Some of the most fascinating topics covered this week are PoliTech (Facebook's connection with Brexit), Technology (The ugly truth about face recognition), Management (Akbar Nawas' winning formula), Work-Life (World's most successful people get enough sleep), Society (Racial bias built into photography) and Economics (Time to write the epitaph for Capitalism?).
At Ambit, we spend a lot of time reading articles that cover a wide gamut of topics, ranging from zeitgeist to futuristic, and encapsulate them in our weekly ‘Ten Interesting Things’ product. Some of the most fascinating topics covered this week are PoliTech (Facebook’s connection with Brexit), Technology (The ugly truth about face recognition), Management (Akbar Nawas’ winning formula), Work-Life (World’s most successful people get enough sleep), Society (Racial bias built into photography) and Economics (Time to write the epitaph for Capitalism?).
Here are the ten most interesting pieces that we read this week, ended May 3, 2019
1. Carole Cadwalladr: Facebook's role in Brexit -- and the threat to democracy [Source: TED Talk]
Carole Cadwalladr, a British journalist, in this Ted Talk digs deep into one of the most perplexing events in recent times: the UK's super-close 2016 vote to leave the European Union. She had to go to South Wales to write a report. She went to this town called Ebbw Vale because in this town 62% of the population voted to leave the EU. And she wanted to know why. The town had changed drastically and had good infrastructure which was funded by the EU. So, why did so many people vote to leave? The main reason why they wanted to leave EU was because of immigrants and refugees; at least that’s what they all told Carole. But, Carole didn’t come across a single immigrant or refugee during her stay in the town.
When she checked the figures, it showed that Ebbw Vale had the lowest rates of immigration in the country. She thought, from where are the people getting information. Soon she realised that most of them were gaining information, knowingly or unknowingly, through Facebook. But you can’t research these as these feeds or ads vanish in few minutes. So there’s no trace of it. The UK government had asked answers from Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, but he refused them. What Carole and other journalists uncovered was that multiple crimes took place during the referendum and they took place on Facebook.
Hate and fear are sown in all around the world. And it is the same with Brexit. The technology that has been invented is amazing but now it’s a crime scene. And just by saying we’ll do better in the future makes no sense. To stop this from happening again, we have to know the truth. We might think that people are smarter and it’s just a few ads. To which Carole says, “Good luck to that”. What the Brexit vote demonstrates is that liberal democracy is broken. Spreading lies in the darkness, paid for with illegal cash, is not democracy. The British government has tried, but it has failed. It’s not about ‘leave’ or ‘remain’, Trump or not, fair or not, free or not, but about whether we can have a fair election ever again.
2. Who’s using your face? The ugly truth about facial recognition [Source: Financial Times]
This article throws light on how your photo can be used by the government without your knowledge for some intelligence purpose. Jillian York, a 36-year-old American activist, was shocked when she realised that her pictures were used by a firm without her knowledge. York is one of 3,500 subjects in this database, which is known as Iarpa Janus Benchmark-C (IJB-C). Iarpa is a US government body that funds innovative research aimed at giving the US intelligence community a competitive advantage; Janus, named after the two-faced Roman god, is its facial-recognition initiative. The dataset, which was compiled by a government subcontractor called Noblis, includes a total of 21,294 images of faces (there are other body parts too), averaging six pictures and three videos per person, and is available on application to researchers in the field.