DataDownload: Approaching the edge of autocracy

7 min readAug 8, 2020

DataDownload: Approaching the edge of autocracy A weekly summary of all things Media, Data, Emerging Tech View this email in your browser

Today we’re thinking about the 88 days ahead. Whatever your political persuasion — the battles being waged will have serious impact. Did technology break democracy? Lots of smart folks would argue yes. So, fellow technologists — how about adopting the famous slogan of every big-box retailer. “You break it, you buy it.” So, time to fix things — which is certainly more than the 88 days of work.

Meanwhile, there’s some good progress on the Deepfakes front. The Atlantic has a must-read about the SCMP’s relationship with Beijing. Institutional Investor has an interesting take on Henry Blodget.

And, if you’re resting up for what promises to be an intensely aerobic fall — check out Dr. Snooze’s TED Talk. Because getting better rest may be the key to surviving the months ahead. The NY Times podcast The Daily invites Jack Dorsey to take responsibility for Twitter — which he does, sort of.

And the commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment Anne del Castillo gives media folk a glimpse into the future. She’s straight-up about what’s coming, and what will be hard. Well worth a listen.

So, if you have to take just one link this week, make it Dr. Snooze — because, hey — it’s nap time. Until then, see you next week.

Steve (steve@nycmedialab.org)

Steven Rosenbaum
Managing Director
The NYC Media Lab
Steve@NYCMediaLab.org Must-Read Inside the Hong Kong Newsroom at the Edge of Autocracy

Last year Hong Kong police chased suspected protesters into a subway station, battering them and dousing them with pepper spray. It was a terrifying moment, and the first draft of an SCMP piece described “chaotic and shocking scenes” and “cowering commuters.” But the published version ran a bit different, describing “elite” police and “radical” protesters. The vilifying of protestors had become a common occurrence in the SCMP newsroom during the months of the protests, and journalists grew increasingly frustrated as their work got edited before reaching the front page.

The 117-year-old paper is unrivaled in Hong Kong’s English publication space, with currently 50M MAUs (note though that the SCMP is banned in China). But there’s been increased scrutiny since Alibaba bought the paper in 2015, and worries have surfaced about the paper being slowly transformed into a conduit for mainland propaganda. The Atlantic dives into the paper’s recent history, its willingness to cooperate with Beijing since the acquisition, and the actions of senior editors.

19 min read

Henry Blodget, a Wall Street analyst best remembered for hist bullish views on Amazon in the late 90s (at a time when most were the exact opposite), fell from grace in 2003 after setting charges for civil securities fraud. He was then banned for life from working in the financial services industry.

Four years later he founded Business Insider, a publication that went on to be sold to Axel Springer for $343M in 2015 and now has 275M monthly readers. Institutional Investor recounts Blodget’s comeback story, his dealings with Jeff Bezos, and his vast ambitions for the future of the paper.

20 min read

Read More Tech+Media Meet Yinka Ibukun, the New West Africa Bureau Chief for Bloomberg News Yinka Ibukun is Bloomberg’s new West Africa bureau chief. Concordia University — Ibukun’s alma mater — interviewed her about the new job, the BLM protests, and her life. as bureau chief, Ibukun is responsible for the coverage of 20 countries. To help her choose which topics to cover, she leverages an AI tool provided by Bloomberg to sort through potential stories:

“The tool allows you to ‘thumbs-up’ or ‘thumbs-down’ suggestions to teach the machine what you find interesting. At the moment, I’m teaching it to catch core Bloomberg stories, like anything relating to cocoa — the two biggest markets in my region, Ghana and Ivory Coast, account for more than 60 percent of the world’s production.”

7 min read Read More System for Thwarting Deepfakes Unveiled The Content Authenticity Initiative, a group building a system to “provide provenance and history for digital media,” aimed at creators and consumers — recently released a whitepaper describing an open standard for photo and video authentication that can be built into hardware (cameras, smartphones) and software (Photoshop) to help detect synthetic media (read: misinformation, disinformation).

“The system would record a digital signature when a photo or video is first taken, and then again each time it’s edited in any way. Users would be able to see that record of the imagery’s origin and any changes that have been made to it.”

2 min read Read More Service That Uses AI to Identify Gender Based on Names Looks Incredibly Biased

Soon after gender verification API Genderify launched on Product Hunt, social media users posted evidence of bias and inaccuracies. For example, putting “Dr” in front of a name shifted results for Meghan Smith from “Male: 39.60%, Female: 60.40%” to “Male: 75.90%, Female: 24.10%.” In fact, the backlash has been so intense that the service was shut down (you probably already saw the 503 error). The Verge outlines the response from the tech community, the potential harm the service can cause, and the company’s reply.

3 min read

TED recently posted a brief but entertaining clip on the innovations around sleep throughout history. It’s fun, but if you want to get deeper into the science of sleep, we recommend Dan Gartenberg’s talk from 2017. Gartenberg discusses deep sleeps health benefits and how to induce it by playing certain sounds.

6 min watch

Watch Now What We’re Listening To Podcast: ‎Jack Dorsey on Twitter’s Mistakes on Apple Podcasts

Two recommendations this week, starting with NY Times’ The Daily, this episode featuring Jack Dorsey, who discusses Twitter’s flaws, potential, and future — timely interview, considering the recent arrest of a 17-year-old who allegedly hacked the Twitter accounts of some of the world’s famous.

We also wanted to add a second recommendation: Variety’s Strictly Business podcast, which speaks with NY’s commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment Anne del Castillo. Castillo discusses the difficult comeback film and TV producers face in the midst of social distancing. Check it out here.

39 min listen

Listen Now Virtual Events Virtual Event: Fireside Chat with Jim McKelvey, Co-Founder of Square
Date: August 11, 12PM-1PM
A fireside chat with serial entrepreneur, inventor, philanthropist, artist, and author, Jim McKelvey to discuss his new book, The Innovation Stack. Register Here.

Virtual Event: Building a Career in Data Science
Date: August 12, 6PM-7PM
Hear from data scientist Raul Vallejo as he shares first-hand experiences on how he built a career in data science and what it’s like to work in the field today. Register Here. A Deeper Look The Five Important Trends in Data, and the One Megatrend Powering Them All

Over at the first cloud data lake conference — aptly titled Subsurface Conference — Tom Tunguz gave a presentation covering major trends in the data world, which he sums up in this blog.

Underpinning these trends is one mega-trend: the rise of the data engineer, the people who “move, shape, and transform data from the source to the tools that extract insight.” Tunguz believes data engineers are the change agents in a “decade-long process that will revolutionize data.” He lists five major trends:

“New data pipelines that use modern computer languages to create reusable abstractions for data processing.” Innovators: Dagster, Airflow, and Prefect.
“Compute engines query data in the cloud without having to move it.” Innovators: Dremio and Databricks.
“Data modeling curates a data catalog for all the metrics within a company.” Innovators: Looker.
Data products are analyses, experiments, reports, and machine learning models/products built on data.” Innovators: Preset, Streamlit, and Tecton.
“Data quality tools monitor data streams, identify anomalies, create testing harnesses to ensure data is always accurate.” Innovators: SodaData, Great Expectations.