities across the US and world.

Protest is a critical component of healthy democracy, a megaphone to grab the attention of those in power and compel change. In the US, it’s a constitutional right. But increasingly, law enforcement agencies are requesting protest footage and images, and the latest technologies are bringing with them the power to cast an ever wider surveillance net.

When San Francisco became the first US city to ban facial recognition in May 2019, perhaps legislators had something like the recent weeks in mind. The Bay Area is no stranger to civil disobedience and demonstration. But in bygone eras, anonymous protest was guaranteed by numbers. Just a face in the crowd actually meant something. Now, with smartphones, high-definition cameras, and powerful algorithms, anonymous protest may soon be a thing of the past.

While cities such as Oakland and Berkeley, California and Somerville and Brookline, Massachusetts have also banned facial recognition, other cities around the country still allow and have actively used facial recognition in law enforcement in the recent past.

Facial recognition algorithms identify people by searching for and matching them with labeled images in vast databases. These databases can be limited to mugshots or they can include far bigger groups, like DMV drivers license photos. In a particularly contentious example, startup Clearview AI composed a database of billions of images scraped from thousands of sites online without consent—including from the likes of Facebook and YouTube—and sold access to the database and facial recognition software to hundreds of law enforcement agencies.

A Buzzfeed News article last week said police departments in and around Minneapolis have used Clearview as recently as February. Another article in Medium’s science and tech publication One-Zero noted several other examples of recent use of facial recognition and requests from local police departments and the FBI for footage and images from the protests.

The capability is there and the systems have been used, but how law enforcement is employing facial recognition day-to-day and during the protests isn’t always clear.

Proponents argue that, used responsibly, the technology can be a valuable tool for more successfully locating people who’ve committed crimes. But its limitations have also been well-documented, not only in terms of overall accuracy, but also built-in bias, with some algorithms misidentifying people of color and women at much higher rates.

Absent clear rules and regulations, there’s potential for misuse, and the wider and deeper digital surveillance goes, the more it may provoke fear and freeze free expression.

“At a high level, these surveillance technologies should not be used on protesters,” Neema Singh Guliani, a senior legislative counsel for the ACLU, told BuzzFeed News. “The idea that you have groups of people that are raising legitimate concerns and now that could be subject to face recognition or surveillance, simply because they choose to protest, amplifies the overall concerns with law enforcement having this technology to begin with.”

In the US, no federal regulation governs facial recognition, leaving it to a patchwork of state and city laws. In a Wired op-ed last December, Susan Crawford argued this approach may have some benefits. The federal government may not be able to act anytime soon. In the meantime, local debates and experiments at the city and state level can inform and pressure wider regulation at the top.

But as those experiments grow in number, focusing just on facial recognition may miss the forest for the trees. There are other ways of surveilling groups from afar.

Smartphones broadcast an array of information that can be intercepted and recorded. And while we humans recognize people by their faces or voices, the algorithms enabling this kind of surveillance have no such limitations. Often they’re able to find patterns we can’t see and don’t necessarily even understand. Researchers have shown algorithms can identify people by their gait or their heartbeat (measured by laser at 200 yards). There may not be a database of gaits and heartbeats yet, but the technology is here.

The wider issue isn’t which piece of information is being used, but that it can be used so pervasively. Limiting how, when, why, and who uses it can help protect vital freedoms.

The question, as ever, is how do we bend technology to better serve us?

Crawford suggests requiring warrants for investigations and limiting real-time use. We can also restrict the storage of data, require deep auditing and public reporting of the technology’s use, punish misuse, and ban use in areas that are prone to discrimination.

That’s just for starters.

If we want a society that’s supple enough to respond to the voices of its people, we need to keep a close eye on how these technologies are deployed in the future.

Image credit: Bernard Hermant / Unsplash

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ohnoitstbskyen · 2 years ago

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I find myself in the strange position of being... less a queer elder, I guess, and more an elder millennial who happens to be queer. I'm watching the next generations of kids simultaneously be more queer, be more willing and eager to be inclusive and open, more experimental with their identities, more fluid in their gender and sexuality and more willing to push the boundaries of expression and selfhood...

And yet also, I feel like I see this sense in them that they feel alone at the tip of history. That they've burst out alone into the world with themselves and their truths, and have to figure out how to navigate it all on their own, that they are wholly new in the world, without history and without origin.

And it breaks my heart a little bit, because first of all, that's incredibly fucking stressful, holy shit, nobody should have to shoulder all of that. But also because in being unmoored from history they become vulnerable to the kinds of scams and toxic patterns that only history and experience can really teach you how to defend yourself from. TERFism relies on this, it relies on people having no memory of the essential and inherent solidarity that does and must exist between cis and trans people if any of us are to be free. I remember that big stupid fight a while back over whether "bisexual" is transphobic or exclusionary of nonbinary identities, which is an issue that was fought and won over thirty years ago. The Bisexual Manifesto of 1990 explicitly calls this out:

"Do not assume that bisexuality is binary or dougamous in nature; that we must have "two" sides or that we MUST be involved simultaneously with both genders to be fulfilled human beings. In fact, don't assume that there are only two genders."

Queer history isn't taught in schools, because, well, quite a lot of governments would still prefer to pretend that we do not exist and are not important. Worse, queer history is ERASED. Remember that fucking Stonewall film from a few years back and how it tried to eliminate the centrality of trans women of color to the history of queer resistance? That's the structures of capital trying to protect white supremacy in historical memory, trying to paper over their own integrated role in upholding oppression.

We lost so many millions of elders to the HIV/AIDS crisis. Or, I should say, millions of us were murdered through negligence and active malice, by systems that would have been content to see us rot and die if not for the bravery and solidarity of the civil rights movements that sprang up to demand justice.

Big parts of those movements eventually got bought out by corporations; not in any grand and monumental betrayal, but slowly and insidiously over time. Assimilationism reared its ugly, polished head, and there are a lot more corporate logos at the Pride parades nowadays. There's a lot more discourse about whether someone seeing a dick or a titty on one of the floats is an unacceptable expression of sexuality, whether it's "family friendly," as though that term isn't regularly used to imply that queer people merely existing constitutes a type of violent pornography.

Anyway, my point wasn't to Old Man Yells At Cloud about all of this, but rather to support the OP answer up there. Ring-fencing and enclosure are the tools of the enemy. Terminology policing and border guarding and gatekeeping are how you become weaponized against your own. The fear that if you broaden the sphere of queerness to include more people, then your gains will be taken away, is a lie. It is a scam, it is a scheme, it's a fucking tactic.

Right now they're perhaps most obviously doing it with trans women, driving a wedge between trans and cis women to break our solidarity, crying crocodile tears that "real" women's rights are being threatened. "Close the circle, cut out the weirdo, assimilate and your gains will be saved!"

But they do it with every category of difference that they can. They do it with binary vs non-binary trans people, they do it with white vs PoC queer people, they do it with class position, they do it with religion.

Knowing the history is the only way to identify this shit, and resist it. And feeling alone at the tip of history, feeling vulnerable and unprotected by a community, that's a great way to convince someone to accept the wedge and save themselves.

Young queer people, you are not alone. People have walked these roads before you, and walked further than you might dare to imagine. We have always been here, and we always will be, and although I fully understand that nobody wants to listen to some old person telling them what to do, the one piece of wisdom I beg of you to take away from elder queers is that the greatest weapon you have in your fight for freedom is solidarity. Don't let them convince you to close the circle, break it open.

don't use "ftm" it's outdated and offensive. it implies that the trans person was their agab, which we never were. i was always a boy, never a girl who became a boy.

i'm 35 years old. i've been IDing as trans or something similar to trans for nearly 20 years. i was probably calling myself FTM while you were playing tag during recess, anon.

i WAS a girl. i IDed as a girl early in my life. i recognized myself as a girl, called myself a girl, lived as a girl, and was a girl. who then IDed as a man. hence, F t M.

spend more time worrying about yourself instead of strangers on the internet, anon.

sorry not sorry if this comes off as needlessly hostile, but i've been getting a lot of shit from a lot of teenage trans kids about the language i use to describe my own goddamn experience, and i'm growing real fuckin weary of it.

i have elder trans friends who call themselves transsexuals and transvestites and trannies. are you going to seriously go to a 60-year-old trans person who survived the reagan years and tell her she's not allowed to use certain language to describe herself because it might offend the delicate sensibilities of some teenager on the internet?

do yourself a favor and log off, find some real-life trans people who are over the age of 20 or 25, and spend time talking to them instead of getting all holier-than-thou at random strangers on tumblr.

#tb blog #queer history #queerness #lgbt history #lgbtq #I am aromantic in case anyone is wondering #which if I see any motherfucker try to debate whether aspec people are “real” queers I will give you a solidarity-smack around the head

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10oclockdot · 7 years ago

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10 More Times I Had to Chime In

1. Why, if so many of us claim to have concern about the well-being of the less fortunate, do we not simply walk around handing out money to anyone who has less of it than we do? It's because charity isn't a matter of doing good, it's a matter of control. Even in our giving, through which we claim benevolence, we wish to exercise power. Hence we give to (read: buy, or buy into) name-brand charities. Which is to say, we give money not (directly) to those who need it, but rather we give to an organization which we feel is fit to manage it, and we expect them to manage it, and thereby manage the people who receive it. Because we don't really want the poor to have too much power; we want them to be managed, whether that management comes through government welfare programs, churches, or private charities. We want the money distributed with strings attached, because we do not trust the poor, because we believe that if they could be trusted with money, they wouldn't be poor. And so even when family members or close friends need money, we give in one of two ways. If they ask for the money, we give only with strings attached, to exercise our will and judgment over them (we think this is benevolence), to ensure that they use the money the way we think it should be used. Since they have asked for money, we do not trust them, and they must humble themselves totally to our whims as a consequence. Or, if they do not ask for the money, but we sense that they need it anyway, we give generously, flagrantly, in part to reward the fact that they did not ask (and therefore did not prove themselves morally suspect), but mainly to prove our own power -- we can give freely, even to those who do not ask, because that's how plentiful our resources are.

2. If you take nothing else away from this blog, I hope you'll remember this quote from Hollis Frampton: “There are ecstasies of restraint as well as ecstasies of abandon” (Circles of Confusion, p. 146). I like this quote because there are many things which can manifest themselves through both restraint and abandon. For instance, across art history, there have been realisms of restraint as well as realisms of abandon. Was Poussin's "linear" approach more realistic because he took greater pains to hide his brushstrokes? Or did he simply render objects in a Platonic "ideal" state -- a realism of pose, stability, stasis? Conversely, was Rubens's "painterly" approach less realistic because his brushstrokes are so evident? Or did he instead construe the stuff of reality as somehow more dynamic, more joyful, free -- the Aristotelian reality of continuous becoming? I don't think that one is better than the other; moreover, I don't think that one approach is more real than the other. They merely concern themselves with different aspects of reality.

3. I was looking at some Bridget Riley Op Art (this or this or this) and I was suddenly struck by the idea that it is work of immense realism. After all, Riley constructed it with such mathematical exactitude that some part of your brain will continuously falsely read it as a three-dimensional space. In this way, you have to keep telling yourself that it's not real, because some part of your brain wants so deeply to believe it. And even though you know that it's not "real," the best Op Art causes your eyes to vibrate disconcertingly. A wire feels like it's getting crossed. What you experience as the spectator is simultaneously unreal and very real.

4. We've often said "realism" when we meant "illusionism" -- the trompe l'oeil, for instance, which means "trick the eye." But, of course, verisimilitude is not the only realism. Malevich's realism sought to expose the reality of flat colorful shapes, the fundamental truth of the canvas. Ryman's realism examined the material reality of paint. Kandinsky and Rothko sought spiritual realism (as did others, each in their own way). Surrealism was about unearthing profound psychological mysteries, Cubism devoted itself to mental geometry -- how the brain collapses three dimensions into two, and Futurism endeavored to represent time in a stationary medium. Constructivism put art in the service of revolution -- it sought to create, or at least draft the framework for, a social reality that did not yet exist. Pop Art deftly expressed the means of mass-market commodity production (a kind of capitalist realism), and Abstract Expressionism exposed the commodity fetishism of the art market itself (whether it meant to or not). Finally, Conceptual Art made objects ciphers or carriers of philosophical propositions. All of these movements sought or revealed or transmitted a different kind of reality.

5. If anything, the avant-garde didn't kill realism; it multiplied the forms of and paths to realism. And it revealed, once and for all, the anti-realisms perpetrated on us by the Bougeureaus of the world, who painted nonsense fantasies in specious verisimilitude. Put another way, the avant-garde unlinked reailsm from likeness. It revealed the potential for apparent likeness to beguile, and, simultaneously, the potential for apparent formlessness to enlighten.

6. You know why MRAs and conservatives of all stripes are constantly raging against trigger warnings? For one thing (and this is obvious), they don't want to acknowledge that the status quo damages the mental health of millions of people. The status quo works for them, and in their change-aversion and loss-aversion -- their inertia of fear, which is the essence of conservatism -- they must punish anyone who disagrees and disavow the pain of the oppressed. Secondly, they're afraid of women and minorities expressing emotion. So they make fun of people getting "triggered" in order to try to shame people into shutting down. But most importantly, masculinity often expresses itself in pre-emptive war. Masculinity insists on asserting its dominance by striking first, lest it be suckerpunched and shown to be weak. Which is to say, that masculinity is always looking to trigger itself, because this is how it keeps from being hurt, and it cannot accept that its very essence hurts others. (P.S.: this is why people who can see beyond the rules of masculinity easily realize that Trump is weak -- he's weak because he's trapped in masculinity and has to lash out because he knows no other way -- and it's equally why those under the rule of masculinity (or we might say patriarchy, heteronormativity, etc; the systems interlock) only see strength. So, given this: how do we take down Trump without his supporters thinking he was martyred? How do we make him look weak to them?)

7. Kevin McCallister grew up and became Jigsaw.

8. Every joke is an argument. A setup and a punchline; a premise and a conclusion. A joke's elegance and glory derive from the teller's ability to conceal the path from the premise(s) to the conclusion until suddenly, at the last moment, it springs shut like a trap. This is, in fact, the essence of the joke: that the path to punchline cannot be discerned until after the audience has already arrived there. The laugh is, as Tom Stoppard put it, "the sound of comprehension." It signifies surprise at the improbable destination, but also delight that a theretofore unknown logic connects the points.

9. Of course, a premise need not precede a conclusion in a joke. It's perfectly possible to begin with the conclusion (or, rather, the thesis statement), make it sound strange or unbelievable, and then pile evidence upon evidence that fills in the logical gaps which the audience thought were unfillable. Consider, for instance, Carlin's Football vs. Baseball routine (here), or Wanda Sykes's Gay vs. Black routine (here), or especially Chris Rock's Rich vs. Wealthy routine (here). In its more advanced form, the comedian begins with what sounds like an unbelievable or untenable conclusion, secretly embedding a logical framework within the description, until at the final moment they dispense the one (perverse but common) premise from which the perverse and uncommon conclusions follow. I'm thinking particularly of the punchline of Louis CK's "Women should be allowed to kill babies" bit in his 2017 special (here), in which he justifies the right to abortion as "pretty fundamental," given the logic of stand-your-ground gun rights: "If there's a dude in your pussy, you get to kill him. ... You're allowed to kill people if they're in your HOUSE." And in its most advanced form, the comic establishes such a strong and clear framework in the premises that the don't even have to STATE the conclusion -- the audience fills it in for them. The best (and perhaps only) example I know of this comes off an old Redd Foxx party record (here). Enjoy.

10. If we pared down the objects in Borges's Library of Babel from the size of books to the size of tweets, and if we set appropriately relaxed constraints on the kinds of characters permissible in each tweet -- 26 letters (plus capitalization), 10 digits, period, comma, question mark, exclamation point, space, @, #, colon, slash, dash, tilde, equals, and asterisk -- that would mean 75^140 possible tweets, or roughly 3.2*10^262. If we let in more characters, I suppose it could range up to 10^280. Humans currently generate 200 billion tweets annually. Assuming an annual growth rate of 30%, it would take a little over 2000 years to tweet every possible tweet. That's a lot faster than the trillions of years it'll take to make John Simon's Every Icon.

#10 new

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judefan824-blog · 4 years ago

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itsfinancethings · 4 years ago

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In recent weeks, my DMs have been flooded with messages from well-meaning acquaintances, many asking precisely what was transphobic about J.K. Rowling’s self-published essay, “TERF Wars.” (In summary: a lot.) “TERF Wars” was, coincidentally, the title of a chapter in my memoir, The Gender Games. I wonder if she’s read it?

Her piece contained nothing you wouldn’t find in ‘gender critical’ forums and op-eds: that the freedoms of transgender women impinge on those of cisgender (not trans) women. In subsequent tweets, Rowling also compared trans-affirming healthcare to conversion therapy, and suggested that young trans men are merely confused lesbians. In all this, we are to understand that Rowling is not transphobic, but scared.

Rowling’s words were well-timed to coincide with a governmental review of U.K. legislation which allows transgender people to legally change their gender on their birth certificate. The Gender Recognition Act 2004 was — at the time — progressive, but since then, many countries including Ireland, Argentina and parts of the United States have surpassed it. To get a Gender Recognition Certificate in the U.K., a trans person requires two specialist doctors to diagnose them with gender dysphoria and a mountain of bills to ‘prove’ their identity hasn’t changed over a two-year period. The majority of trans people in the U.K. simply don’t bother.

The Gender Recognition Act never had anything to do with public bathrooms, women’s refuges or changing rooms, however. Trans people can access those spaces—with certain exclusions—under the Equality Act 2010. If the government were to bar trans people from those spaces, they would be rolling back rights we already possess.

Let’s be clear: there is no evidence that trans-inclusive laws lead to a rise in criminality—assaults, stalking or harassment—in single-sex spaces. In 2018, peer-reviewed journal Sexuality Research and Social Policy concluded that “fears of increased safety and privacy violations as a result of non-discrimination laws are not empirically grounded.”

If I’m being generous, I’d acknowledge that the fear is real, if entirely without basis — but it takes a lot of that generosity on my part to do so. After my recent cameo in the BBC/HBO drama I May Destroy You, Twitter users criticized my voice, hands and perceived cosmetic surgeries; there are Mumsnet forums scrutinizing my genitals and calling me a pedophile. I mostly suspect transphobes just think trans people are weird and funny-looking, but they choose to couch their bigotry in a fear of the unknown.

Living in a patriarchy is fundamentally scary for all women. One in four women in the U.K. will be a victim of domestic abuse in their lifetime, and two women a week are murdered by a partner or ex-partner. What woman wouldn’t be terrified? Trans women are at heightened risk: 16% of trans women had experienced domestic violence in the last year compared to 7.5% of cisgender women. (Trans prisoners are ten times more likely to be the victims of sexual assault than the general prison population.) I was a victim in 2017, but even if we don’t personally experience it, I’d argue we’ve all witnessed it – growing up, or in our friendship groups.

Moreover, we know help isn’t coming. Domestic violence is among the violent crimes least likely to be reported to police and, in 2019, referrals to the Crown Prosecution Service fell by 11%.

In her essay, Rowling disclosed she was a survivor of domestic violence and, in her next breath, described her abstract unease at sharing a refuge with a hypothetical trans woman. Why? She was assaulted by a familiar cisgender man, as are the vast majority of domestic violence victims. Across the world, most women are likely to know their rapist at the time of assault.

It’s chilling to think that your friend, boyfriend, husband, or a male family member is the bogeyman. Easier, perhaps, to level your fears at a miniscule minority group. A scapegoat. (And easier still when, as the Netflix documentary Disclosure demonstrates, Hollywood and the wider media landscape has fabricated cross-dressing serial killers for years.)

We must collectively move on from theoretical or philosophical ‘debates’ on this phantom risk. In Britain, Rowling’s tweets gained more media attention than the actual case of Kasabian frontman Tom Meighan who was caught beating his ex-fiancé on CCTV, and walked free from court with community service. While we’re endlessly talking, cisgender men are getting away with violence. Instead, we must focus on provision for survivors — the U.K. government has recently introduced a new domestic violence bill (and provided emergency funding for some domestic violence and sexual abuse charities amid the coronavirus pandemic), but previous austerity measures have severely impacted many refuges and frontline services. Some women are considered too wealthy to apply for Legal Aid despite having their finances controlled by partners.

Like a broken record, there will be transphobic readers who respond here just to say, ‘but trans women are men’. I appreciate I’m unlikely to change your hearts or minds — but know that it’s not us you should be fearful of. We’re terrified too.

#IFTTT #Blogger

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watsonhealthproject · 7 years ago

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Small Town Living in Guatemala

The last time I wrote I was just arriving in Guatemala and now I am preparing to head out in a week. A month is no time at all but somehow, just enough. Here are some of the things I have been learning and doing. A final reflection on my time here coming soon!

Women’s Health Group

I got to sit in on a women’s health group meeting at Mayan Families that was super awesome. The group was new and it was their second week. The topics of the day were hygiene and menstruation.

The class is led by a local doctor and watching her answer the questions of the women with such confidence, patience, and empathy made me want to one day be in a similar position. The importance of her role as an educator was clear when she clarified that contraceptives don’t cause cancer and that the hymen can be torn by things other than sex and is therefore not an indicator of ‘virginity.’ The importance of her connection to the cultural realities of Guatemalan women was clear when she reassured a woman that it was not ‘wrong’ to see a local healer before seeing a doctor and that the Mayan culture has to be respected. The value of her being a female doctor was made clear when the women discussed their own reservations about discussing some of the issues that were brought up with male doctors.

The experience made me think of my time with FFLY at Bowdoin because it was the kind of environment in which women gathered and were empowered through learning about their bodies and connected through stories of shared experiences. It’s such a vitally important thing to have these kinds of safe spaces and I only wish that every woman had access to important health information and opportunities to discuss the things that come up in our lives as women.

Lessons from the Clinic

I am sure I have said this before but regardless, I just want to acknowledge what a distinct privilege it is to be able to listen to the stories and concerns that patients bring to the doctors office. Since I am not the doctor, I get to focus more intently on the things that go beyond the physical ailments of the patients. It fascinates me that the challenges patients face here are very similar to those of people I met in Ecuador. Here are some cases that have stood out to me:

- Self advocacy: If a patient doesn’t ask, the doctor doesn’t tell. I have been in various situations when the doctor tells the patient something and I personally don’t understand what it means or how it is relevant. This is problematic because if I don’t understand, there is a chance that the patient doesn’t either. For example, a middle-aged male came to the clinic complaining of unbearable chronic pain. The doctor told him that he was going to give him a prescription for a set of injections that he was to self-administer weekly over the course of 2 months. When the patient mentioned other symptoms, the doctor kept saying that he would give him injections and gave the impression of not really paying attention while he was writing. Beyond the instructions for application, the doctor never clarified what the injections were and how they would alleviate the patient’s very diverse symptoms. I am not suggesting that the doctor should have gone into a detailed biochem lesson but rather, that he give a sentence or two explanation of how this treatment would solve so many seemingly different problems. Why does this matter? As a listener, I didn’t feel very confident in the doctor’s treatment plan because I did not understand how it would help. If the patient felt the same, I can imagine that it might affect his adherence to the plan, especially if it got hard for whatever reason. On top of that, the doctor never asked if the patient was comfortable with self-administering an injection. This might not seem like an important question but when I was working with a diabetes educator in Ecuador, she explained to me that fear of injections was a big problem that affected patient’s ability to follow through. One could ague that if the patient had an issue with the treatment plan, he would’ve said something. However, as I have mentioned in other posts, assumptions can be dangerous. The best doctor should be able to foresee potential problems and address them in that moment to avoid unnecessary complications and delays in treatment.

- Mystery Medications: Patient’s never know what they are taking. It is a massive problem. For example, a diabetes patient came into the clinic for the first time. She said that she had been taking a medication for her diabetes but didn’t know what it was called. It was clearly not working because her sugar was really high that day. The doctor had to make a choice for how to proceed and he chose to give the patient a new regimen of medications despite being unsure of what she was already on. This was risky for a million and one reasons, including the possibility of adverse drug interactions. However, the alternative was sending her home with a very high blood sugar and hoping she would come back at a later date with the medications. There are a million and one reasons why that would have also been a very risky move. This is just one example of a seemingly common trend. There has to be a better way to deal with medications, whether it be keeping track of what a patient is taking, or the lack of essential drugs at affordable prices, or the limited supplies of medicines in large public hospitals that serve vulnerable populations.

- Intimacy, Vulnerability, and Trust: A female patient with a hernia in her lower abdomen came to the clinic. I watched her get examined and it was so painfully clear that she was very uncomfortable with the process. Rather than having a conversation, the doctor also became a bit awkward. I wish he had asked for permission to proceed more explicitly during the physical examination and assured her of her agency in the situation. The doctor was very professional and there was an assumption of trust. However, given her hesitation, I think being more upfront about consent would have gone a long way. As I learned in Ecuador, medical spaces can be traumatic and keeping a patient’s sense of hyper-vulnerability in mind can go a long way for avoiding unnecessary trauma.

Surgery Week at Salud y Paz

A group of surgeons from Canada came to the clinic for a week to perform much needed surgeries at reduced costs to patients. Sunday was “triage day” and my job was to help schedule everyone for their surgeries and make sure they understood all pre-op instructions. It was super busy but so much fun. I left feeling pretty inspired by the things that were about to transpire that week. Part of the surgical team was removing cataracts that had rendered patients blind. Some people were going to be able to see again! What a beautiful thing it is to be a part of that process, even if it is in a very small way.

Becoming a Student Again

A while ago I wrote that I wanted to substantiate the things I was seeing and doing by diving into more academics. I have not been successful in this endeavor until now because I have felt a bit disoriented trying to figure out where to start and how to make sense of it all. I needed some sort of guidance and I think I found it. There is an online platform called EdX and they have free courses from top universities all over the US and the world. I have been shopping around a bit and found a Harvard class called “Improving Global Health: Focusing on Quality and Safety.” I have made it through a good chunk of the material and I feel like it is both relevant to what I am doing and super interesting. The beauty of this class is that it has helped to inform what I pay attention to when I am at the clinic and how I make sense of it.

The Hard Stuff

Panajachel is absolutely, completely, and totally beautiful. The lake is majestic, the volcanoes awe-inspiring, and the people inexplicably welcoming. However, it definitely feels like something is missing for me. Coming from a big city to a small town, I knew that the shift would be hard and that it has been. I wish there was more to do and see. I keep myself entertained and engaged most of the time but I have found that I am not particularly motivated to go out into town and do things. Staying home sometimes makes me feel like I am not taking advantage of this opportunity the way I should be but there is not much beyond the organizations that appeals to me. Spending more time at home means that I have not connected with as many people and that connection is critical for making a place feel like home. Sadly, Panajachel feels like a pitstop rather than a place that I can call my own. Its interesting to me how I am so sure that I will return to Ecuador at some point and just as sure that this is the first and last time that I will be witness to the beauty that is Lake Atilan. I think that this is ok and am not particularly distressed by these feelings. Rather, I have chosen to highlight this as an acknowledgment to my readers that not everything is perfect and a reminder to myself that perhaps I shouldn’t expect to love everywhere I am equally. Obviously, love it or hate it, there are always a million and one things to learn if I turn my attention outwardly and that is exactly what I have done and will continue to do.

Random Adventures in and around Panajachel

I decided to take a walk to the lake without a real agenda in mind. I ended up getting on a somewhat sketchy looking boat that went around the lake and it was absolutely spectacular. I tried to take pictures of the volcanoes and mountains but they all failed to live up to the beauty that surrounded me. I felt so at peace just riding along in the lake. I am a believer that the best adventures are the ones that you don’t necessarily plan for.

Me and Jan taking the ‘chicken bus’ to the clinic in Camanchaj. The public buses here are glorified school buses. Watching them from another car makes it seem like the drivers are ‘nut jobs’ (driving like the world is ending) but riding on the bus doesn’t feel anywhere near as crazy (aka unsafe) as it seems from the outside. Perhaps I have been lucky with drivers who were not on a suicide mission?

These dancers were from Peru. I found their performance to be very meaningful because I was so aware of how these young girls were embodying their traditions and honoring their ancestors through dance. It made me think of my own experience with dance in these last few months. All else aside, these girls had some serious strength and skill!

The statement at the bottom of this banner is beyond powerful...

I have no idea what we were discussing but I love the candidness of this picture!

Tried a new drink whose name I do not remember but whose taste is unforgettable. Reminded me a lot of colada morada in Quito.

If you look closely, you will notice that the tree is topped with a rooster. We laughed so hard at this.

Moving Forward

Argentina- To say that I am excited to go to Argentina is an understatement. I am ready for the crazy that comes along with city living. I am not looking forward to the supposed heat and humidity that awaits me but I guess it’s better than the snow I’ve been hearing about in the northeast? Unlike in these last two countries, I am going to Argentina a little “blind” in that I do not have my “work” details completely figured out. I have sent some emails and made some connections but for a handful of organizations, I am planning on just showing up at their doorstep. It’s a bit of a change in strategy but I think it will be good for me because it will push me out of my comfort zone in a new way. One thing that worries me is the fact that it will be both summer and the holiday season when I arrive. This can make it a little harder to find opportunities since its presumably vacation time for a lot of organizations and people. However, I am confident I will figure it out.

Med School - I’m super excited to announce that I will be studying to take the MCAT in April in South Africa and applying to medical school during this upcoming cycle (for 2019 matriculation). This is a huge deal for me because it is a real big and solid step in the direction of achieving a life-long goal: becoming a doctor! Taking the MCAT in April means that I will have to incorporate some intense studying into my Watson adventures. Some people might think that this will detract from my experience but I think that I am in an ideal position because I have a lot of control over my schedule. More than anything though, I think that my experiences help me to better visualize what I am working towards. I am lucky enough to feel inspired by the things I am doing and seeing each day and there is no doubt in my mind that it will serve as motivation when studying gets particularly hard.

#watson fellowship

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coopdigitalnewsletter · 5 years ago

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11 Feb 2020: Why political software sucks. Writing for death. Remote working.

OK, this one’s a bit of a linkorama.

Sustainability, data and AI in retail

Pandora, Zalando, IKEA, Amazon ramp up sustainability focus - how long until retail businesses must have a clear, strong sustainability position if they’re to avoid losing customers and revenue? - not long, believes this newsletter.

UK consumers warming to AI, with 54% happy to resolve queries with bots.

IKEA are promising new data controls for customers - that link might be behind a paywall so it’s explained here.

“In the future, all but the most convenience-based retailers will begin to use their stores as media to acquire customers and their media platforms as stores to transact sales. Put another way, media is now a cost of sales and rent is now a cost of customer acquisition.” - a retail opinion.

“Amazon Choice” labels look like an editorially curated quality filter but are just a popularity algorithm.

The impact of coronavirus on China-centered supply chains - now that China is responsible for around 15% of global manufacturing, the concerns for supply chains are real.

Why political software sucks

In the US, the Democratic party’s Iowa caucus votes were delayed by flaky software (and here’s how caucuses work). Some interesting commentaries on the underlying causes of unreliable software:

“The space is dominated by decision makers who are stuck on a very short term decision making cycle. Structurally there is no space for long term investment, despite everybody stating that this would be good [...] In normal tech circles we’d have a bunch of free software libraries and tools we build on together, but the campaign tech space doesn’t have this because decision makers fear our tools will be taken and used by the other side.”

“no one should have been solving the problem of making the caucuses more innovative. transparency & speed was what it sounds like the actual needs were, & those are often best served by rock-solid last-gen technology, optimized & tested to heck.”

“well-intentioned but underfunded and lacked comprehensive organizational buy-in [...] the product testing cycle and margins are nonexistent [...] a hard market where everyone hates you and no one has money to pay you”

Software is always harder than it first looks, even to fellow developers commenting online! The comments above recall Conway’s law (“organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations”). But here you might extend that slightly: the software you get reflects the organisations’ communications structures, but also the values and the incentives that commissioned it.

Writing for death, care promises

Designing content for people dealing with a death: “There’s no room for doubt or misunderstanding. That means the words we use must get straight to the point. By trying to be kind, we often use more words when we should be helping people to understand what they need to do as quickly and simply as possible.”

Scotland’s independent care review has published its comprehensive report on the care system, encompassing “legislation, practices, culture and ethos” - it’s ambitious and essential reading for those working in digital gov, but also those who care about humans.

Remote working

18F’s best practices for making distributed teams work (18F is a digital services agency within the US government). Perhaps there are some lessons here for organisations with many locations: tear down any head office vs shopfront barriers by going “remote first”.

There are now startups explicitly working on making remote staff work easier.

Help agriculture

Digitalfolk, could you help next-gen agriculture get more sustainable and more human-centred? Add your name here: Agriculture is a game-changer! Community of Practice.

Digital in organisations

Six digital strategy plays to drive value in established corporations - some of these plays are common sense (like cutting cost/time/process/error), but this is an interesting read, and it’s good to see some failures discussed as well.

How to scale agile product development and delivery - spoiler: not by imposing some framework.

Co-op Digital news and events

“‘We don’t want to just give people a refund when there’s a problem; we want to give them a genuine response and a personalised experience that they will remember.’ [says Claire Carroll, Head of Sales and Service at the Co-op.] The Co-op’s trailblazing approach has been a great success: customers actually buy more in its stores after making a complaint. ‘The basket spend is 6% higher’”

That’s from a shiny Salesforce customer success story - Co-op customer service advisors run 3m requests yearly through it. If customers are sending more after a complaint, that means Co-op is handling complaints - fixing the problem - in such a way that’s builds increased loyalty and confidence in the business. The industry term for this is “service recovery” (and that link is an interesting thread of how to win at ecommerce), but you might equally call it putting customers first. As exciting as the Salesforce bit is, this story is really about a Rescue Lasagne.

Public events, most of them at Federation House:

Carbon Co-op’s Beginner’s Guide To Retrofit (a monthly event about retrofitting your house for energy efficiency) - Wed 12 Feb 6pm at URBED, 10 Little Lever Street, Manchester, M1 1HR.

Manchester Law Tech Meetup - Thu 13 Feb 6.00pm.

Open Data Night - February 2020 - Tue 18 Feb 6.30pm.

Conscious Entrepreneurs - Wed 19 Feb 12pm.

Open Data Manchester: Black software (explores racial injustice & the professionals & hobbyists of color who helped build the internet) - Wed 18 Mar 6.30pm.

Returners/Re-trainers (about successful initiatives to create better routes for women returners/re-trainers) - Thu 26 Mar 11.30am

Internal events:

Digital all-hands - Wed 12 Feb 1pm at Fed Defiant.

Co-operate show & tell - Wed 12 Feb 3pm at Fed 6 co-operate space.

Data management show & tell - Thu 13 Feb 2.30pm at Angel Sq 13th floor breakout.

Membership show & tell - Fri 14 Feb 3pm at Fed 6 kitchen.

Food ecommerce show & tell - Mon 17 Feb 10.15am at Fed 5.

Delivery community of practice - Mon 17 Feb 1.30pm.

Health team show & tell - Tue 18 Feb 2.30pm at Fed 5 kitchen.

More events at Federation House - and you can contact the events team at [email protected]. And TechNW has a useful calendar of events happening in the North West.

Thank you for reading

Thank you, beloved readers and contributors. Please continue to send ideas, questions, corrections, improvements, etc to the newsletterbot’s typing entity @rod on Twitter. If you have enjoyed reading, please tell a friend!

If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog. Previous newsletters.

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