DataDownload: Boma Global is hosting a virtual COVID-19 summit… here’s how to join
DataDownload: Boma Global is hosting a virtual COVID-19 summit… here’s how to join A weekly summary of all things Media, Data, Emerging Tech View this email in your browser
So — yeah. It’s pretty real.
But here at NYC Media Lab, we’re focused on keeping our programs vibrant in our new Virtual platform offering. It takes some getting used to, but we’re adjusting — how about you?
Meanwhile — read on for some smart thinking about photos and data privacy and the powerful connection between journalism and democracy.
And the MIT Tech Review ranks COVID-19 dashboards.
We’re working with our friends at Boma to support an extraordinary virtual gathering of COVID-19 doctors, scientists, and experts.
Plus, our EVENTS calendar goes 100% virtual — join in to the virtual events that are relevant and get involved.
And — let us know what we can promote and share with our community. We’re all in this together.
Write me: Steve@NYCMediaLab.org.
Cheers,
Steven Rosenbaum
Managing Director
The NYC Media Lab Must-Read Global Virtual Summit on COVID-19 launched
In a week (March 23rd) Boma Global — the brainchild of TEDx founder Lara Stein- will host a virtual summit in partnership with Zoom to illuminate the early lessons we can learn from the COVID-19 outbreak and explore specific plans of action to address it. The Boma COVID-19 Summit will feature more than 20 hours of debate and discussion by health experts, policymakers, business leaders and innovators. The event is open to the public.
As leaders in technology and media, we at NYCML are looking to support Boma, and the use of tech to facilitate virtual events that can provide information about COVID-19 with high-quality content partners.
Sign up and register here — it’s free.
Register Here Journalism’s Market Failure Is a Crisis for Democracy Co-director at Media Inequality and Change Center at UPenn Victor Pickard traces the decline of journalism’s 150-year-old ad-based business model. With the industry losing an estimated tens of billions of dollars in ad revenue over the past few decades, paywalls and/or sensational content have become methods of mitigating collapse — especially by beleaguered local news outlets.
Packard’s point is that the industry’s current business model is incompatible with a healthy democracy — so he suggests a new model: “the surest way to protect journalism from market failure is a well-funded public media system.” Though, the US seems to be the outlier here:
“The US… tends to treat news and information more like commodities than public goods. And it’s a global outlier among democracies for how little it spends on public media. The U.S. federal government allocates around $1.35 per person per year for public broadcasting, while Japan spends over $40 per citizen, the UK about $100, and Norway over $176.”
8 min read Read More For the Media What Are My Photos Revealing About Me?
A photo reveals a thousand personal data points… as the saying goes. Besides time and location information, peripheral data can be extracted from shared photos using open source intelligence (OSINT) techniques — regardless if you masked your metadata or not. The Markup suggests a few things to keep in mind before posting that photo up:
- Uploading an image with a face on Yandex reveals similar faces. The search engine uses a “powerful face-matching technology” that works differently than Google’s Reverse Image Search — see the image below.
- Obscuring geolocation isn’t a foolproof way to hide your whereabouts. “Buildings, trees, bridges, utility poles, antennas…. license plates, store and street signs, billboards, even T-shirts” give clues to your location. Google uses CV to autotag locations and software like PeakVisor can automatically detect certain locations.
- Meteorological data can reveal when a photo was taken: “WolframAlpha provides detailed historical meteorological data for any weather station (think zip code level)… that could help confirm the time and date that a photo was taken.”
9 min read
Read More The Best, and the Worst, of the Coronavirus Dashboards MIT Technology Review ranks 10 COVID-19 dashboards (from best to worst), from Singapore’s clean, simple, and transparent dashboard (you can see cases by gender and nationality, how many patients are hospitalized or discharged, etc.), to the Hong Kong government’s clunky GeoCities-esque page.
8 min read Read More Facebook Slaps “Partly False” Label on Trump-Endorsed Video of Biden
Twitter’s new policy banning “deceptively shared” media was recently put into action when the company said it would label an edited political video by White House social media director Dan Scavino as “manipulated media.” Apparently, the label only showed up for some users — a Twitter spokesperson said the company was working on a fix.
Meanwhile, Facebook also attached a warning to the same video, noting that it contained “partly false information checked by independent fact-checkers.”
2 min read
Read More What We’re Watching Why Modern Chemistry Still Needs Glassblowers
Verge Science met up with a third-generation glassblower who specializes in scientific glassblowing. Modern chemistry still relies on unique glass instruments — which require both seasoned craftsmanship and a background in chemistry to make. While the 3D printing world hasn’t caught up to the level of human scientific glassblowers, the job isn’t being replaced — but it’s also not a popular career choice.
6 min watch
Watch Now Events (All Virtual) Event: Designing Out Waste: Circular City Week 2020
Date: March 17, 6:30PM — 8:30PM
How can players at each link in the food value chain work to design out waste while creating value for their business and stakeholders? Hear from folks like the Chief Sustainability Officer at JustSalad on creating zero-waste solutions. The event will be completely virtual. Register Here.
Event: Accelerate Good Global: Virtual Edition program
Date: March 17th, 11AM — 9PM
Accelerate Good Global is a sector-defining event, uniting tech nonprofit entrepreneurs, technology leaders, and philanthropists who believe in leveraging tech for good. This year, AGG is going virtual. Register Here.
Event: PluralSight: The Ultimate Tech Skills Conference
Date: March 23rd
Pluralsight LIVE Europe is now a virtual event open to everyone. Tune in for exciting product announcements, a message from CEO Aaron Skonnard and sessions on tech trends, skill development, best practices and more. Register Here.
A Deeper Look Machine Learning Takes on Antibiotic Resistance
“At least 700,000 people around the world now die each year from infections that could formerly be treated with antibiotics.”
Rising bacterial resistance to relatively novel drugs has pushed some researchers to AI to find solutions. A recent paper documented an “almost paradoxical” approach to find a new antibiotic with an “unconventional mechanism” that can target highly resistant infections. MIT researchers built a neural network that wasn’t biased to preconceived notions of how antibiotic molecules should look like or how they should work. This led to a discovery of an antibiotic candidate that was “hiding in plain sight.” The researchers were quick to point out that in silico work will not supplant in vitro testing:
“‘Whenever you use computers you always reach the same roadblock, which is that … the machine thinks that the molecules it has created will be good — as antibiotics in this case. So we need to validate the molecules’ with laboratory experiments.”
11 min read
Read More Warring Algorithms Could Be Driving Up Consumer Prices
SaaS products and in-house solutions that automate product pricing have been a boon to companies looking to stay ahead of competitors. Amazon, for example, updates prices as often as every 15 minutes. In one study, researchers collected pricing data from five large retailers and modeled algorithmic price competition, finding that algorithmic prices were, on average, 5.2% higher, and variable profits increased by 9.6%.
Meanwhile, customers ended up on the losing side: in the researchers’ simulation, shoppers spent an additional $300M due to pricing algorithms.
7 min read
Read More Transactions & Announcements Deep North Raises $25.7M for AI That Uses CCTV to Build Retail Analytics
Insurance AI Startup Synthesized Raises $2.8M From IQ Capital and Mundi Ventures
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