Originally shared by Anne-Marie Clark
The url is a much better title than the headline:
Faith in humanity restored wholesome happy random acts of kindness
At about 200 items uploaded so far. Pics from around the world.
via Jennifer Freeman & Valkyrie
Via John Lewis.
Originally shared by ****
One for Edward Morbius’ “Data are liability” file.
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This is a thread for those of you who say coders and developers should take no role in politics. Those of you who watched my #WCLDN talk last year already heard this story. You can hear it again.
This was Rene Carmille, and that is a punch card. Image of Rene Carmille
Rene Carmille was the comptroller general of the French army. He eventually headed up the French census. Census data – innocuous, straightforward facts about people – was tabulated on IBM punch cards. Then the Nazis came.
Rene Carmille had all the data about all the people. He saw what the Nazis wanted to do with that data. So he made a decision about what to do with it. He did his job, externally, for the Nazis, of course.
In the background, he sifted through the data to find recruits for the French Resistance. He and his team went further than that. They did things like leave boxes of census records – thousands of people’s data – in a back room, unprocessed.
Then he and his team engaged in – if not invented – ethical hacking. They physically hacked their IBM punch card machines so that nothing could be entered into column 11: religion. That data, for those thousands of people, was missing.
He and his team were caught, and interrogated, and tortured. Rene Carmille died at Dachau. I have been there. There is a smell of burning flesh in the air. It is still there.
As is his legacy. In the Netherlands, 73% of Dutch Jews were found, deported, and executed. In France, that figure was 25%. It was that much lower because they couldn’t find them.
They couldn’t find them because Rene Carmille and his team got political and hacked the data.
On #HolocaustMemorialDay , as the people in the data we collect and store and share face threats we never thought we would see again, you need to be prepared to go that far when the day comes when it is you handling the data.
You can, and you will.
And in reply: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/957722588641419266.html
This seems like a good place to mention that the US Bureau of the Census likes to talk about how strict they are about privacy, even once turning away FBI agents who arrived at the Colorado Springs BOC office with a warrant for confidential Census data. But…
…during WWII the BOC provided block-by-block data on people of Japanese ancestry for the purpose of sending them to concentration camps, something that was officially denied or simply ignored until records research confirmed it in 2000. And…
…in 1943, the BOC provided specific names and addresses of all persons of Japanese ancestry in the Washington DC area, on the request of the US Treasury Secretary, which was also denied until further research confirmed it in 2007.
And the specifics of the request and response indicate that other requests may have been made and fulfilled prior to the one now documented, to the extent that this was then a routine transaction.
What especially disturbs me personally about this is that I worked on a federal contract for BOC from 2007-2008 and again from 2012-2014. Our mandatory data-confidentiality training included the Colorado Springs story…
…but no acknowledgement that the Census Bureau had ever been less than perfect and morally upright in its protection of the confidentiality of respondents’ data.
has officially apologized for the WWII block-level data disclosures, but this is far from just ancient history: in 2004 records requests revealed the previous year, BOC supplied ZIP-code-level data on residents of Arab ancestry broken down by nationality to DHS…
…only apparently later requesting the required statement justifying the need for such data.
When popular fervor or official policy turns against a group, we must not assume that things we always thought were bulwarks against abuse actually were or will continue to be — in fact they are often turned into tools of the very oppression they are supposed to protect against.
Sources: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/confirmed-the-us-census-b/
This is well worth a read.
Originally shared by Kymberlyn Reed
#morethan28days
If the future is better than the past, it will be because of people like this.
Originally shared by Self-Rescuing Princess Society
“It is an honor and a great responsibility to be part of the network that gathers the best of the best of women (and some great men) from across the Middle East, Asia, and Africa and now Latin America, who have the same issue to fight, who face radicalization and foster sustainable peace. I found a diversity of expertise. We have the common goal, and I am learning from them and they are learning from me. It was a blessing to have women from different ages, backgrounds and religions come together. I want to have that wisdom to represent my community.”
You’ve heard of Alan Turing. But what about Elizabeth Friedman?
Like me, she ended up in a technical profession from an arts background – but her job was breaking codes.
Originally shared by Jennifer Ouellette
This Woman Saved the Americas From the Nazis. Pioneering codebreaker Elizebeth Friedman, a poet and mother of two, smashed spy rings by solving secret messages. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/10/elizebeth-friedman-codebreaker-nazi-spy-fagone/
I listened to this very moving podcast on my way home yesterday.
It’s about a Somali main who becomes a political prisoner of the regime and is kept in solitary confinement. His only human contact is when his friend in the next cell teaches him how to tap out code, letter by letter, on their shared wall.
Then his friend gets a book. Anna Karenina. And he reads it to the guy. All 800 pages. By tapping it out, letter by letter, on the wall.
And it helps him in completely unexpected ways that are thought-provoking from a writer’s POV.
Via Ryan Toxopeus.
I don’t know about you, but if my first draft is vaguely coherent and resembles a novel in the way that, say, Swamp Thing resembles a human being, I take the win.
Originally shared by Nicola Smith
Sage advice from a Hugo-award-winning, million-dollar-book-deal author:
Via Lisa Cohen, like all the stories in my Kindness collection so far.
Originally shared by ****
When they realized they were stuck, they decided to keep themselves busy and help the community and made as many loaves of bread as they could. By the time the owner managed to get to them, they had made so much bread that we took the loaves to loads of emergency centers across the city for people affected by the floods.
“We didn’t count exactly how many loaves they made, but they used 4,400 pounds [1,996kg] of flour.”
Based on fruit flies.
Originally shared by Singularity Hub
It’s not every day you meet a high school student who’s been building functional robots since age 10. Then again, Mihir Garimella is definitely not your average teenager.
Via Deborah Teramis Christian.
Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh
Nice work. “When 16-year-old Kavya Kopparapu wasn’t attending conferences, giving speeches, presiding over her school’s bioinformatics society, organizing a research symposium, playing piano, and running a non-profit, she worried about what to do with all her free time.
[…]
Of 415 million diabetics worldwide, one-third will develop retinopathy. Fifty percent will be undiagnosed. Of patients with severe forms, half will go blind in five years. Most will be poor.
“The lack of diagnosis is the biggest challenge,” Kopparapu says. “In India, there are programs that send doctors into villages and slums, but there are a lot of patients and only so many ophthalmologists.” What if there were a cheap, easy way for local clinicians to find new cases and refer them to a hospital?
That was the genesis of Eyeagnosis, a smartphone app plus 3D-printed lens that seeks to change the diagnostic procedure from a 2-hour exam requiring a multi-thousand-dollar retinal imager to a quick photo snap with a phone.
Kopparapu and her team—including her 15-year-old brother, Neeyanth, and her high school classmate Justin Zhang—trained an artificial intelligence system to recognize signs of diabetic retinopathy in photos of eyes and offer a preliminary diagnosis. She presented the system at the O’Reilly Artificial Intelligence conference, in New York City, last month.
“The device is ideal for making screening much more efficient and available to a broader population,” says J. Fielding Hejtmancik, an expert in visual diseases at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Other research groups, including Google and Peek Vision, have recently announced similar systems, but Hejtmancik is impressed with the students’ ingenuity. “These kids have put things together in a very nice way that’s a bit cheaper and simpler than most [systems designed by researchers]—who, by the way, all have advanced degrees!”
[…]
Hejtmancik, the NIH expert, notes that there’s a long road to clinical adoption. “What she’s going to need is a lot of clinical data showing that [Eyeagnosis] is reliable under a variety of situations: in eye hospitals, in the countryside, in clinics out in the boonies of India,” he says.
Still, Hejtmancik thinks the system has real commercial potential. The only problem, he says, is that it’s so cheap that big companies might not see the potential for a profit margin. But that affordability “is exactly what you want in medical care, in my opinion,” he says.”
Harish Pillay Jyoti Q Dahiya