#i had to travel to a different dataset to get in for these

[s-lycopersicum]

Seeming as the new FFXIV patch is already out, I had to at least go check on the cat.

I'm mostly immediately interested in the graphics. The new GTAO looks quite close to the one I had applied via ReShade (though I can't confirm that, since that shader broke with the update, oops).

Also, the new anti-aliasing earns some points for being the first temporal AA to not make me sick immediately upon activation. And performance-wise, all seems fine.

Oh, and Brightlily looks great, of course.

[umichenginabroad]

Week 9: German Final, Final Trips, and Finally Free from my Research Paper

Willkommen zurück to week 9 out of 10 of my UROP experience in Aachen! With us being in the final weeks of the program, things have been wrapping up in all the bittersweet, nostalgia-filled, and occasionally stress-inducing ways. The research symposium is just around the corner now, and our papers/posters are due Monday (aka 3 days from now… aka AAAAH). Thanks to the Berlin trip I have planned for this weekend, I had extra motivation to put my head down and actually get all my work in order by the end of the week. Such a feat was looking highly unlikely a few days ago, but I am happy to say I will not have to write about Intrusion Detection Systems and dataset generation to the background noises of my Berlin walking tour or Techno music in the club Saturday night. This is a win. 

On Thursday, I had my German final which ended up being one of those exams that inspires you to tap into your philosophical side and begin wise internal dialogues about the benefits and unavoidable nature of failure (yes, this is just me coping). The five T/F questions in our Reading section worth 30/90 points left something to be desired and the Listening section somehow found a way to connect ice cream (in Cyber Space?) to the Industrial Revolution in one confusing speech. (It may be wise to note on that last point that I still have no idea what this man was talking about.)

All that random Cyber Space ice cream talk inspired our German class to get some of our own (normal) ice cream to recover from being collectively humbled by the exam, and it was indeed the perfect cure. I’m going to miss my German classmates and our unifying dread of getting picked for Taboo (a game we played at the start of every class where one person had the unfortunate, isolating task of explaining new German vocab auf Deutsch and the others simply guessed). Though I sometimes wished my German classes were with all the other UROP students, I ended up really enjoying the unique opportunity my course provided to meet people from all different parts of the world studying here and learning German like I am.

Dunkel Schokolade und Menz Eis aka Emergency Post-Exam Mood-Recovery Ice Cream

Even in spite of my looming deadlines and questionable German Final, I still managed to fill the past week with travel and making the most of the finally summery weather (*knock on wood*). Last Saturday, I went to an impressively large fun fair in Duesseldorf that put my sad county fair with its three rickety, life-endangering rides and show-stopping prize chickens to shame. The delicious fair food, loud music, and bright energy felt like a taste of home on the Jersey Shore Boardwalk (without the weird teenagers and suspicious piercing shops) and it was exactly what I needed.

Scenes from Duesseldorf's Fun Fair

We also had Ramen for lunch to make up for not getting it here when the lines were ridiculously long on Japan Tag, and it fully lived up to the hype.

Ramen from Duesseldorf’s Little Tokyo

On Sunday, I traveled with one of my friends to Liège where we made sure to accomplish all the Liège Musts: 

✅ Eating a LiègeWaffle 

Incredibly yum waffle. 8/10. For two point deduction reasoning: see part 3

✅ Climbing the Montagne de Bueren, a 374-step staircase 

Beautiful views from the top of the staircase. I promise I was also enjoying them and not only suffering from getting to the top.

✅ Having a disastrous, embarrassing, all around self-esteem-destroying attempted conversation with a French-speaking person 

✅Finding somewhere (with weird black burger buns?) to eat lunch where we could order online to avoid more of said conversations

The strange burgers in question. Not sure where they were going with the whole “accidentally forgot how to use an oven while cooking your meal and it burned” aesthetic, but it did taste quite good.

✅Exploring lots of beautiful architecture

Some of the gorgeous sites found while roaming Liège

After completing our official Tourists Guide to Liège, we ended the day by visiting a small aquarium/science museum where we proceeded to get distracted by pretty fish, fun interactive exhibits, and these jump-scare-inducing holographic portraits until their closing time. Unfortunately, their closing time also happened to be a few minutes after we would've needed to leave to catch the next train back to Aachen. What followed was a semi-panicked, 2,5 km run with my unathletic jeans, unathletic tank top, unathletic hoodie, and unathletic self. Was it worth it for the single hour we saved by not waiting for the next train? Probably not. Will I be adding this to the official Tourists Guide to Liège anytime soon? 100% no. But I did leave feeling at least 15% as much accomplished as I was tired and sweaty, so that’s something… 

Emo Nemo, Hologram Dog, and distractions from the aquarium that had the audacity to almost make us miss our train

I promise I did do actual work at some point this week, but on Wednesday we had a nice, relaxing UROP picnic that served as the perfect break from it. There were delicious baked goods, volleyball/frisbee games, lots of reminiscing, and enough sun to make up for at least three days of Aachen rainstorms. 

We’re at the point of the program where everything is starting to be labeled some kind of last: Last German Class. Last UROP Weekend Travels. Last Wednesday UROP Activity. Last Motor Bar Night. And it’s all starting to feel extremely bittersweet. I’ll save all my sentimentality for my final blog (consider yourself warned), but I am really looking forward to making this official Last Weekend in Berlin one to remember. Until next time!

Sarah Bargfrede

Computer Science

UROP Program in Aachen

[mercurygray]

The Big BOB OFC Data Dive

When I first joined this fandom in April, it was the middle of a pandemic and all I wanted was a big wish-fulfillment project to work on - and I was surprised to find that, for a 20 year old fandom, Band of Brothers is still going strong, and, perhaps more surprisingly, is representing very well for one of my favorite fandom tropes - the original female character.

After several discussions about overused tropes and pet peeves, and because I am simply odd like this, I wanted to go back through fic to see if there were any patterns over time over a) what professions OFCs are placed in in fic and b) which BoB guys get more OFC attention.

In order to answer this question, I went to two major, cross-fandom archives (AO3 and FF.net) manually scraped data, stuck it in a spreadsheet and played with it a little bit. (Pivot tables; they’re great.) I was going to try and make a graph, but this was already starting to take a little longer than I had anticipated, so I’m going to summarize in words for brevity.

I recognize this is a very small subset of a small fandom. I acknowledge my research method is faulty and would not hold up to peer review. I know that there is a lot more of what I would call 'ephemeral' on platforms like Tumblr that's been excluded from the basis of this survey.

Why not Wattpad, Merc? I chose not to survey Wattpad only because I'm unfamiliar with the platform, and because its search and indexing features make it unfriendly to the manual data collection I was using. Furthermore, as a mixed-use space, I feel the conventions vary strongly from the other two archive spaces represented in the data.

Owing to changes in tagging systems, system purges, and fandom migrations to other platforms, this may be an incomplete dataset, but  still serves to take a look at trends over time. I joked to a friend that this project started feeling a little bit like fandom archeology, going through strata of accepted norms.

AO3 Data:

2020 was the BoB Year of the OFC. In 2020 alone, 35 separate authors updated OFC fics on AO3, compared with 9 the year previous.

I trust myself to have pretty good OFCdar - as in, to be able to watch a show and know who's more likely to show up in these types of fics. When I first watched BoB ten years ago, my money was on Joe Liebgott and Lewis Nixon - and I wasn't wrong. These two have a very strong presence in the AO3 data, followed very quickly by Ron Speirs and Eugene Roe, although Don Malarkey also makes a very strong showing as well.

Lewis Nixon fans are in for the long haul. Nixon was more likely to have multi-part collections or multichapter fics dedicated to him.

There was a strong lull in OFC fandom activity in 2018 - prior to this, many OFC fics were routinely pulling 18-20 kudos. After 2018, the average drops to 10, with some outliers.

FF.net

I was surprised to find that FF.net is still a going concern for a subset of BoB fans; 17 OFC stories were published to the platform in 2020, with minimal duplication in the AO3 set. 

The oldest fic in this set is from 2005, compared with 2011 in the AO3 data. The FF.net stories have a tendency to be longer, multipart fics, written over much longer periods of time. Their summaries tend to fit the legacy format for describing OCs - "[Name] is a [occupation] whose [reason for joining up] will [change her life/finally let her fall in love.]" 

These stories ALSO have a tendency towards what I would call 'heritage tropes' - story ideas that I read a lot of in my early days as a fanfiction author but which I don't see too often in fics now.  There are 5 OCs in this dataset in time-travel fics, but there's also a couple that are magically related to a canon character, and, very interesting to me, there are also three stories where the character joins the company as a DISGUISED woman, a heritage trope if ever there was one. (Thank you, Mr. Shakespeare.)

FF.net OCs are much more likely to fit expected fandom norms in terms of their occupations; the majority are female paratroopers, nurses, or medics. The top romantic interests in this dataset? Richard Winters, Joe Liebgott, and Ronald Speirs, with Don Malarkey and Doc Roe rounding out the top five. BUT I noticed another pattern; when sorted over time, there are bands where multiple authors in the fandom are all writing for the same paraguy - and that that guy changes over time, while the authors remain the same. (You’re writing about Luz? We’re ALL writing about Luz.)

Another interesting trend in this data is the appearance of several authors who are writing what appear to be the forerunners of the now-ubiquitous tumblr reader-insert fic. These are stories in shorter, 1000-2000 word formats, unconnected to other works in a series with an unnamed protagonist whose occupation isn't mentioned in the story description.  They occur in the dataset in blocks by the same author, with three or four stories clumped around the same publish date, and their sole reason for existing seems to be to express or receive romantic interest from/in a paraguy, not tell a particular woman's story.

Takeaways:

Named But Not Appearing In Canon characters, Reader Inserts, and Original Characters are three distinct categories of fic with different target audiences. None of them are 'wrong' in any way, but I feel each should be tagged differently. Kitty Grogan, for instance, is named in the show but never appears, and while we have to speculate on what she's actually like, she's different than the characters we created out of thin air and should be tagged accordingly.

I know several fics being written by acquaintances of mine don't appear in this survey because, while the ship is tagged, they're not tagged as 'Original Female Character (s)' and several Reader Inserts found their way into the dataset because they're tagged incorrectly. (You all should FIX THIS.)

On AO3, fics with more comments were also more likely to have more bookmarks. Since comments are an entry point to beginning a relationship with the work's author, authors who engage in the comments seem to be more likely to have the type of followers who bookmark and return to a work. These works also tend to be longer, supporting the idea that continued engagement with authors over time is a good way to encourage them to keep creating.

[eponymous-rose]

(I’d rather this not be reblogged, just in case!)

I’ve had a funny conversation a couple of times this week, once with my cousin and once with my physical therapist, so I thought it might be fun to go over this: when I mentioned I wasn’t teaching this quarter, they both stared at me in shock and said, “And you’re still getting paid?” To be fair, I absolutely would’ve asked the same question before I started. This job is so weird I never would’ve guessed what all falls under it! 

So here’s a little glimpse into what goes on in this particular professorship:

So, hey, there are different ranks of professor. I’m an “assistant professor”, which is about as junior as it’s possible to get, but I won the dang lottery and somehow finagled my way into getting the words “tenure-track” tacked on before that. This means that over the next six years, everything I do will be scrutinized (culminating in a "summary” of several thousand pages reporting on every single aspect of my job performance), and at the end of it, after about nine months of progressively higher-ranked people in the university voting and deliberating, I have a chance to be granted tenure, which comes with a promotion to associate professor rank and Extreme Job Security. The criteria here are basically being able to prove that I’m one of the foremost experts in my field in the country and hitting research/service/teaching goals, and I’ll talk a bit about that in a second here. Promotion (often many years later) to full professor requires proof of being one of the foremost experts in the field on the planet.

Also, if you don’t get tenure, you get fired after that six-year period. Some universities are dicks and hire three or four assistant professors for every tenured position they want to fill and just fire the spares after getting six years of work out of them. My university has an extremely high tenure rate (mainly because anyone who seems unlikely to make tenure will either have some sort of intervention on their behalf, be granted an extra year to make up the difference, or will be asked to quietly resign before deliberations start), and my department hasn’t denied anyone tenure in decades.

So! What the hell do I do? Well, universities in the U.S. that are particularly research-heavy are referred to as “R1 universities”, which is the situation I’m in here. This means that the majority (often the vast majority) of my time is not spent teaching: it’s all about doing research, to the point where I will not be teaching more than one class simultaneously. In my field, that research can look like a lot of different things:

There are indeed people who work with beakers and range hoods and snazzy lab coats: these researchers in my field might be doing stuff like growing snowflakes in the lab and using that information to figure out the conditions under which different kinds of snow can form. Also there’s chemistry? I don’t know this side of it too well. Professors’ roles here, apart from the science, include ordering the right equipment (which includes getting quotes from various suppliers) and hiring lab technicians and folks to keep the equipment up and running.

Some folks do intense numerical modeling: if you’re studying the atmosphere, you can’t just try your experiment on one Earth and compare how it’s different on another Earth, since we only have the one, so what we do instead is use the most powerful supercomputers on the planet to create simulations. These can be as detailed as looking at the flow of dust in the millimeters above the ground, or as broad as simulating the whole atmosphere of the entire planet (or other planets!). On top of the science, these professors often have to negotiate for supercomputer time (a precious commodity), purchase massive computational resources (e.g., a server room hosted locally), and sometimes hire dedicated I.T. support just for their research.

I work a lot with large datasets: if we have information about the conditions under which tornadoes happened over the past 15 years, what patterns can we pick up that forecasters might be able to use? What is physically, fundamentally different about tornadoes that happen in different places? This kind of stuff really just needs a decently specced desktop machine and some know-how, and a lot of research in our field involves sitting and thinking. Also in this category is the pure math and physics work in the field, where people bury themselves in impossible-to-solve equations to try to figure the best way to wrench them into things we can solve. This is probably the closest to what most people think of when they hear “research”.

Fieldwork. Think Twister. Coordinating large numbers of people, who may be on the ground, driving, in the air, in the ocean. Also, coordinating instruments that might be stationary or might be buoys or drones or something else. We’re a public university; we don’t have the cash to buy our own airplanes, so profs in this scenario have to rent time on research aircraft owned by organizations like NASA or NOAA, or rent time on boats, or hire folks to develop and build new instruments. Massive amounts of organization goes into this, and all stages from inception to execution are generally overseen and organized by the professor.

When any or all of these approaches come up with groundbreaking results (you’re expected to have that kind of result happen a couple times a year), it’s time to write a paper and get it published in a prestigious academic journal. That process can take between four months and a year, depending on a bunch of different factors, so often a professor is juggling a few different projects in different states of done-ness.

What you’ll notice in all this is that professors generally have to come up with the money to do this stuff. New profs generally get a starting budget to get them off the ground, but most of that winds up wrapped up in personnel and start-up costs (e.g., buying computing resources or space for a lab). For the rest of it? Grants.

Grants in my field right now are a bit of a mess: it takes months to put a proposal together, it’s chaotic and complicated as hell, and there’s only about a 10-15% success rate, so you can do the math on that one. In my field, grants range from “small” ones supporting a few years of the pure-science stuff (typically a few hundred thousand dollars that mainly goes toward paying several people’s salaries over several years, but also covers things like journal publication fees - it costs several thousand dollars to publish one paper in an academic journal) to much larger ones supporting field campaigns or long-term projects (rarely, several tens of millions of dollars if you’re talking projects with multiple aircraft and such). I get paid for nine months of the year, and have to come up with the remaining three months’ salary on my own. 

The other thing, though, that grants pay for is graduate student salaries! My department pays students quite well (more than enough to afford the rent on an apartment here, which is saying a lot), and also provides full benefits and a complete tuition waiver. Grad students in my field are essentially in an apprenticeship situation: they pick an advisor and work with that person for typically about seven years. During that time, they have to hit certain milestones (nine months of classes, plus a few courses sprinkled throughout the remaining six years, giving presentations, passing exams, doing a defense, writing a dissertation---essentially a book of their research results), and if you’re thinking this is putting a horrifying amount of power in the advisor’s hands, you’re absolutely correct. The imperfect but step-in-the-right-direction solution my department’s adopted has been to give each student a committee of professors, where one leads the research but the others are always available for new ideas or to resolve problems or speak up on behalf of the student. Students are also strongly encouraged to take a year or two off from their main research project to work with another professor, either here or elsewhere, and explore new research ideas.

Professors are responsible for teaching their students what they need to succeed, and our department has famously exceptional graduate students and graduate student mentorship: profs teach students how to do research (often guiding them through a Master’s project, then letting them take the reins and backing off to an advisory role for the remaining years of the PhD), which includes having them publish their results as the lead authors of their own scientific journal articles. Profs also pay to send students to conferences to showcase their research and introduce them to the people who’ll help them in their future career (one of the reasons I traveled a bunch this quarter was to meet some folks who might be good contacts for students who don’t want to just shoot for a job in the US). Some students will get to go on field campaigns, flying on research aircraft or, I dunno, driving tanks into tornadoes. Some will be more interested in non-academia pursuits and might spend some time shadowing insurance analysts or taking extra entrepreneurial classes in the business school or working hands-on with forecasters during the height of severe weather season. It’s our jobs as professors to know the job market, to know the right people, and to know our students well enough to help them get where they’re going. This department takes this Very Seriously, to the point where it eclipses research as our Top Priority, and the general understanding is that getting a grad student position here sets you up for life.

So! Part of my job this time of year is recruiting graduate students based on my budget. For some folks, that means actively advertising wherever possible and getting super involved in the visiting student weekends (we fly prospective grad students out here to visit before they make their decision, and there’s always a fair number of students who haven’t settled on an advisor yet). Some folks are absurdly lucky and study fields that are considered particularly cool and interesting, and the top students actively seek them out and will cold-call or send e-mails or introduce themselves at conferences (look, turns out it’s hilariously easy to sell someone on “come study tornadoes!” and even a newbie like me has to choose between several particularly strong candidates). Either way, the graduate student hiring process involves a lot of internal debate---we’re not a huge department, so we typically can only send offers to a little under 10% of the folks who apply each year---that mainly centers around making sure each student has a supportive research “home” waiting for them here, based on funding and how much time each faculty member might have. Professors need to coordinate grant budgets (or startup funds, or stopgap funds in the increasingly common situation where no grant money could be secured for a given year) to make sure students have any equipment they might need (cool stuff like supercomputer time, servers, equipment to take to the field, accessibility aids, but also mundane stuff like office space and desks). We also have to coordinate with the university to make sure international students can get here and stay here under the correct visa status.

Right now, I only have one graduate student, and he’s currently undergoing the barrage of first-year coursework, but we meet weekly and he’s started playing around with some data analysis and reading some of the big papers in the field (he’s coming in from mechanical engineering, so the math is familiar but the vocabulary is funky). I’ve developed short- and long-term learning goals for him, culminating in putting together a proposal for his master’s research in June, then converting his early results to a scientific journal article to help him hit the ground running, because he’s brilliant and he’d be able to pull it off without breaking a sweat. 

I’m also on the committees of two second-year Master’s students, so my responsibilities there include reviewing their proposals and, in one case, helping her put together an application for a major fellowship that would put $100,000 toward her education, which means she wouldn’t be beholden to any given research grant and could study any topic she liked. I’m also co-advising a postdoctoral researcher---his primary advisor is a specialist on snow, which is his area of interest, but I’m a specialist on some of the methods he uses to study snow, so I’m consulting with him on that side of things. I’m also working with a couple of particularly motivated final-year PhD students who want to run a multi-day Python and machine learning workshop for the department. Heck yeah.

Apart from research and advising, another facet of being a professor is the nebulous category often just referred to as “service”. Volunteer work, essentially. Right now, I’m reviewing scientific journal articles, typically 2-4 at a time (down to one right now, although I anticipate a flood right before the holidays). This is all done as volunteer work, but it’s honestly the easiest way for me to keep up with the latest literature, because yeah, you can’t just sit in a room and think if you don’t know what everyone else is thinking about. And when even a small field has a dozen or so major academic journals putting out a couple dozen articles each a month that you have to stay on top of... reviewing can be a great way to get the highlights. Sometimes I also get to review other people’s grant proposals, which is really helpful! Still, I wish journals would pay us for this work---someone did a poll on Twitter and found that folks in our field spend on average about 6 hours per review. That adds up!

I also tend to help out with conferences, either doing logistical stuff like deciding what the major topics are, and who gets to speak when (and who probably shouldn’t be given a microphone...) or coordinating the judging of awards for student presentations. That sometimes involves weird event planning stuff like trying to find a venue and speakers and transportation for a formal dinner, or hiring caterers and dealing with competing hotel quotes for room blocks, or cold-calling reasonably famous people and asking them to volunteer their time (or offering them an honorarium) to Skype in to a room full of people.

I’m also on a few national committees that are working to define the priorities of some of the big professional organizations: mainly I work in my particular subdiscipline, but also with diversity/equity/inclusion and early-career support. Some of that is as simple as running social media accounts or helping to design surveys. I’ve recently been assigned to help audit a major organization’s commitment to diversity, which could be pretty interesting. It all sounds like a lot, and a lot of it’s coming to a head lately just because of conference timing, but it usually slows down to one or two hours a week of work in the off-season. I like this kind of stuff because it’s a relatively low-effort way to meet scientists all over the world that I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise.

We’re also hiring a new faculty member right now, which is... hilariously complex. Every aspect is basically done by committee and the entire department has to agree on who to interview and, eventually, who to hire, because hiring someone for this position is potentially choosing your coworker for the next 30+ years. Interviews are two-day endurance training for the poor candidates, who get face-to-face meetings with every member of the faculty, on top of more specialized interviews. We’ve had about 120 competitive applications thus far. It’s... a lot.

And just because I’m not teaching actively right now doesn’t mean teaching isn’t eating a lot of time: there’s some fun logistical set-up to do! For instance, the class I’m co-teaching starting in January features a lab where we take all the students over to the engineering buildings to set up some instruments in a wind tunnel. Gotta make sure we’ve timed it right so they can actually give us the wind tunnel! We’re also coordinating the timing and the schedule so that both instructors are actually around for the parts of the class they’re teaching. For three of the five weeks I’ll be teaching, I have the previous instructor’s materials to work with, but the other two weeks are all new material (and a lot of ad-lib based on how students do with the first chunk of the class). I also haven’t done anything related to this class since I took a comparable class over a decade ago, so, uh. Better study up.

In the spring, I’ll be teaching an entirely new class that’s never been offered by the department before. That involves building a syllabus, figuring out what each lecture will be about, coming up with contingencies in case some lectures get cancelled, writing exams and assignments and lectures and (since it’s a programming class) making sure everyone has access to the necessary hardware and software and data for the big final project. And, because I’m me, I’ll also be coordinating the whole thing with a special office in the university that does long-term testing of teaching effectiveness---they’ll send someone over to spend a few minutes chatting with the students midway through the quarter, then work with me on recommendations and improvement. I figure it’s a new class being offered for the first time, so we might as well get in on the ground floor of longitudinal pedagogical study. Also, I don’t actually know this programming language yet. Little more studying to do, there.

So... yeah. This job is absurd. It’s a million different jobs, the vast majority of which I’ve had no training for. And I adore it. Nobody cares where I am or what I’m doing at any given time, as long as I get results and as long as my students are succeeding. As someone who loves nothing more than bland, repetitive tasks repeated over and over again, it’s not exactly in my wheelhouse... but I love how hard it makes me think, and I adore being pushed this far out of my comfort zone and knowing I actually have the resources and the know-how to succeed. Every single day is something completely new and exciting and bizarre. Hell, every hour. It’s pretty fantastic, and utterly terrifying.

[violetsystems]

#personal

Because of the Internet, cycles of things don’t really follow the same pattern as the older generation is used to.  They think they know obviously.  Their favorite game is called human capital and we are the pawns, bishops and knights on the chessboard for them to sacrifice.  I’m forced to read a lot of financial opinions as an outsider.  For somebody in the aforementioned camp, Mario Gabelli had at least acknowledged that the Fortnite generation has been slowly growing up.  Apps like Robinhood have opened the market up to steal your hard earned pennies.  And then accounts get hacked, money gets stolen, and the older generation laughs and shakes it’s head.  You stupid kids and your lack of motivation.  If you didn’t spend all your time living your life instead of making us money.  I think he forgets like most boomers do that there’s an entire generation after them that was born and bred on Tron.  I didn’t land into the stock market after playing Call of Duty with my bros to be honest.  I melted down a twenty year pension from a place of employment that ghosted, derezzed and ignored my entire identity.  Other people might have traded online through simulations, harvested their bitcoin at the behest of their electric bill or just have rich parents,  I’m not like other people.  We all have figured this out after how many years of writing these to an invisible tribunal of amazing people.  I often read these other perspectives about the financial industry controlled by pundits, investors, and people who generally talk down to the little person like me.  We are what people refer to as “the retail investor.”  We’re written about like the plague mostly because nobody can really control our strategies or bully us into submission.  Much of the idea of retirement is hinged on investments in America.  Social Security is about to run out at some point.  My generation will probably be the first to see my government stiff the bill and run away.  Corporations and working for them at times can be a whirlwind of interconnected dots.  Money and loss on paper becomes a zero sum shell game for the rich.  It’s not about the work you do.  It’s about the money you spend for them.  Donald Trump took a loss for almost two decades which is incidentally how long I was gainfully employed.  A typical artist in America can take a hobby loss for up to five years.  The same artists with no healthcare to speak of.  The fiscal cliff that we all dread is nowhere reflected in the markets.  Neither is the actual driving force behind their profit.  America is a consumer based economy and America is simultaneously shrinking and bursting at the seams.  These are all stitched together by a frail, aging ideology that doesn’t want to let go.  Generation X’ers like myself are used to being forgotten about.  I travelled the world looking for someone to look at me as more than a number.  And now people follow me around because I’m a name on their company registry.  But nobody really ever speaks to me directly.  I’m a dataset and a demographic that only speaks as a number on paper.  Until I do things that the financial elite can’t stand.  I make a decision that is based on things they don’t value.  I choose to put my money elsewhere.  And this is why people hate us.  Because you can’t speculate on chaos that you do not control.  And America is simply profit off of speculation which is a value amounted to 20.83 trillion dollars in debt.  Which doesn’t sound much like it’s in control of anything except printing money.

I grew up on computers.  My mother helped me start my first bulletin board system.  I had my very first phone line in my bedroom around the time wargames came out.  I used to post the number on boards before I had even set up a system like Telegard.  I would advertise it like a mysterious military site out of a Gibson book.  People would call and the modem would pick up the carrier tone and dump them to a blank monochrome screen.  From there my twelve year old self would punk people into thinking I was an AI.  Years later I found a twenty year career in Information Technology in the Arts which abandoned me in a wholly disturbing way.  My knowledge of computers still stayed and those skills kept me alive in these times.  I grew up playing games because I had no friends and suffered horrible bullying.  I was an only child who was ridiculously intelligent but often quiet and ignored.  Years later it’s not so much different.  The bullying is still out there.  America rewards the loud and the forthcoming mostly because it is too lazy to seek out the nuances.  Convenience has warped America’s attention span beyond the regular flow of time.  Computers and connection over the years have rapidly accelerated the dominance of these ideals.  Jobs exist all over the world these days.  Most of the ones I’ve been interested in have been in China.  But due to the circumstances of my situation, I was forced to take a larger sum of income this year than I would have liked.  Sounds terrible right?  No shortage of people trying to scam me into spending it.  Any further income accrued this year becomes taxed horribly.  Ironically, the Illinois fair tax law changes the game even further as retirement income was not taxed before the amendment.  If passed, any retirement income that was not with held will be owed.  Another round of layoffs to liquidate pensions from the bottom line in cities like ours will definitely affect people worse than me down the road.  I’ve been stumbling through the process alone since the end of July.  A lot of what I had done was to part out and budget money in my own way playing a waiting game that I’ve grown used to in my life.  I am at the peak of stagnancy at the moment.  Staring out at another blank screen typing into the void every week while people lift bits and pieces for their own convenient narrative of me and my value in human capital.  Headhunters no longer stalk the internet.  They follow you around in the street with forced intimidation expecting you to read into what they think you deserve to spend the rest of your life doing.  All the while trying to wrap you up back into an ecosystem for less pay, shrinking benefits, and an economic ecosystem of investments of both human and monetary.  Debtors are paired with debtors.  Marriages are arranged for tax purposes and rich oligarchs with political ties find more ways to pay less.  And yet they never really understand the power of connection they do not have.  They don’t communicate.  They project.  They expect you to believe that we’re all in this together when they never hear a word you say.  The only time they listen is when you take your money away.  I’m single.  Never been married.  An only child.  And pretty much an exile on Wall Street with more liquidity and equity suddenly than most people in America.  And much like everyone paying more taxes to a government that has basically turned into a formulaic limp dick reality show.

A reality show that treats me like the Babadook at best these days.  I can’t even leave my house anymore without somebody following me or watching me.  I realize this might just be the hazards of my next pivot into global employment.   I thought these long forms of prose were enough of a background check for the FBI at this point.  It’s called “transparency and accountability” Scully.  I realize ethics aren’t a valuable skill in America.  But the utter lack of human emotion for my situation speaks volumes to me.  And it should be a wakeup call for most who live and work in this dangerous time.  They really don’t give a fuck about us in such a comedic way that they don’t realize our power.  Our power is confidence and they find ways to undermine it.  Tell you that you aren’t beautiful enough so that you spend more money on things you do not need.  Ignore and isolate you until you breakdown and ask for their help.  Until you treat yourself in bankruptcy so they can print more money.  These times are abusive at best in a way that I have never been prepared for.  But those on top don’t really understand how it feels to be under the thumb for years.  I do.  Corporations aren’t human and neither are most rich people.  I realize that life here is literally all about money.  Last night was a very good example of that when I read the news about a game I played shutting down.  I cried because it was the only thing connecting me to anything social without being overbearing and weird.  And I had invested a sizeable amount of my pension in the thought that this might keep the ecosystem alive.  The lesser of two evils of investing.  Put money where you think it will be used fairly and wisely.  Water the garden and watch it grow.  The amazon stock is literally over three grand per share.  They own everything.  They’ve shattered their profits due to the shift from COVID to delivery.  Small businesses shutter.  Hard artistic work is pissed to the wind.  And people like myself are left to wonder why the fuck Jeff Bezos needs any more money from me to treat me like a fucking lab rat.  These companies do not give a fuck about you as a person.  They want your money.  They want to leverage your image, your words, your narrative to push something that doesn’t benefit you at all.  There is no excuse for me to be invisible after all these years let alone from what happened to me in July.  And yet, there is no real way to get back at it.  Other than to completely divest from something that only hurts.  Capitalism is funny that way.  It desperately wants your participation to stay alive.  A two trillion dollar company like Apple cares only about the cut for their investors not the art that drives these bricks that become obsolete in two years.  The reason the old generation is contentious to us is that we see the scam in broad daylight.  We trolled you behind the scenes.  And when we learn the truth, it hurts.  We can always hurt back.  I divest.  I decouple.  I wonder what motivates me as a human being and not a bottom line for some rich fuck who got their way scamming people into thinking they’re worth less so they could have more.  The internet moves pretty fast.  It can all fall apart in a keystroke.  And these people will still be making excuses and not staring us point blank in the eye.  I’ll still be playing video games and you’ll still be investing in what you think you know about me.  Which last time I checked is jack shit other than the fact that it’s safe enough to plant a nuclear physicist under my apartment for a year without me knowing.  Shall we play a game?  See you at the opening bell Jeff!

[canyouhearthelight]

The Miys, ch. 37

I was running late to work this morning, so I didn't have time to queue this chapter. Instead of uploading it super late in the day (7pm EDT), I made a judgement call to pull the copy that I emailed my lovely sister @parisconstantine to proof - which she approved - but that means there is no break.

08/10/2020 Edit: Added a break! and links.

Once Conor had sufficiently transformed me into a fuzzy purple burrito, I glanced around my quarters with a weak smile.  Sure enough, Antoine and my sister put a fierce limit on my welcome-back ‘party’. I saw only them, Conor, Sam, and Derek. Knowing that Simon and Noah were likely watching and listening remotely, it was the perfect amount of people for me to handle at the moment.

Antoine returned my smile gently as he handed me a server of tea. “No caffeine and no alcohol until you finish your medications,” he explained somewhat apologetically. His shrug suddenly turned into a wince as he backed away, one hand flying to his temple with a hiss.  After taking a step forward, he shook his head energetically and blinked a few times. “I need to calibrate this more,” he muttered.

Tyche tsked at him. “That’s what you get for deciding to be your own guinea pig,” she replied airily before tilting her head toward me. “He’s working on a project to help the autistic population on the ship.  It’s… in the experimental stages. He should explain, though.”

“It’s going to be marv,” Conor gushed quietly.

I glanced at Antoine. “So, what’s the project?  I’m all ears.”

He chuckled somewhat ruefully. “It actually will fall partially under your purview if I am able to work out the – bugs?” When I nodded, he continued. “During the sabotage attempt on the ship, Conor and I were needed to retrieve Derek and escort him to Level One.  There was simply no other way for him to arrive without being overwhelmed by so many people in close proximity. Since then, it occurred to me: What if there was a way for Derek to travel around the ship, even during such times that the corridors are crowded, without need for an escort?  It would give him much more autonomy than he has had in the past.”

“The idea came from your Council pendant, partially – when we headed to Level One, your pendant gave off a low tone, in theory a proximity alert to let everyone know to let you through.  However, it did not work, and we now know that was due to not everyone being able to hear it in all the panic, yes? We do have a way to hear things over exterior noises, though.” He tapped his temple. “The translators.  Even in the loudest room on the ship, for example, you would still be able to perfectly hear the translation of Derek’s sign language provided you were looking at him.”  I nodded, but was honestly still confused.

“The ultimate goal of the project is to combine the technology we already have, and give Derek – and all autistics on the ship – the ability to interact on their own terms,” Antoine explained, crouching down. “Using the datasets and our translators, the first aim is audio and visual dampening.  No more too-loud noises, no more unpleasant lights or colors. They will be able to adjust both the audio input from the translators and hopefully visual input, right from their dataset. Secondly, proximity alerts – but mostly not for them. Instead, anyone who approaches too closely will receive an alert to their dataset first, and then a loud alarm transmitted directly to their translator.” He tapped his temple again.  “I thought it was only fair that I be the test subject for the alarm, and I’m working on calibrating it. When I backed away from you after delivering your tea, I backed too closely to Sam, who agreed to be my co-tester.”

“That’s brilliant,” I breathed, wide-eyed. “But you said the proximity alerts are ‘mostly’ not for Sam.  So he still receives some of it?”

Antoine looked over his shoulder at Sam, who was in the process of a beautiful and intricate piece of knotwork. “Sam?  When do you receive an alert?”

“If I’m not paying attention and I’m about to walk into someone.  It’s just a chime, though,” he answered nonchalantly, not looking up from what he was doing.

“So really, it’s only to keep you from accidentally touching someone if you don’t want to?” I asked.

“Yep. Works good.  I didn’t walk into anyone today.”

“And the software can tell the difference?”

The question was directed at Antoine, but Derek was the one who answered. <Locational sensors in the corridors tell us who is the one moving and causing the proximity.>

“So, the people who need the software the most are not being punished?”

<Of course not, Wisdom.  I don’t want a screech in my head because someone almost bumped into me.>

“I just wanted to make sure,” I chuckled, letting the silly nickname go unremarked. “Antoine, really.  This is brilliant. And it’s going to help a lot of people, not just those on the spectrum.  There are a lot of people on the ship who have PTSD-related touch issues. Or just flat out inherent aversions.”

He nodded. “Correct.  Grey was able to corroborate in their data that the autistic-spectrum population on the ship has the most stringent requirements and need, however, so that is where the focus is. If I can calibrate it to work for them, everything else is just a matter of adjustment.”

“Okay, okay,” Tyche shifted next to me and gathered our attention. “As proud as I am of this project, especially how far it has come in such a short time, there are a few other things we need to talk about if you’re good with it, Soph?”

“Depends on what it is,” I hesitated.

“Timeline for getting you back to work,” she clarified. “It’s going to be a slow hand-off, and don’t even think of trying to take on more than you’re ready for or I will sedate you myself.”  She arched an eyebrow at me and I just held my hands up in defeat. “Your primary focus is going to selecting a new assistant. I’ve been helping Simon, but there is only so much I can do to help and still be able to manage staffing.  Right now, each of the department heads is handling as much of that as they can, but they still need me for day-to-day questions like who is currently available.”

I groaned. “Can’t you just find one for me?”

“No, I can’t. I don’t have time, like I said. Simon refuses to, because he is the one who originally hired Arantxa.”

“If I have to select them myself, I want a list vetted by Xiomara and Derek.” I glanced over. “Derek, is that okay with you? Dig up all the dirt you can on every single person Xiomara okays?”

<All the dirt?>

“I want to know if they don’t bathe regularly, do they kick pets, did they not thank a vendor, everything.”

<I can do that> he confirmed with a pretty vicious amount of glee.

“Good,” I nodded, turning back to my sister. “I’m not leaving anything to chance. I know none of us want to admit it, but Arantxa had one thing dead to rights – I am entirely too trusting.  Derek and Xiomara? Not so much. I’ll make the final call, but I’m going into this with eyes wide open. No more surprises. Hell, I don’t care if I even like the person.  If they can do the job and I can trust them, I can make it work.”

“Sophie, come on – “

“No, Conor.  I almost died, and the entire Ark almost paid the price for mine and Simon’s poor judgement. This may be an extreme reaction, looking at it from the outside, but the people on this ship need to know that I’m not making the same mistakes again.”

“But they just watched you stand in the Council Chamber and talk about the best of humanity.  Now, you’re going to move forward with suspicion?” This time, it was my sister.

“I also, quite clearly, said that one of our best traits is that we learn from our mistakes. I can believe in the best of people without being stupid about it, and they need to see that.  It doesn’t just mean trusting blindly – it can also mean seeing something in a person no one likes, or who everyone underestimates, or who no one thought could do the job. We also persevere, which is exactly what I’m going to do,” I finished quietly.

As Conor squeezed my shoulder, Tyche nodded in reluctant acceptance. “Okay, in that case, we need to make a list of what you are looking for in a new assistant. And you can’t put 'not a Baconist' on that list, because it pretty much guarantees everyone who applies will secretly be one, no matter what Miys says.” She shot me a look. “So, seriously.  You need to have criteria to weed out who we even pass on to Xio and Derek.”

I hummed in thought, leaning my head back against Conor’s arm.  “Well, there’s the obvious stuff – organized, at least somewhat familiar with who handles what on the Ark, moderate computer skills.  They can’t be shy, either. In fact, I would prefer someone stubborn: I have a hard-enough time saying ‘no’ to people, so I need someone who can put their foot down both on my behalf and to me. Willingness to learn is also non-negotiable.”

My sister nodded, transcribing all this to her datapad and flicking a copy over to Antoine and Derek. “Okay, and what are the absolute deal-breakers?”

“Mindless conformity, in any direction,” I responded immediately.  “I’ve known too many people who were so counter-culture that they though they were open-minded, but they were just narrow-minded in the opposite direction. At the same time, discrimination is absolutely not to be tolerated – there are only so many of us left, and we need to get the fuck along.  Don’t get me wrong, if they disagree with me, that’s fine, but they have to be able to listen and consider other viewpoints.  What I’m talking about is people who make judgement calls based on things that people can’t help or change, and refuse to listen to any opinion counter to their own.”

“Like Xiomara,” Tyche ventured hesitantly.

I shook my head vigorously. “Xio has her faults, but even when she realizes she doesn’t understand, she relents and goes with the flow.  She at least leaves herself open to the possibility of understanding later. Something like that wouldn’t be a complete no-go. But the situation with Maverick and eating? If the person is the type who would flat out ignore my request, they can’t be my administrator.  I have to fight enough uphill battles with the Council, I cannot waste time fighting with my administrator.”  I took a deep breath. “Beyond that, hero-worshipers, victim-blamers, and victim-worshipers are right out.”

“Victim-worshipers?” Conor asked in confusion. “What are those?”

Before Tyche or I could answer, Antoine let out a loud groan. “Sometimes they are the worst types of people, my friend. You know what victim-blaming is, correct?” Conor nodded, leaning forward out of curiosity. Antoine continued, “Victim-worshipers are the complete opposite. They create this idealized, innocent, unrealistic ideal of a person who has been a victim of actions taken against them.  Using Sophia as an example, these people would construct their entire idea of Sophia around her being a victim first, even before being human, or female, much less her being competent at her job.  Instead, she is A Victim, and everything else about her supports her ‘victimness’. She isn’t a person to them anymore.”

Tyche nodded in agreement and continued where her partner had left off. “Depending on the person they are attaching themselves to, yeah – victim worshipers can sometimes be worse than victim blamers. At least the people who blame a victim grant the person a sense of agency, acknowledging that they are a person who can make decisions.  They’re still scum, don’t get me wrong, but they wouldn’t take away the fact that Sophia is a person, who is capable of decisions. Victim blamers try to eliminate their own ability to decide and put that burden on the person who was attacked – victim worshippers don’t even let us decide what we wear each day.”

Conor started snapping his fingers, looking around as he grasped at something. “The whore-thing… about women… what is it? I’ve heard about this. Dammit, what is it….”

Derek clapped to get our attention before explaining. <Madonna-Whore complex> he supplied helpfully.

“YES!” Conor shouted, pointing at him. “Thank you, Derek. That!  So ‘blamers’ are on the ‘whore’ end, and ‘worshipers’ are on the ‘Madonna’ end, and the focus of their judgement can’t win, right?”

Tyche, Antoine, and I gaped at Conor in astonishment. Slowly, Antoine began to nod. “Yes.  That’s what we were trying to explain…”

“Dumb lug my ass,” Tyche muttered, glancing at me.

Conor just squeezed my shoulder again, showing he wasn’t offended. “In that case, I completely agree. Sophie isn’t a hero, or a victim, she’s just… Sophie.  She shouldn’t have to work with someone who can’t understand or appreciate that there are much more important things about her than what happened on Level One.”

“Like what?” I asked, teasing.

“Like the fact that, if you recover properly, you can cook like a fiend again, which I am looking forward to.” His stomach grumbled to punctuate the comment, instantly breaking any tension in the room.

This is exactly the housewarming I needed, I mused as I giggled at Conor’s never-ending hunger.

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[mostlysignssomeportents]

#1yrago Garbage In, Garbage Out: machine learning has not repealed the iron law of computer science

Pete Warden writes convincingly about computer scientists' focus on improving machine learning algorithms, to the exclusion of improving the training data that the algorithms interpret, and how that focus has slowed the progress of machine learning.

The problem is as old as data-processing itself: garbage in, garbage out. Assembling the large, well-labeled datasets needed to train machine learning systems is a tedious job (indeed, the whole point and promise of machine learning is to teach computers to do this work, which humans are generally not good at and do not enjoy). The shortcuts we take to produce datasets come with steep costs that are not well-understood by the industry.

For example, in order to teach a model to recognize attractive travel photos, Jetpac paid low-waged Southeast Asian workers to label pictures. These workers had a very different idea of a nice holiday than the wealthy people who would use the service they were helping to create: for them, conference reception photos of people in suits drinking wine in air-conditioned international hotels were an aspirational ideal -- I imagine that for some of these people, the beach and sea connoted grueling work fishing or clearing brush, rather than relaxing on a sun-lounger.

Warden says that people who are trying to improve vision systems for drones and other robots run into problems using the industry standard Imagenet dataset, because those images were taken by humans, not drones, and humans take pictures in ways that are significanty different from the way that machines do -- different lenses, framing, subjects, vantage-points, etc.

Warden's advice is for machine learning researchers to sit with their training data: sift through it, hand-code it, review it and review it again. Do the hard, boring work of making sure that PNGs aren't labeled as JPGs, retrieve the audio samples that were classified as "other" and listen to them to see why the classifier barfed on them.

It's an important lesson for product design, but even more important when considering machine learning's increasing role in adversarial uses like predictive policing, sentencing recommendations, parole decisions, lending decisions, hiring decisions, etc. These datasets are just as noisy and faulty and unfit for purpose as the datasets Warden cites, but their garbage out problem ruins peoples' lives or gets them killed.

Here's an example that stuck with me, from a conversation with Patrick Ball, whose NGO did a study of predictive policing. The police are more likely to discover and arrest perpetrators of domestic violence who live in row-houses, semi-detached homes and apartment buildings, because the most common way for domestic violence to come to police attention is when a neighbor phones in a complaint. Abusers who live in detached homes get away with it more than their counterparts in homes with a party wall.

Train a machine learning system with police data, and it will overpolice people in homes with shared walls (who tend to be poorer), and underpolice people in detached homes (who tend to be richer). No one benefits from that situation.

https://boingboing.net/2018/05/29/gigo-gigo-gigo.html

[c-alarcon-research]

First Conference Reflection

My name is Christian Bernard Alarcon. I am an undergraduate biomedical engineering student at the University of Houston. I am currently working with the Laboratory for Non-Invasive Brain-Machine Interfaces under the direction of Dr. Jose L. Contreras-Vidal to create an open-source dataset of longitudinal electroencephalography (EEG) data. Following my fellowship under the university’s summer undergraduate research program (UH-SURF), I submitted my work to the Biomedical Engineering Society’s (BMES) national conference and was fortunately accepted to present my work.

Applying for the conference to make the most out of my fellowship

As I entered the plane, I thought to myself, “How did I end up here?” After being accepted into a university fellowship to continue working in the research lab I volunteered in, I received an acceptance email that I would be able to continue working with my mentor as a full-time, paid, research fellow. Under the University of Houston, I worked with the Laboratory for Non-Invasive Brain-Machine Interfaces to segment and categorize longitudinal EEG brain data, focusing on making the data accessible and available for public use. As I was finishing up the paper report, I received an email from my advisor in the Biomedical Engineering department, encouraging students to submit their research abstracts to the annual Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) national conference in Philadelphia and potentially be accepted to present. Great timing -- but would they even consider my paper? My graduate student advisor encouraged me, “Part of academic research is not only the success in discovery but the joy of sharing what you have found.” I asked my PI, Dr. Contreras-Vidal to assist in funding the abstract submission fee and submitted my paper in. It was very exciting to see my name in a paper, all officiated and formalized in the final submission. 

I took this photo during my SURF fellowship. My graduate student mentor, Jesus Cruz-Garza and I, played a game during our lunch break while code processed on the computers.

I was definitely trying to get my feet wet in academia and this opportunity would allow me to just soak everything in. After weeks of waiting, I received the email that I was chosen to present my work and attend the meeting. It was definitely exciting. Not even my first year in academia and I was already preparing to share my work with experienced students, industry leaders, and professionals.

Self-development and preparing to talk to distinguished professionals

To make the most of the trip, I had to practice being comfortable presenting in a professional setting. I signed up to participate under the university’s Cougar Initiative to Engage (CITE) first elevator speech competition. This event marks the first time I officially explained my work.

Presenting my elevator speech in front of the judges.

After a competitive selection process, I successfully became one of the ten finalists to perform my speech in front of three college deans to judge my performance. I didn’t place top three, but I definitely learned the importance of radiating excitement and enthusiasm to effectively share ideas. I would later use these skills during my trip to Philadelphia.

To prepare for the conference, I was mentored by the graduate student advisor for my department, Dr. Charlotte Waits. She helped me maintain a level of professionalism in my emails and speech. I also had to work on choosing what to wear. Jeans would not fly by! She also helped me in being professional with asking for travel funding. I am very grateful my the majority of my trip being funded by the Biomedical Engineering Department, The Honors College, and Dr. Contreras-Vidal’s lab. I also met with the university’s career services department to practice etiquette and formalities when talking with professionals.

Representing the university

I packed my bags and arrived on Wednesday night and roomed with my classmate, James. James was also accepted to present at the conference. We were the only two undergraduates selected to represent our university. We’re both working under the university’s neurotechnology industry/research partnership, Building Reliable Advances in Neurotechnology (BRAIN).

The only picture of James and I. Taken on the day of our presentations.

On Thursday, I got to attend my first day of the conference. After registering and picking up my ID tag, I was greeted by recruitment and admission staff from universities across the nation. It was exciting to be around people from prestigious universities. In fact, many were happy to hear that I came from the University of Houston’s biomedical engineering department. The department was established in 2010 and being part of one of the first delegates from the undergraduate level was very nice to hear. In fact, with James, we also play a role in representing the university’s BRAIN center and the Honors College.

A photo of me next to my department’s banner. Here, the department’s graduate advisor, Dr. Charlotte Waits would encourage prospective students to apply for the university’s biomedical engineering graduate program. Showcasing the faculty’s wide-range of research that is offered.

Learning as a brain-computer interfaces background among distinguished tissue engineering speakers

The same day, I also got to listen to the BMES’s yearly Pritzker Distinguished Lecture. From Dr. Christopher Chen from Boston University, I learned about the rise of three-dimensional organotypic culturing as a lens to emulate the vascularity and cell-cell interactions in diseases such as breast cancer and pancreatic cancer.

I learned how much of biomedical engineering is interested in disease observation techniques, prizing on the recent advances in on-a-chip devices. Here, Dr. Chen discusses the advantages of utilizing organotypic culturing as another lens to view breast cancer cells.

While cell culturing and on-a-chip modeling can help in studying how cells respond to disease, Dr. Chen suggests that utilizing this model offers researchers the ability to view cell interactions in a three-dimensional scale -- which can be useful for cancer-cell invasion imaging.

Learning about different techniques to record the brain

Furthermore, I got the opportunity to attend some lectures about neural engineering. Many of the topics involved deep brain stimulation and forms of direct-brain technologies. Deep-brain stimulation is the use of electrical stimulation on parts of the brain to treat diseases such as epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, and tremors. I was interested in one lecture about improving the electrode materials to increase or maintain signal quality while reducing potential brain trauma. While my background was more on the field of processing data, it was nice to hear the initial steps surrounding the techniques of recording the data.

My role as an undergraduate student

As an undergraduate, I set a goal for myself to first learn about the topics within my field and attend all personal development meetings. I attended an interesting session where I had to informally explain my research in a small group, then a member of the group would try to reexplain my work. It was very fun to hear other students inquire about my field. I also enjoyed trying to explain other student’s research -- knowing that I would have to learn some topics that are out of the field of neurotechnologies.

I also was selected to attend a “Think-Tank” session and assist the BMES board of directors on how to expand the organization’s influence in the future. I am a large supporter of mentorship and suggested for the organization to help set up collaborations and form academic-industry partnerships for students to network with potential employers, early in their academic career. My suggestion was to keep the partnership regional. For example, students from my university would be able to connect with potential employers and be open to more opportunities in addition to career fairs. Companies representatives would have to play an active role with faculty in working with students -- maybe monthly -- to create a project and develop future opportunities for internships, rather than teacher-led projects.

This conference also presented many opportunities to network with admissions staff from other universities. In the main conference hall, university exhibitors would invite me to take a look at their graduate program. Not only were Master’s Degree programs available, but many Ph.D. positions and faculty positions were being offered. I was more focused on schools that had combined M.D./Ph.D. programs and was very pleased to find out about specific schools that encourage engineering backgrounds to apply to their medical school.

Presenting my research to industry leaders, professors, admissions staff, and students

I was talking with a recruiter from a public-ivy university, having a lighthearted discussion of why biomedical engineering does not consider neurotechnology as one of the main disciplines. As I was supporting for categorizing it under the rehabilitation engineering field of biomedical engineering, she asked me to explain what is the scientific impact of my research findings. It was the first time I was caught off-guard and on-the-fly on my work. To answer the question, I had to first explain that the central issues behind brain imaging are the rigidness of imaging, often done in settings that do not fully replicate the real-world. With my research done on an artist as she creates an art project for over 15 months. I present data that captures the complexities of the brain in the real-world, utilizing wireless imaging technology.

It was definitely difficult to tailor my word choice to people from non-neurotechnology backgrounds. However, I found that if I invite the listener for any questions, I’ll be able to explain my project with clarity. From the elevator speech competition, I also discovered that my enthusiasm for my project would radiate to the listener, and would help keep the listener engaged.

In front of my poster, minutes before people were scheduled to come by and talk to me about my work.

I was definitely nervous when explaining my project to an industry leader with a background in brain-computer interfaces. I was worried that if I said the wrong information, I would automatically lose his interest. He enjoyed my project and we debated over the advantages and disadvantages of non-invasive imaging (poor signal quality, yet accessible) against invasive techniques (strong quality, yet limited in human participants). In the future, I hope to be proficient and confident in explaining my research and defending it in front of people who are knowledgable in the field. I am looking to participate in more lab meetings and present my current findings to my graduate student mentor and PI.

Touring around Philadelphia

In my downtime, I got to have a Philly Cheesesteak lunch at the Reading Terminal Market, near the Pennsylvania Convention Center, where the convention took place. I also got to visit the Rocky Steps in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and saw the Liberty Bell, right next to Independence Hall, where the founding fathers declared independence from Great Britain, creating the United States.

After I did the infamous jog up the stairs, I took a picture on the top of the Rocky Steps.

In fact, Benjamin Franklin -- one of the most influential people from the city Pennsylvania -- was heavily recognized as a pioneer in biomedical engineering. I knew that he invented the bifocals, but I found out that he also invented the flexible urinary catheter. It was great to explore places outside of Houston, and even better to be among intellectuals in the birthplace of the United States. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that I got to experience both the forefront of US history and my engineering field!

Suggestions

I hope for future students to be presented with more opportunities like this. If my advisor did not send the email, I would have not had known about how I can advance from the work I did through SURF. I understand that it is a student’s job to actively seek opportunities like this, however, I suggest for all students working in academia to know that there are year-round opportunities available to present work -- not just Undergraduate Research Day.

I am thankful for the university’s large support for the SURF and PURS programs. Having a research experience at an undergraduate level gave purpose to my coursework, encouraged me to do well in my classes, get involved with knowing my professors, and placed me at a high advantage in professional development. I hope for students to pursue a research opportunity with a professor and strive to develop their credentials in academia.

To be informal, if I could talk to my past self: The successful student does not finish each course assignment to hit the threshold for an A. You’re in the university -- not just to satisfy degree requirements -- but to learn skills that will be used in the future. Furthermore, these skills should not go to waste. Academic research values approval and disproval of new and old information. In a time where efficient technology and global communication is becoming relevant, you can utilize the methods you learned from a small class project to discover something new. Opportunities like representing the university in an academic research conference are only offered to students who dare to seek out. It is time to seize all opportunities and share what you have learned.

Feel free to access my publication sent to the conference here, through a ResearchGate link:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336702422_Developing_a_Mobile_Brain-body_Imaging_MoBI_Dataset_as_a_Tool_to_Visualize_Creativity_Feasibility_Testing_Using_Task_Classification_in_the_Alpha-band_Domain

[aiweirdness]

Don’t use a neural network to name your next pub

The King’s Arms. The Bell and Bucket. The Black Bull Inn. The Beggar’s Bridge. A pub’s name is part of its soul, often highly unique, often hundreds of years old, often with a story behind it. A simple computer program couldn’t hope to give a proper name to a pub. But what if it tried?

Timothea Armour asked me to find out, as part of a project called “The Last Hour!” on the cultural peculiarities of pubs, commissioned by Collective, a gallery in Scotland. I’ve been training a type of computer program called a neural network to generate names for all kinds of things - guinea pigs, craft beers, and paint colors. Neural networks are a bit different from regular computer programs: In the usual kind of computer programming, a human invents rules that a computer has to follow. With neural networks, however, the human only gives the computer some examples to learn from, and the computer invents its own rules about how to make more examples.

Timothea gave me a list of 1,053 pubs from the northeast of England from a database compiled by Colin Anderson, and I fed these names into an open-source neural network framework. 

After just a little bit of time training, the neural network had made some progress - after all, it starts with no idea of whether it’s supposed to be generating prose or musical notation or Finnish grocery lists. It had to form its own rules about capitalization, and line breaks, and which letters go with which other letters. And these names - well, some of them - are already identifiable as possibly pub-like, though at this stage none of them are usable.

Euceseeettigwtird Arms Tea Posh Basei Innery Ga iral Ferk Thod Inn Inn Darn Funk Inn Alan Ars Swoos Loveles Noms Lick Aams Tteat Armharoh Hams Olk Ars Hotle Moveam Treee Slamlongs Arms Roll Brrew keg Arme Horel Booge Houne Arse Inn Tumen Poodes Cavel Coundor Horse Baak Hotey Bead Inn Fl Wlofler Arms Oleetrar Moor Corore oad Bite & Chuts Wotee Vonehscon Cresks Arms

After the neural network has looked through the list of names about 11 times, it has made a bit more progress. These mostly sound like pub names, though there’s definitely still something off about them.

Tostars Inn Liad Cush House Blawky Arms Stons Of Horse Blaksigth Arms Whistle Plan Hotel Bracken of Crovn Coksarnss Hotel Vulck fod Lick Bool House Many Inn Horshy Ban Crownreal Top Drock of Conshersland Prickhomidd Arms Bill Inn Dhodalgoat Hotel Facg Manf Hell Hotel

By 17 times through the dataset, the neural network still doesn’t quite have the knack for this.

Whoneas Grey Hotel Hotel Hotel Trlety Eln's Arms Phite Meathord Green Head Hotel Bhickloy Farp Arms Wharberb Bark Hirlamion Crapy Grile & Fumthorse Male Dora Rey Ofe White Bear Pivsing Jambork Hotel Cumperlel Watersy Head Ox Cadder Inn Bar of El Carhey Orb Boak Hotel Inn Whee Blinf Plowde Tree Bleak Clad Angely Arms

By 21 times through the dataset, the neural network has shown some signs of improvement, but most of the names still need work.

Elden Mens Collick Inn King Brad Inn Load Hotel Torn House Inn Rob Inn Thanes of Lampel Gurn uf Staneton Hell Garled Blorge Roods Cocket Horn Blawde Inn House Inn Tivern Got Blewe Wot n Arms Hotel Arm Savers

The names eventually get more consistently pronounceable, and very occasionally, even believable.  But mostly, they’re a bit substandard. At this stage, the neural network has had 35 tries at the original dataset, and still thinks “Bill” is a pretty good name for a pub.

Green Green Frown Arms Plucksick Bill Horse Long Bog Lede Lick Hotel Farter Inn Ports Bean Fin Dune The Beelly Gam Tha Dlee Fark House Phan House Naw Old Mess Now and Inn Fripy Whee Bore Inn Ladside Inn Hogs Thee Inn Shur Hiad House Hotel Hotel Old Ash Ox Horse Inn Bleak Clab Bark Inn Blisksmerd Shorthood Rat Horses Wheee Travel Sham New Shins Ferp's Brel

Forty times through the dataset, and it also has not relented on its odd preference for rude-sounding names. The pubs of northeast England are in general a lot more innocuous than this. 

F'ing Hotel The Gland Greene Old Farders Arms King Shams Bliyffinge The Blande Tree Blink Bear Gole Clown Hotel Hall of Sprong Firdwock Hotel Dur & Thimpers Dorty Hounds Phage Farm Ox Kings Kingfarter Mantle

I’m not even trying here. As the neural network progresses in its training, the proportion of terrible pub names only increases.

Bollock Hotel Flee Sun Farm Pubber Arms Blanding Weed Willey Farters Red Hotel F Kings Moldy Goine Pant Cabber Hell Castle Stan Crown & Three Hotel Grey Trip

Now that the neural network has gone through the dataset a hundred times, I can only conclude: don’t use a computer to name your next pub.

Belle Inn Crow's Rest Mingside Arms Crown & Fathous Stonebredde Arms Old Festerlan Burn Horse Hotel Doss of Wulling of Stank Shore's Castle Crustle Hotel Lick Inn Odd Lingwion Lambles Loons Hall Thringeron Arms Flint Horse The All House Dean & Funtling Old Hell Kick Jolly Trocks Wallow Arms

[helloamhere]

@fakedeepplantjerker replying to this post: 

I don't put a lot of stock into hit-to-kudos ratio. I had a hypothesis about what a "good" one was, and then I found some awful (imo) fics with a "good" ratio, and fics I hated with "bad" ones... Now I believe the ratio really only measures whether your fic is reaching an audience it resonates with, not its quality.

But I’m curious if you have other data on hits to kudos! I really *want* it to be meaningful, haha

I am totally on the same page as you! Agreed it’s really not a clean measure of anything...especially because it seems like fic sharing is so social, with some fics getting huge exposure and others not, along networks. DEffffffinitely I don’t think we should ever look at ao3 measures as some objective barometer of quality!! I’m SO curious about how fic travels and what audiences it reaches, but that would require knowing so much more than what AO3 knows about an individual work! 

*warning for rambling, possibly incoherent* 

I think that ratio is really only useful *within* a set, not between sets? So it’s fun to look at it for your own group of works. As a comparison tool between one work to all the others in a fandom, my main thought when looking at it was that instead of a ratio it would be most useful to actually bin works in strata of #hits and then look at the different kudos/comments numbers within each set. So hits seem more like they should be a control than anything. That way you could ask, “this fic is in the category of fics that got a huge number of hits, but out of that category, what’s its ranking?” but then you’d have to get a representative dataset to make useful strata of #hits and that’s where I got too lazy to do it. :)  The hit/kudos as a single ratio ratio might actually be most useful for identifying and excluding outliers! Because there are some pretty mega snowball outlier fics in terms of kudos and idk why. That’s what I did with it when I was looking at the longlivefeedback survey. The other main thing I pointed out when I was looking at that data was that there’s a really big floor problem...most fics have a low comment score. Probably too low for hypothesis testing to be much more insightful than observational stats, really. I actually really want to do some kind of content analysis on comments themselves. Like, are there fics that evoke really long comments? Wouldn’t it be fun to compare some semantic analysis between angst fic versus comfort fic?? But that ALSO requires writing a script to scrape that data and I am frankly terrible at that shit (I’m definitely a frontend data analyst, experimental design and all). 

[eponymous-rose]

A while ago I got an ask (which of course I couldn’t find today) that was basically wanting to know what in the heck a postdoc actually does. That’s a fair question! “Postdoc” is generally used to mean “a researcher with a PhD”, which is vague as heck. 

So hey, here’s what my day at work was today. This is pretty typical of me, but probably not typical of every postdoc, because the responsibilities vary so much from field to field.

First thing: check those e-mails! Today, that involved adding some stuff to my calendar, clearing up an error on an expense report for travel, bugging my boss to come sign my timesheet (there are a lot of places in the building where I work that I’m not allowed access to as a foreign national... including my boss’s office), setting up some preliminary stuff for the women/nb’s dinner at a conference in October, submitting corrections on my shiny new faculty page for next year’s job, and contacting my coauthors on a recently accepted paper to inform them that they have to sign the copyright release form.

Time to do some browsing of Twitter: I’m the social media rep for a committee in a professional organization, so I was mainly just looking for anything worth retweeting. Nothing of note. Our stuff is so specialized that I’m not sure what kind of content to go for unless there’s a conference happening, like, right now. Probably need to think about widening our net of follows and acting as a promoter for other groups. Make a note to follow up on that later this week.

Boss arrives to sign my timesheet. Chat for a while about how his hard drive broke about fifteen minutes before he had to submit the final draft of a monograph. He’s not having a great day, but he leaves in a good mood to go celebrate his wife’s birthday.

Finally get to check in on my current paper status: one paper accepted (looking at what factors cause tornadoes to occur in a big outbreak versus individually), just going through the final logistic steps before publication. Nothing for me to do there. Two papers are in progress (discussing what makes tornadoes unique in the southeastern US using a couple different statistical methods), but I got word last week that there’s another couple years of data that’re getting processed and should be ready to use in a week or so, so I’m holding off on doing anything with those until I have the shiny new dataset. Nothing to do there, either. A rare occasion!

Pull up a paper I’m peer-reviewing for a journal. This one’s just a revision of a paper I’d already reviewed, and after a thorough read-through I’m convinced the authors did a great job addressing all my concerns, so I get to give it the thumbs-up. About thirty seconds before I hit “send” on that one, I get a fresh new paper to review. So it goes.

There’s a new Master’s student working in the office across the hall, so I poke my head in to say hi. She is adorable and must be protected at all costs. Promises of bringing in cookies to share are exchanged.

There’s enough time for a quick lunch with a friend! We start out talking a bit about a research project we’re going to be working on together over the next year, but the conversation veers into D&D when another player from our game stops by our table.

Time for a Skype meeting with another research collaborator! I have to cut this one short to get to the next thing on time, but we still have time to talk about the details of a grant report we’re submitting later this month (explaining what we’ve been doing with the money for the past year, which mainly boils down to: publishing a lot of good science). I also have her walk me through the process of getting the funds released for publishing our current paper. It’ll cost almost $3,000 to publish. Yes, you have to pay to publish in academia. Cool beans. Thank goodness we have a research grant for this one.

There’s a neat event in the afternoon: a two-hour workshop/training course about communicating science with reporters. The person giving the course is marvelous---she’s been in communications here for a couple decades after a solid career in journalism---and she does a great job of leading us through strategies for approaching difficult or even hostile lines of questioning without outright avoiding answers. At the end of it, I get to sign up for a mock-interview on Friday, complete with camera crew. Maybe a little nervous about that. Scribble down some useful elevator-pitch summaries of my research, just in case I forget before Friday.

I spend a little bit of time knocking out some coding for an elaborate animated gif I want to include in my presentation at a conference in October. The science for that presentation is really all done (see the aforementioned paper that’s going through copyright/financial stuff), but I’m the first presenter of the conference, and I’d like to have some visual aids that really wow the audience. I get something mocked up that I think will go over well.

A friend of mine is writing a reference letter for her former advisor! She hasn’t done that sort of thing before, so she sends it to me. I edit it down a bit, but it already looks fantastic and I tell her so when I send her my suggestions.

I’ve only got about an hour left in the day at this point, so I open up that new paper that came in for review. It’s right up my alley, which is great, and it looks like some interesting science, but there’s one method being used that I’m less familiar with, so I google it to make sure I know what they’re shooting for.

...while googling that, I see a link further down the list of results that looks like it’s from some sort of coursework. That seems like it might be relevant to me, so I check out the link: it’s from the notes of a pretty great-looking course on the programming language R, which is something I’ve been working on learning anyway! It’s an astronomy course, but there’s a ton of overlap in the types of data they work with, so I wind up getting sucked in and spend the rest of the day going through the excellent tutorials and familiarizing myself with this new-to-me programming language. I’m veering into more pure stats stuff, lately, so this is a great programming language to learn, but it’s also becoming more and more popular, which means that the odds of my having a graduate student who knows it are pretty high. It’s definitely good for me to be familiar with this sort of thing!

And... that’s a day! I love this job because there’s so much going on that it’s hard to feel like I’m spinning my wheels on any single thing; even though the bulk of my research is stalled until I get the shiny new data next week, I’ve still got a ton of different projects to keep myself busy.

[michaelandy101-blog]

7 Rising Applied sciences in search engine marketing and Their Functions

New Post has been published on http://tiptopreview.com/7-emerging-technologies-in-seo-and-their-applications/

7 Rising Applied sciences in search engine marketing and Their Functions

search engine marketing is a dynamic business. What labored some weeks in the past may not work once more proper now.

As an search engine marketing skilled, you might want to know the newest tendencies and rising applied sciences, to maintain up with the ever-changing demand of the business. That manner, you possibly can keep on high of your sport and develop into extra environment friendly in your enterprise.

On this submit, I’ll share with you seven rising applied sciences within the search engine marketing business and the way they affect your work as an search engine marketing knowledgeable. Lastly, I’ll present you apply them in your enterprise for optimum outcomes.

If you wish to scale your search engine marketing processes in 2021 and past, it’s best to be careful for these applied sciences, and begin implementing them in your enterprise straight away.

1. Pure Language Processing (NLP)

In December 2019, Google formally rolled out the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) algorithm replace worldwide. This replace introduced NLP to the fore, and it’s been a expertise to be careful for within the search engine marketing business since.

With NLP, Google can perceive what a phrase in a sentence means by its context.

Which means that Google now not depends on the particular phrases or phrases that customers are trying to find to supply them with the correct solutions. Somewhat, they’re wanting on the intent behind every search.

Right here’s an instance of how BERT (an offshoot of NLP), impacts a search question according to Google.

Earlier than NLP, if somebody searches for the question “2019 brazil traveler to usa need a visa”, Google thinks that that is an informational question to verify if a U.S citizen can journey to Brazil with no visa. Therefore, it reveals a Washington Submit article that solutions the query on high of the SERPs.

As you possibly can see, the context behind this search is somebody eager to journey to the USA from Brazil who wants a visa. Whereas it was troublesome for Google to determine what these sorts of queries meant prior to now, with BERT, the algorithm understands the context behind every search and offers the person with the correct data.

The way to make the most of NLP in your search engine marketing processes

With NLP, informational content material is extra essential than ever. Nonetheless, optimizing for BERT isn’t one thing you are able to do as an search engine marketing.

Somewhat, it’s best to give attention to creating high-quality content material that solutions search queries precisely. Once you do, you’ll undoubtedly rank nicely.

This Moz article reveals you write wonderful items of content material for search engines and other people.

2. Pure Language Era (NLG) for short-form content material

With NLG, SEOs can now produce significant phrases and sentences identical to a pure language, however utilizing expertise.

As a substitute of battling with writers’ block and spending hours considering of what to jot down, NLG removes that burden by way of automation. And should you’re a content material creator, this helps you focus simply on sharpening the content material and making it learn higher.

Whereas there are a variety of use circumstances for NLG, in the mean time, it’s higher used to jot down short-form content material equivalent to headlines, product descriptions, assembly memos, and so forth.

The way to use NLG as an search engine marketing

There are a variety of use circumstances for NLG applied sciences. With a device equivalent to Copy.ai, you possibly can create touchdown web page hero textual content, Fb main textual content, weblog introductions, e-mail topic strains, listicles, meta descriptions, and so forth.

Right here’s an instance of some listicles I created for the subject “quality blog content” utilizing this device:

As you possibly can see, if I needed to jot down an article on this subject, I can use a few of these ideas as a top level view for my submit. With these, I can focus as an alternative on researching the person sub-topics.

Right here’s one other instance of some web site taglines that I created for Moz by getting into the model title and a short description of “The Ultimate SEO tool you can trust” into the device:

When you had been beginning a brand new model as an search engine marketing, you should utilize NLG instruments equivalent to this, to find superior taglines to make use of on your model.

Three. TF*IDF

TF*IDF stands for “Term Frequency times Inverse Document Frequency”. This measures how you employ a time period on a selected web page and the way it compares to a set of pages for that particular key phrase.

Whereas TF*IDF may appear to be a measurement of key phrase density, it’s really measuring how vital a key phrase phrase is by evaluating it to that key phrase’s frequency in a big set of paperwork.

Though it’s not but clear if Google makes use of TF*IDF in its algorithm, it’s a superb apply to include it into your on-page SEO technique.

Earlier than making use of TF*IDF, you might want to create a chunk of content material concentrating on a selected key phrase. As soon as that’s finished, plug the content material right into a TF*IDF device. Some really useful choices are Text Tools, SEO PowerSuite, Ryte, and Surfer SEO.

The way to use TF*IDF in your search engine marketing processes

With expertise and a few details about your key phrase, TF*IDF instruments normally recommend some phrases you possibly can add or take away out of your pages. As an search engine marketing, you possibly can optimize your web page primarily based on these ideas to satisfy the required TF*IDF rating for that key phrase.

That manner, you possibly can work out some phrases that are intently associated to the key phrase you’re writing about, however not current in your content material. Once you add these phrases and phrases to your content material, it makes your article topically related and helps your web page rank higher within the SERPs.

four. GPT-Three for automated content material creation

In September 2020, The Guardian published a story on its website that was written by a robotic. Since then, Generative Pre-trained Transformer Quantity Three (GPT-Three) has been a sizzling subject within the search engine marketing business.

The GPT-Three API works in an fascinating manner as a result of it’s been skilled with a large pool of datasets to imitate how people write. This consists of the Common Crawl dataset, Wikipedia, related historic books, and so forth.

Once you present the GPT-Three API with a writing immediate, it tries to foretell precisely what would come after that, primarily based on the knowledge it’s learn on the Web.

The screenshot beneath is an instance of GPT-3-generated content that went viral on Hacker information some months in the past. Most customers commented on it, identical to they might on an everyday submit, with out realizing that it was written by a robotic.

The way to Use GPT-Three for automated content material creation

E-mail writing: As an search engine marketing, you almost certainly acknowledge that writing nice emails is a ability that’ll assist your enterprise develop, but discover it troublesome to take action. With GPT-Three, you possibly can write emails simply. All you might want to do is provide some bullet points outlining all you wish to cowl within the e-mail, and it’ll robotically write it for you.

First draft writing: Creating the primary draft is probably the most troublesome facet of writing. With GPT-Three, you possibly can create the primary draft of your content material, after which edit it afterwards to satisfy your model voice. This protects you a variety of time and makes you extra environment friendly.

5. search engine marketing A/B testing

Most SEOs focus extra on person A/B testing and fewer on search engine marketing A/B testing. Whereas person testing includes randomly assigning guests (customers) of your web site to totally different variations of your pages, and finally deciding on the one to make use of primarily based on the efficiency. In search engine marketing A/B testing, the customers are Googlebots and never end-users, they usually’re usually proven the identical model of the web page.

What this implies is that if you implement search engine marketing/AB testing, you’re solely exhibiting customers or Google just one model of the web page, and never a number of pages.

The way to implement search engine marketing/AB testing

There are other ways to implement search engine marketing A/B testing, relying on what you wish to obtain for your enterprise. When you’re simply beginning out, some issues you possibly can check embody:

Title tags

Meta description

H1

Take for example, Etsy conducted a title tag SEO A/B testing for a few of its pages, and inside a couple of days, they began seeing vital visitors adjustments to their pages.

When you’re an intermediate/superior search engine marketing, you possibly can check different issues equivalent to:

AMP pages

Inside anchor texts

Schema markup

New content material

And so forth

For instance, SearchPilot ran an internal link SEO A/B testing for a grocery retailer, and noticed a 25% improve in natural visitors.

Conducting search engine marketing A/B assessments equivalent to these will assist you already know precisely what works nicely on your model and what doesn��t. That manner, you can also make extra knowledgeable selections when optimizing your pages for search engine marketing.

For example, in case your visitors decreased to a selected web page after making adjustments to it throughout the search engine marketing A/B check, it reveals that the check didn’t work out.

Usually, it’s best to count on to begin seeing outcomes out of your search engine marketing A/B testing as quickly as Google crawls your variant web page. If Google crawls your check web page inside say 7-14 days, then you possibly can examine it with the primary web page.

Some search engine marketing A/B testing instruments you should utilize for this function embody: Google Tag Manager, Rankscience, Optimizely, and so on.

6. Automated on-page content material optimization

When making a long-form piece of content material, you usually:

Test the top-ranking pages on the SERPs

Undergo every bit of content material rating on the SERPs

Determine the particular headings and subheadings the pages are overlaying

Establish the lacking factors within the pages

Create a greater define of our personal piece.

And so forth

This normally takes a variety of time. It’s important to spend hours manually checking one piece of content material after one other and paying attention to crucial factors to incorporate in your individual piece.

The way to use automated on-page content material optimization

As a substitute of spending hours to create content material briefs and researching the knowledge you wish to embody in your content material, you should utilize search engine marketing instruments equivalent to Frase AI and Content Harmony.

With Frase AI, you possibly can shorten the time you employ for content material analysis. Say you wish to write about “how to lose weight fast”, you possibly can enter the primary key phrase into the device.

As soon as finished, it’ll robotically test the top-ranking pages within the SERPs, and give you some helpful data you should utilize when creating your content material. These embody the highest outcomes for the key phrase, statistics and knowledge you possibly can add in your content material, questions your audience are asking on Quora, Reddit, and Google’s Folks Additionally Ask.

With a device equivalent to Content material Concord, you possibly can robotically create content material briefs that meet search intent in much less time.

All you might want to get began is your key phrase. When you enter it into the software program, it robotically analyzes the SERPs utilizing totally different knowledge factors. Afterwards, you possibly can construct your content material briefs from there.

7. Non-text content material elements

Non-text content material elements have gotten extra outstanding in search engine marketing as a result of they assist you create a nicer person expertise in your web site pages.

When you learn a chunk of content material with blocks of texts throughout it, you’ll most certainly discover it unappealing to take a look at. And with the upcoming enforcement of Core Web Vitals by Google in March 2021, non-text content material elements may have a big impact on search engine marketing.

A few of these non-text content material elements embody:

Photographs

Infographics

Graphs

Charts

Movies

Audio clips

Animations

Slideshows

Downloadable recordsdata equivalent to PDFs

The way to use non-text content material elements for search engine marketing

Canva: With this device, you create high-quality non-stock photographs on your pages.

Venngage: If you wish to create infographics that catches your readers’ consideration, then it’s best to use Venngage.

Invideo: Invideo helps you create and edit movies online in a couple of minutes with totally different ready-made templates.

Animaker: When you don’t have a design background and wish to create animated movies, then this device will assist you vastly.

With these instruments, you can also make your pages and posts extra interesting. Therefore, your readers will spend extra time in your web site, and your bounce charge will finally lower drastically.

Conclusion

As we glance ahead into the way forward for the search engine marketing business, new expertise developments will certainly play a big position. Whereas a few of them are already in use, others are nonetheless in growth.

When you’re an search engine marketing who desires to stay up to the mark within the business, then it’s best to maintain a watch out for these rising applied sciences and begin making use of them to develop your enterprise. Have extra search engine marketing tech so as to add to this listing? Let me know within the feedback.

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[covid19updater]

COVID19 Updates: 10/31/2020

World: WE HAVE REACHED 46,000,000 CASES WORLDWIDE !! 1,000,000 NEW CASES IN LESS THEN 50 HOURS !!

Greece: Greece ushers in partial lockdown to fight 'exponential' rise in cases LINK

Austria: Government sends Austria into the second lockdown LINK

Thailand: Thai emergency decree extended to end-November to curb coronavirus

UK: Boris Johnson will hold an urgent news conference in two hours (4 pm) It comes as documents seen by the BBC suggest the UK is on course for a much higher death toll than during the first wave unless further restrictions are introduced. Deaths could reach more than 4,000 a day, one of the models suggests. This figure is based on no policies being brought in to slow the spread of the disease, but most of the models peak at about 2,000 a day.

World: SARS-CoV-2 Spike Proteins Disrupt the Blood-Brain Barrier, Potentially Raising Risk of Neurological Damage in COVID-19 Patients LINK

World: Covid: When will it be over and we can do this again? LINK

World: Amazon AWS releases models and datasets to help predict COVID-19’s spread LINK

Poland: reports record 21,897 new coronavirus cases, positivity rate jumps by nearly 9% - New cases: 21,897 - Positivity rate: 36.6% (+8.9) - In hospital: 16,144 (+700) - In ICU: 1,305 (+51) - New deaths: 280

UK COVID update: - New cases: 21,915 - Positivity rate: 6.3% (-0.7) - In hospital: 11,108 (+183) - In ICU: 978 (+3) - New deaths: 326

Illinois: reports nearly 8,000 new coronavirus cases, biggest one-day increase on record - New cases: 7,899 - Positivity rate: 8.5% (+1.2) - In hospital: 3,228 (+136) - In ICU: 680 (+7) - New deaths: 46

UK: Vallance: There is potential for this to be twice as bad or more than the first wave

RUMINT (UK): Report form England. Miserable heavy rain and strong wind day, had to go out as I needed some things that won't be easy to get in lockdown even with online shopping (small items that won't meet the delivery cost so charges will be expensive). Anyway despite it being the last Saturday before a lockdown, and near to christmas, the stores were deserted, I could walk freely with no worries.Got most of what I needed. But on the bus there were small children running up and down and touching the whole bus all the rails, etc, then the mother took off her mask to shout at them from the other end of the bus and of course they were not wearing masks in the first place, and shouted back.I was of course wearing a mask, but, this is how it spreads.There was a woman not wearing a mask, maybe she was exempt, but she was open to that infection travelling in the air because that stupid woman would not keep her children in one place and talking at a normal volume.

France: +49,495. Yesterday: 49,215 /// Last week: 45,422 +547 deaths

Brazil: Brazil health minister hospitalized with COVID-19 LINK

Portugal: PORTUGAL'S PM COSTA: WE WILL REIMPOSE STAY HOME RULE. THERE WILL BE REMOTE WORKING IN MOST OF PORTUGAL FROM NOV. 4TH.

US: Covid-19 Is Worse in the Dakotas Now Than It Was in the Spring’s Hot Spots   LINK

RUMINT (Texas): I'm seeing limits on can vegetables (4) and increasing empty shelf spaces. Daughter who lives in a different part of TX asked me if people are panicking, because lots of items are out of stock where she is. So, get what you need while you can.

US:  FAUCI: “We’re in for a whole lot of hurt. .. All the stars are aligned in the wrong place as you go into the fall and winter season, with people congregating at home indoors. You could not possibly be positioned more poorly.”

US:  COVID update: - New cases: 90,058 - Positivity rate: 6.6% (-0.5) - In hospital: 47,374 (+686) - In ICU: 9,495 (+58) - New deaths: 960

RUMINT (Russia): Moscow is cold and grey. It's soon been two weeks and I still haven't gotten my Corona test result back. Will attempt asking again on Monday. Symptoms are mostly gone, smell returning a little bit, taste is still out. Russia is having a horrible emergency with blown capacity of hospitals everywhere, Oxygen supply failing in multiple places leading to deaths of people in need of O2 as well as other horrible things. Like people being placed in staircases and halls of hospitals. Sadly one could be fined, or given jail time for spreading "fake news" about this horrible situation. Daily numbers approach 20 000, total numbers approach two million. There is a critical shortage of medications at pharmacies and overall things seem to crash and burn.

France: Covid situation in France. The peak in COVID19 hospital admissions is expected in mid-November, according to Institut Pasteur estimates. "If behavior changes little, the summit will look like a long, high plateau."

World: Coronavirus vaccine taskforce chair says first COVID vaccines 'likely to be imperfect' and 'might not prevent infection' LINK (Drip. drip. drip)

Russia: Russia temporarily halts “Sputnik-V” trial due to shortage of doses LINK

US: CALIFORNIA GROCERS BRACE FOR HOLIDAYS AHEAD OF POTENTIAL 2ND FOOD STOCKPILING WAVE LINK

Texas: Walmart closes west El Paso Sam’s Club for disinfection due to Covid-19 spread concerns LINK

[shirlleycoyle]

Private Intel Firm Buys Location Data to Track People to their ‘Doorstep’

A threat intelligence firm called HYAS, a private company that tries to prevent or investigates hacks against its clients, is buying location data harvested from ordinary apps installed on peoples' phones around the world, and using it to unmask hackers. The company is a business, not a law enforcement agency, and claims to be able to track people to their "doorstep."

The news highlights the complex supply chain and sale of location data, traveling from apps whose users are in some cases unaware that the software is selling their location, through to data brokers, and finally to end clients who use the data itself. The news also shows that while some location firms repeatedly reassure the public that their data is focused on the high level, aggregated, pseudonymous tracking of groups of people, some companies do buy and use location data from a largely unregulated market explicitly for the purpose of identifying specific individuals.

HYAS' location data comes from X-Mode, a company that started with an app named "Drunk Mode," designed to prevent college students from making drunk phone calls and has since pivoted to selling user data from a wide swath of apps. Apps that mention X-Mode in their privacy policies include Perfect365, a beauty app, and other innocuous looking apps such as an MP3 file converter.

"As a TI [threat intelligence] tool it's incredible, but ethically it stinks," a source in the threat intelligence industry who received a demo of HYAS' product told Motherboard. Motherboard granted the source anonymity as they weren't authorized by their company to speak to the press.

Do you work at a location SDK company? Did you used to? Do you know anything else about the sale of location data? We'd love to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, you can contact Joseph Cox securely on Signal on +44 20 8133 5190, Wickr on josephcox, OTR chat on jfcox@jabber.ccc.de, or email joseph.cox@vice.com.

HYAS puts a particular emphasis on identifying the people behind attacks, or "attributing" them, although the actual effectiveness of its products is unclear and may be exaggerated by the firm in marketing material.

"We track threat actors and other bad guys down to their physical doorstep for customers and clients," the LinkedIn profile for HYAS CEO David Ratner reads. HYAS' "Insight" product provides clients with a Google Maps-style interface to interact with the company's datasets, according to HYAS' website. Insight provides access to the firm's "exclusive data sources" and "non-traditional collection mechanisms," the website reads.

A wide range of industries often buy location data to track the movements of crowds of people. Retailers can source the data to see how much foot traffic their store, or maybe one of their competitors, is getting. Real estate companies could use the information to see if a piece of land has the potential to be popular. Marketing firms use location data to identify and target groups with specific commercial or political adverts.

HYAS differs in that it provides a concrete example of a company deliberately sourcing mobile phone location data with the intention of identifying and pinpointing particular people and providing that service to its own clients. Independently of Motherboard, the office of Senator Ron Wyden, which has been investigating the location data market, also discovered HYAS was using mobile location data. A Wyden aide said they had spoken with HYAS about the use of the data. HYAS said the mobile location data is used to unmask people who may be using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to hide their identity, according to the Wyden aide.

In a webinar uploaded to HYAS' website, Todd Thiemann, VP of marketing at the company, describes how HYAS used location data to track a suspected hacker.

"We found out it was the city of Abuja, and on a city block in an apartment building that you can see down there below," he says during the webinar. "We found the command and control domain used for the compromised employees, and used this threat actor's login into the registrar, along with our geolocation granular mobile data to confirm right down to his house. We also got his first and last name, and verified his cellphone with a Nigerian mobile operator."

A screenshot of a webinar given by HYAS, in which the company explains how it has used mobile application location data.

On its website, HYAS claims to have some Fortune 25 companies, large tech firms, as well as law enforcement and intelligence agencies as clients.

Threat intelligence firms generally gather data from a wide range of sources, including hacker forums, private chat rooms, and internet infrastructure such as where websites are hosted, and sell products based on that data and their own analysis to clients. Customers can include banks who want to get a heads-up on whether a freshly dumped cache of stolen credit card data belongs to them; a retailer trying to protect themselves from hackers; or a business checking if any of their employees' login details are being traded by cybercriminals.

Some threat intelligence companies also sell services to government agencies, including the FBI, DHS, and Secret Service. The Department of Justice oftens acknowledges the work of particular threat intelligence companies in the department's announcement of charges or indictments against hackers and other types of criminals.

But some other members of the threat intelligence industry criticized HYAS' use of mobile app location data. The CEO of another threat intelligence firm told Motherboard that their company does not use the same sort of information that HYAS does.

The threat intelligence source who originally alerted Motherboard to HYAS recalled "being super shook at how they collected it," referring to the location data.

A senior employee of a third threat intelligence firm said that location data is not hard to buy.

"As a TI [threat intelligence] tool it's incredible, but ethically it stinks."

A blog post on HYAS' website said that "HYAS Insight 1.1 provides telemetry gleaned from advertising and mobile application location data."

When Motherboard emailed HYAS, it removed the mention of advertising and mobile application location data from its blog post. The blog post added that the Insight product also lets customers determine what other devices or wireless networks are near a device. The post now reads that HYAS "provides precise geolocation telemetry."

"HYAS is in the business of supporting our clients in cyber-criminal investigations. Our business is focused on helping our clients detect and prevent cyber crime," Ratner told Motherboard in an email. The company did not reply when asked why it removed the mention of mobile application location data from its website.

Motherboard found several location data companies that list HYAS in their privacy policies. One of those is X-Mode, a company that plants its own code into ordinary smartphone apps to then harvest location information. An X-Mode spokesperson told Motherboard in an email that the company's data collecting code, or software development kit (SDK), is in over 400 apps and gathers information on 60 million global monthly users on average. X-Mode also develops some of its own apps which use location data, including parental monitoring app PlanC and fitness tracker Burn App.

"Whatever your need, the XDK Visualizer is here to show you that our signature SDK is too legit to quit (literally, it’s always on)," the description for another of X-Code's own apps, which visualizes the company's data collection to attract clients, reads.

"They’re like many location trackers but seem more aggressive to be honest," Will Strafach, founder of the app Guardian, which alerts users to other apps accessing their location data, told Motherboard in an online chat. In January, X-Mode acquired the assets of Location Sciences, another location firm, expanding X-Mode's dataset.

"My bet is that they bet on folks clicking through things without reading the text," Strafach said of app users not necessarily being aware of X-Mode collecting their location data.

A screenshot of the Drunk Mode app available on the Apple App Store.

Motherboard then identified a number of apps whose own privacy policies mention X-Mode. They included Perfect365, a beauty-focused app that people can use to virtually try on different types of makeup with their device's camera.

"I don’t know if my information was used anywhere," Marta, one Perfect365 user, told Motherboard. Marta provided a screenshot of her app settings, showing Perfect365 could access her device’s location.

Gianna, another user, said "[It] bothers me the fact that it asks me for my current location!," she added.

Perfect365's CEO Sean Mao did not respond to a request for comment.

Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at activist group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) told Motherboard that even if a user is presented with some form of consent notice, they may not tangibly understand or know what is happening to their data.

"And that's assuming people even read privacy notices, which they normally don't," she said.

An X-Mode spokesperson told Motherboard in an email that "app users must provide informed consent before their location is tracked," and that the company follows guidelines from the GDPR, CCPA, and other data protection regulation. Users can also opt-out of collection via the company's own app, the email added.

The X-Mode spokesperson added that "Our clients use this data to observe groups of individuals in the aggregate and pseudonymously. X-Mode actively uses two data anonymization techniques—pseudonymization and generalization. We obfuscate any user IDs we collect from all devices and we aggregate devices using generalization. Our clients use these techniques and others to identify trends that are difficult to observe at the individual level, such as trends in mobility."

This stands in stark contrast to what HYAS says it is actually trying to do with that data, however. When pressed on HYAS' deployment of mobile location data to find specific people, X-Mode said "We take our obligations of confidentiality with our clients seriously, and we can't discuss the details of specific clients. I am sure you are aware however that companies such as the one you mentioned use multiple data sources. As we stated, and to reiterate, we contractually prohibit misuses of X-Mode data such as using X-Mode data solely to re-identify individuals."

"The data we obtain is used for these purposes in compliance with all applicable law," Ratner, HYAS' CEO, added.

"Shady data brokers are scooping up databases of private information to create dossiers on individual Americans, without our consent or knowledge," Senator Ron Wyden told Motherboard in a statement. "These databases create enormous risks to our personal safety, privacy and U.S. national security if they fall into the wrong hands. I wrote the Mind Your Own Business Act to crack down on these unsavory practices and put Americans back in control of their own personal information."

Various government agencies have bought access to location data from other companies. Last month, Motherboard found that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) paid $476,000 to a firm that sells phone location data. CBP has used the data to scan parts of the U.S. border, and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tried to use the same data to track criminal suspects but was unsuccessful.

The first threat intelligence source added, describing HYAS' use of mobile location data, "It's shady as fuck."

Private Intel Firm Buys Location Data to Track People to their ‘Doorstep’ syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[hudsonespie]

What the Arctic Reveals About Coronavirus

"Last evening the officers broke up a card game in one cigar store, and left orders that no persons were allowed to congregate or play cards or stand around and talk. Patrons are to make purchases and then get out. There is little danger of contagion so long as people remain in the fresh air.” - Juneau, Alaska, October 18, 1918, as reported in the Alaska Daily Empire

"Among the natives whole families have been wiped out. First made helpless by the disease, then, without attention, they have frozen to death. In superstitious fear of the dead the Eskimos have fled from cabin to cabin, making the task of the authorities in combatting the epidemic more difficult. To care for the Eskimo children, an orphanage has been opened in Nome, with thirty babies as inmates.” - Nome, Alaska, November 15, 1918, as reported in the Alaska Daily Empire

“At Igloo there have been 45 deaths, and at Teller Mission sixty Natives have died. In a small village at York everyone has died. Grave fears are felt for Cape Prince of Wales and the most Western settlement on the mainland. Three dog teams have been sent for relief at Cape Prince of Wales.” - Alaska Daily Empire, December 7, 1918  

A little over a century ago, the “Spanish” flu spread around the world with an astounding speed as millions returned home from the battlegrounds of World War I. (While the virus likely did not actually originate in Spain, the neutral country’s media was the only one within Europe to cover its outbreak sufficiently, as other countries censored reports). Many young men who had survived gruelling trench warfare succumbed to pulmonary hemorrhage, edema, and other respiratory infections caused by a deadly strain of the H1N1 influenza virus. Between 1918 and 1920, it infected 25% of the world’s population, killing between 17 million and 50 million people. Unusually — and unlike with the COVID-19 virus currently ravaging the planet — young people were hit particularly hard.

Exactly one month later in Alaska’s Seward Peninsula, Spanish influenza was reported as “cutting out a fearful swath of death…and now, believed at the turning point in this section, is spreading still farther northward towards the Arctic, and down the coast.”

As travelers wound their way home, the virus penetrated distant corners of the Earth like the Pacific Islands and the Arctic. In October 1918, seven men aged between 18 and 29 sailed 1000 kilometers north from Norway for new jobs in Svalbard’s coal mines. During that fateful voyage, they contracted the Spanish flu. Knocked dead by the virus, the men were interred beneath the permafrost in glaciated Svalbard.

The virus devastated Native communities. Outside the gold mining town of Nome, the Alaska Daily Empire reported in November 1918 that out of 250 Iñupiat in the vicinity, only 75 were left, with “others dying daily.” Underscoring the disturbingly unequal mortality rate of the disease between Natives and Whites, the same article observed, “Nineteen white persons in Nome have succumbed, but conditions among the whites are improving.” While government authorities made efforts to help the Natives, setting up orphanages and sending dog teams and medical care, for instance, Indigenous vulnerability to the virus was exacerbated by the conditions of forced settlements, which were often overcrowded and unhygienic, and the deeper traumas of colonialism. Across the state, children were left orphaned, their parents taken by a flu that originated continents away. Given the stark differences in health and quality of life outcomes between Native and White communities that persist to this day, it is likely that coronavirus will have disproportionate impacts on the two demographics as well.

Photo: Alaska Native orphans of 1918 influenza victims. Credit: Alaska Packers Association. From Alaska Packers Association’s Report on 1919 Influenza Epidemic; Naknek, Nushagak, Kvichak Stations, Bristol Bay, Alaska RA644.I6 A4 1919a. Source: Alaska’s Digital Archives

Unearthing the 1918 influenza from permafrost

In the village of Brevig Mission (then called Teller Mission) north of Nome, the Spanish flu killed 75 out of 80 residents in the span of just five days in November 1918. The community had already experienced a difficult year, losing its mission building to a fire that August (a loss which sadly parallels the fire that consumed the school in the village of Kaktovik just last month).

After the horrifyingly swift spate of flu deaths, the Alaska territorial government sent gold miners up from Nome to use steam points to dig a mass grave in the permafrost two meters beneath the surface. One of the flu victims lain to rest there was a heavyset Iñupiaq woman. Little did the dead know that one day, one of their frozen lungs would be cut out in a quest to understand exactly why the post-war pandemic was so deadly.

In 1951, Johan Hultin, a young Swedish-American pathologist, traveled to Brevig Mission after learning of the mass grave. Since it had been encased in permafrost for decades, he believed that frozen, infected lung tissue might still store intact virus material. Hultin received permission from Elders to exhume some of the bodies, from which lung tissue was obtained. Efforts to revive the virus failed, however, and Hultin gave up on his mission — at least for a while.

In a tale of scientific commitment and perseverance, nearly four decades later at the age of 72, Hultin came across the work of an American virologist named Jeffrey Taubenberger, who was also studying the 1918 influenza. Inspired by his work, Hultin, using $3,200 in personal savings, led a team of pathologists on a return journey to Brevig Mission. A special meeting of the city council agreed to let the grave be reopened. Hultin and his colleagues identified that one of the bodies — that of the obese woman — had enough fat stores to have kept the internal organs from decomposing during brief periods of permafrost thaw, therefore preserving the virus. The scientists biopsied the lung tissue at the site of the grave. With the procured material, they were successfully able to sequence one of the genes in the virus for the first time.

Hultin’s herculean effort was complemented by a team of scientists working on the other side of the Arctic in Svalbard. On an island more famous for storing frozen seeds today than frozen viruses, scientists successfully exhumed six of the seven bodies of the would-be young miners after obtaining permission from their families. Their resting places were located one meter beneath the surface with the help of ground penetrating radar, which can peer beneath the Earth’s surface, whether composed of soil or ice. In 2005, using a variety of lung tissue samples including one from the deceased Iñupiaq woman in Brevig Mission, Taubenberger’s team finally completely sequenced the 1918 influenza virus and determined that it had an avian origin.

While the work of these researchers continues to be heralded, especially as the world confronts a new flu epidemic, it is also important to acknowledge the local and Indigenous who make their studies possible. In a 1998 interview, Hultin expressed, “The only sample we (found was) there because the elders of Brevig Mission let me go back into the grave again…They gave us the opportunity to do something good — not just for themselves but for the whole world.”

As Earth warms, viruses will be lost and gained

Scientists were able to uncover the origins of the mysterious 1918 influenza virus thanks to the icy band of permafrost that stretches around the top of the planet. Underlying much of the Arctic, the thick layer of soil that has been frozen for at least two years has kept everything from enormous mammals like wooly mammoths to microscopic particles like viruses encase in the ground. Across the North, however, this permafrost is rapidly thawing, as a recent dataset published by the European Space Agency’s Climate Initiative illustrates.

As the ground beneath the Arctic cracks and melts, viruses long locked into the soil escape. One potential threat in Russia is anthrax, a highly toxic bacteria endemic to the country and which thrives among its domesticated and wild ungulate populations, namely reindeer, when they go unvaccinated. In the 1920s, anthrax was so prevalent and so devastating to reindeer on the Yamal Peninsula that it became known nationwide as the “Yamal disease.” Those early outbreaks had a fatal echo a century later in August 2016, when a young boy died and twenty people were hospitalized after being exposed to anthrax. It’s believed that during the hot dry summer of 2016, these infections were caused by the exposure of a reindeer carcass that had been infected 75 years ago.

Permafrost decay can release long hidden bacteria and viruses into the environment, threatening the health of both people and animals. The loss of this frozen ground may also cause the loss of information regarding past epidemics that could help us fight present ones or even prevent future ones. Forget trying to resuscitate mammoths: had scientists lacked access to the well-preserved bodies at Brevig Mission, society might have an even weaker understanding of the 1918 influenza, whose precise origins and particular deadliness for young people still baffle scientists.

A better grasp of historic flu pandemics can help researchers come to grips with ongoing ones like coronavirus and those in the future that humanity will undoubtedly face again. Climate change mitigation – particularly keeping permafrost frozen – therefore doesn’t just promise benefits for the environment. Preserving ice can directly aid epidemiology and public health, too.

Arctic communities remain vulnerable to viruses

A few weeks ago, as I was sitting at my desk in Hong Kong after returning from fieldwork on Alaska’s North Slope, an urgent email popped up in my inbox. A contact in Utqia?vik, Alaska had gotten in touch to say that at the North Slope Borough Assembly Meeting in late February, someone from the village of Kaktovik had raised the concern that after speaking with me, someone who appeared Chinese, in late January, he felt unwell and developed a cough. I hadn’t been sick at the time and hadn’t traveled to Mainland China, so I at first felt his concern was unwarranted.

Yet upon reflection, given the devastating effects that respiratory diseases have had on Arctic and particularly Native and Indigenous communities in the past, anxieties about coronavirus are understandable. Beginning in the late 1700s, settlers, miners, fur trappers, and other new arrivals to Alaska imported tuberculosis. By the 1930s, Alaska had some of the highest rates of infection of the disease that the world has ever seen. The deadly bacteria was responsible for some 35% of Native deaths each year, making it the single highest cause of mortality. To this day, Alaska suffers some of the highest number of cases of tuberculosis in the United States.

Source: Fellows, F. S. (1934). Mortality in the native races of the Territory of Alaska, with special reference to tuberculosis. Public Health Reports (1896-1970), 289-298.

Coronavirus is a global pandemic. The number of infected cases in the Arctic shows that it has already quickly reached the planet’s more remote fringes just as the 1918 influenza did a century prior. Just yesterday, Iceland saw its first person to succumb to coronavirus. It was not an Icelander who died, but, in a morbid indicator of the breadth of the country’s tourism industry, a 36-year-old Australian man.

In light of the dire state of healthcare in many Alaskan villages and in the wider Arctic, it is critical that strict measures are taken to prevent the further spread of coronavirus. Greenland’s decision to suspend all air travel for two weeks both to and within the island nation may seem drastic. But in a place without roads and where flying is commonplace (features common across much of the Arctic), restrictions on aviation may be temporarily necessary to curb the virus’ spread.

With the lack of hospitals and clinics in the north (not to mention ventilators) it is already hard enough to control infections and diseases that humans have long known about such as anthrax and tuberculosis. Let us hope that the hundred-year-old biological residues of a deadly virus dug up from the Arctic’s frozen recesses can inform how we react to the pandemic unfurling today. And while coronavirus seems to be an imminent and pressing danger that makes the threat of climate change seem slow and even inconsequential in comparison, we should not forget that the long game of halting its tide and keeping permafrost frozen may also hold the keys to averting future viral catastrophes.

Mia Bennett is an assistant professor in the University of Hong Kong's Department of Geography and School of Modern Languages & Cultures. She specializes in the politics of infrastructure development in the Arctic and combines fieldwork and remote sensing in her research.

This article appears courtesy of Cryopolitics and may be found in its original form here. 

from Storage Containers https://maritime-executive.com/article/what-the-arctic-reveals-about-coronavirus via http://www.rssmix.com/

[endenogatai]

Google is now publishing coronavirus mobility reports, feeding off users’ location history

Google is giving the world a clearer glimpse of exactly how much it knows about people everywhere — using the coronavirus crisis as an opportunity to repackage its persistent tracking of where users go and what they do as a public good in the midst of a pandemic.

In a blog post today, the tech giant announced the publication of what it’s branding COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports, an in-house analysis of the much more granular location data it maps and tracks to fuel its ad-targeting, product development and wider commercial strategy to showcase aggregated changes in population movements around the world.

The coronavirus pandemic has generated a worldwide scramble for tools and data to inform government responses. In the EU, for example, the European Commission has been leaning on telcos to hand over anonymized and aggregated location data to model the spread of COVID-19.

Google’s data dump looks intended to dangle a similar idea of public policy utility while providing an eyeball-grabbing public snapshot of mobility shifts via data pulled off of its global user-base.

In terms of actual utility for policymakers, Google’s suggestions are pretty vague. The reports could help government and public health officials “understand changes in essential trips that can shape recommendations on business hours or inform delivery service offerings,” it writes.

“Similarly, persistent visits to transportation hubs might indicate the need to add additional buses or trains in order to allow people who need to travel room to spread out for social distancing,” it goes on. “Ultimately, understanding not only whether people are traveling, but also trends in destinations, can help officials design guidance to protect public health and essential needs of communities.”

The location data Google is making public is similarly fuzzy — to avoid inviting a privacy storm — with the company writing it’s using “the same world-class anonymization technology that we use in our products every day,” as it puts it.

“For these reports, we use differential privacy, which adds artificial noise to our datasets enabling high quality results without identifying any individual person,” Google writes. “The insights are created with aggregated, anonymized sets of data from users who have turned on the Location History setting, which is off by default.”

“In Google Maps, we use aggregated, anonymized data showing how busy certain types of places are—helping identify when a local business tends to be the most crowded. We have heard from public health officials that this same type of aggregated, anonymized data could be helpful as they make critical decisions to combat COVID-19,” it adds, tacitly linking an existing offering in Google Maps to a coronavirus-busting cause.

The reports consist of per country, or per state, downloads (with 131 countries covered initially), further broken down into regions/counties — with Google offering an analysis of how community mobility has changed vs a baseline average before COVID-19 arrived to change everything.

So, for example, a March 29 report for the whole of the U.S. shows a 47 per cent drop in retail and recreation activity vs the pre-CV period; a 22% drop in grocery & pharmacy; and a 19% drop in visits to parks and beaches, per Google’s data.

While the same date report for California shows a considerably greater drop in the latter (down 38% compared to the regional baseline); and slightly bigger decreases in both retail and recreation activity (down 50%) and grocery & pharmacy (-24%).

Google says it’s using “aggregated, anonymized data to chart movement trends over time by geography, across different high-level categories of places such as retail and recreation, groceries and pharmacies, parks, transit stations, workplaces, and residential.” The trends are displayed over several weeks, with the most recent information representing 48-to-72 hours prior, it adds.

The company says it’s not publishing the “absolute number of visits” as a privacy step, adding: “To protect people’s privacy, no personally identifiable information, like an individual’s location, contacts or movement, is made available at any point.”

Google’s location mobility report for Italy, which remains the European country hardest hit by the virus, illustrates the extent of the change from lockdown measures applied to the population — with retail & recreation dropping 94% vs Google’s baseline; grocery & pharmacy down 85%; and a 90% drop in trips to parks and beaches.

The same report shows an 87% drop in activity at transit stations; a 63% drop in activity at workplaces; and an increase of almost a quarter (24%) of activity in residential locations — as many Italians stay at home instead of commuting to work.

It’s a similar story in Spain — another country hard-hit by COVID-19. Though Google’s data for France suggests instructions to stay-at-home may not be being quite as keenly observed by its users there, with only an 18% increase in activity at residential locations and a 56% drop in activity at workplaces. (Perhaps because the pandemic has so far had a less severe impact on France, although numbers of confirmed cases and deaths continue to rise across the region.)

While policymakers have been scrambling for data and tools to inform their responses to COVID-19, privacy experts and civil liberties campaigners have rushed to voice concerns about the impacts of such data-fueled efforts on individual rights, while also querying the wider utility of some of this tracking.

And yes, the disclaimer is very broad. I'd say, this is largely a PR move.

Apart from this, Google must be held accountable for its many other secondary data uses. And Google/Alphabet is far too powerful, which must be addressed at several levels, soon. https://t.co/oksJgQAPAY

— Wolfie Christl (@WolfieChristl) April 3, 2020

Contacts tracing is another area where apps are fast being touted as a potential solution to get the West out of economically crushing population lockdowns — opening up the possibility of people’s mobile devices becoming a tool to enforce lockdowns, as has happened in China.

“Large-scale collection of personal data can quickly lead to mass surveillance,” is the succinct warning of a trio of academics from London’s Imperial College’s Computational Privacy Group, who have compiled their privacy concerns vis-a-vis COVID-19 contacts tracing apps into a set of eight questions app developers should be asking.

Discussing Google’s release of mobile location data for a COVID-19 cause, the head of the group, Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, gave a general thumbs up to the steps it’s taken to shrink privacy risks. Although he also called for Google to provide more detail about the technical processes it’s using in order that external researchers can better assess the robustness of the claimed privacy protections. Such scrutiny is of pressing importance with so much coronavirus-related data grabbing going on right now, he argues.

“It is all aggregated; they normalize to a specific set of dates; they threshold when there are too few people and on top of this they add noise to make — according to them — the data differentially private. So from a pure anonymization perspective it’s good work,” de Montjoye told TechCrunch, discussing the technical side of Google’s release of location data. “Those are three of the big ‘levers’ that you can use to limit risk. And I think it’s well done.”

“But — especially in times like this when there’s a lot of people using data — I think what we would have liked is more details. There’s a lot of assumptions on thresholding, on how do you apply differential privacy, right?… What kind of assumptions are you making?” he added, querying how much noise Google is adding to the data, for example. “It would be good to have a bit more detail on how they applied [differential privacy]… Especially in times like this it is good to be… overly transparent.”

While Google’s mobility data release might appear to overlap in purpose with the Commission’s call for EU telco metadata for COVID-19 tracking, de Montjoye points out there are likely to be key differences based on the different data sources.

“It’s always a trade off between the two,” he says. “It’s basically telco data would probably be less fine-grained, because GPS is much more precise spatially and you might have more data points per person per day with GPS than what you get with mobile phone but on the other hand the carrier/telco data is much more representative — it’s not only smartphone, and it’s not only people who have latitude on, it’s everyone in the country, including non smartphone.”

There may be country specific questions that could be better addressed by working with a local carrier, he also suggested. (The Commission has said it’s intending to have one carrier per EU Member State providing anonymized and aggregated metadata.)

On the topical question of whether location data can ever be truly anonymized, de Montjoye — an expert in data reidentification — gave a “yes and no” response, arguing that original location data is “probably really, really hard to anonymize”.

“Can you process this data and make the aggregate results anonymous? Probably, probably, probably yes — it always depends. But then it also means that the original data exists… Then it’s mostly a question of the controls you have in place to ensure the process that leads to generating those aggregates does not contain privacy risks,” he added.

Perhaps a bigger question related to Google’s location data dump is around the issue of legal consent to be tracking people in the first place.

While the tech giant claims the data is based on opt-ins to location tracking the company was fined $57M by France’s data watchdog last year for a lack of transparency over how it uses people’s data.

Then, earlier this year, the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) — now the lead privacy regulator for Google in Europe — confirmed a formal probe of the company’s location tracking activity, following a 2018 complaint by EU consumers groups which accuses Google of using manipulative tactics in order to keep tracking web users’ locations for ad-targeting purposes.

“The issues raised within the concerns relate to the legality of Google’s processing of location data and the transparency surrounding that processing,” said the DPC in a statement in February, announcing the investigation.

The legal questions hanging over Google’s consent to track people likely explains the repeat references in its blog post to people choosing to opt in and having the ability to clear their Location History via settings. (“Users who have Location History turned on can choose to turn the setting off at any time from their Google Account, and can always delete Location History data directly from their Timeline,” it writes in one example.)

In addition to offering up coronavirus mobility porn reports — which Google specifies it will continue to do throughout the crisis — the company says it’s collaborating with “select epidemiologists working on COVID-19 with updates to an existing aggregate, anonymized dataset that can be used to better understand and forecast the pandemic.”

“Data of this type has helped researchers look into predicting epidemics, plan urban and transit infrastructure, and understand people’s mobility and responses to conflict and natural disasters,” it adds.

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