DataDownload: The digital election

8 min readAug 22, 2020

DataDownload: The digital election A weekly summary of all things Media, Data, Emerging Tech View this email in your browser

There’s a long list of things that have been changed by COVID. Some will return, others will never return. But one of the unexpected surprises was this week’s Democratic National Convention. It was a technological marvel — with feeds from 57 locations… all being controlled from a living room in Brentwood, California (after first being planned for Milwaukee, then Delaware). Glenn Weiss directed all four nights.

Amazing. It was authentic, it had real America voices, and even the few tech glitches seemed to add to its homespun appeal. It could have been all Hollywood, but instead, it was American. Here’s some great coverage of how digital and IT are the stars of this year’s convention season.

But, as with every newsletter we write… there’s more of course. Gartner’s Hype Cycle is worth a read. Gannett is facing its white newsrooms. Tencent’s ownership is massive and complicated. And for a podcast, WNYC’s Trump Inc. on the Hatch Act will leave your head spinning.

And… next week, big news from NYC Media Lab — watch your inboxes, you won’t want to miss it.

Till then — send me your ideas, links, leads, and feedback… steve@nycmedialab.org

Steve

Steven Rosenbaum
Managing Director
The NYC Media Lab
Steve@NYCMediaLab.org Must-Read The M.V.P.s of This Year’s Conventions? The Digital and I.T. Teams

More than ever before, digital teams will play vital roles during the upcoming election. With the pandemic, digital planners will be managing a nearly-virtual election, handling hundreds of remote feeds, ensuring smooth livestream coverage, and coaching speakers on proper Zoom handling. This isn’t an ad hoc setup, either — Andrew Binns, COO at the Democratic National Convention, has been preparing for black swan events like natural disasters for nearly two decades.

Binns has built out a “secure and reliable network of a dozen remote video links and a few spare video kits. Should organizers ever need to conduct the actual convention remotely, Mr. Binns could quickly dispatch a spider web of streams to recreate the convention online.”

To create some semblance of an audience during broadcasts, Binns’ team will arrive at Democrat superfans’ homes complete with lighting rig, mic, and camera. The feeds will then be spliced in live during major speeches. NY Times covers the intricate moving pieces being arranged for this November.

6 min read

This week, Gartner released their 2020 hype cycle for emerging technologies, distilling 1,700 technologies into 30 profiles and trends. These include composite architectures, algorithmic trust, “beyond silicon,” formative AI, “digital me,” and much more.

We’ll be launching a five-part newsletter series covering these emerging technologies starting next week over at our Innovation Monitor newsletter. If you’re not already signed up, just head over here. Here’s a preview of what we’ll be covering:

Algorithmic Trust: “For example, ‘authenticated provenance’ is a way to authenticate assets on the blockchain and ensure they’re not fake or counterfeit. While blockchain can be used to authenticate goods, it can only track the information that it is given.”
Beyond Silicon: “DNA computing and storage use DNA and biochemistry in place of silicon or quantum architectures to perform computation or store data. The data is encoded into synthetic DNA strands for storage and enzymes provide the processing capabilities through chemical reactions.”
Digital Me: One example is “bidirectional brain-machine interfaces (BMIs), are brain-altering wearables that enable two-way communication between a human brain and a computer or machine interface…. In the business world, potential applications include authentication, access and payment, immersive analytics and exoskeletons.”

6 min read

Read More Tech+Media Maker Week at The New York Times — on lockdown. Maker Week is the NY Times equivalent of Google’s allocated side project time. Employees are allowed to step away from their usual tasks and take five days to develop their own project. NY Times shares some of this year’s 96 projects and what makers learned in the process. Here’s a few of our favorites:

Auditorial

“Auditorial uses the Google Natural Language API to process New York Times audio transcript data and parse important and salient keywords. It then subsequently recommends relevant Times Tags using the NYT Semantic API.”

Times ARchive

“Times ARchive is an augmented reality app that allows readers to view archived New York Times newspapers in physical space.”

Collaborative Crossword Chrome Extension

“Our team of interns created a Chrome extension that enables collaborative play on The New York Times Crossword. Users in the same session can utilize a chat box and view each others’ progress in real time, effectively allowing them to solve a crossword together.”

11 min read Read More Gannett Newsrooms, Whiter Than the Communities They Serve, Pledge Broad Change by 2025 Media giant Gannett — owner of over 260 local news outlets in the US — pledged this week to establish a more diverse and inclusive workforce by 2025. Nearly every newsroom in the USA Today Network published a demographic census: “Across most of the newsrooms that released data, newsroom staffs and leadership were whiter than the communities in which they operate.”

President of news at Gannett Media Maribel Perez Wadsworth noted that newsrooms that “aren’t representative of their communities can’t fully understand their needs and interests.” You can find a list of links to each Gannett newsroom’s census in Wadsworth’s article, which outlines Gannett’s diversity and inclusion plans.

3 min read Read More Tencent: The Ultimate Outsider

This is (the enormous) Part 1 of a two-part series on Tencent — “the most important company that Americans know the least about” — by Not Boring’s Packy McCormick. In a half-hour read, he covers the company’s history, business, and portfolio (McCormick even made a public spreadsheet of the company’s portfolio).

Given that most American’s have never installed WeChat (which has 1.2B MAUs), and Trump signed an executive order partially banning the platform earlier this month, it’s worth getting acquainted. You can also listen to the whole thing, if that’s more suitable.

26 min read

When is it right for the tech industry to decide that relevant audiences are segregated ones? It’s a question that big tech has been skirting for years, and one that’s explored in this excellent Vox short. Vox speaks with Muhammad Ali, a PhD student at Northeastern University who’s spent thousands of dollars on Facebook ads researching instances of algorithmic bias.

According to Ali’s research, even if you target everyone, Facebook’s algorithms will read the content of your ad and target demographics they predict will react to that ad based on interests, creating a self-reinforcing loop that can result in segregated targeting. And it’s definitely not exclusive to Facebook’s algorithms either.

8 min watch

Watch Now What We’re Listening To Podcast: ‎’Repeat Offender’

Trump administration officials have been cited 13 times for violating the Hatch Act, which “prohibits most government officials from engaging in politicking in the course of their official work.”

These have amounted to slaps on the wrist, and it may culminate in Trump — to whom the Hatch Act doesn’t apply — choosing the White House for his nomination acceptance speech (in which case, “executive branch employees in the White House and agencies might be in jeopardy if they support or attend the event, experts said”).

Andrea Bernstein covers the blatant disregard for proper conduct in her Trump Inc. podcast, “Repeat Offender”.

33 min listen

Listen Now Virtual Events Virtual Event: Systemic Racism, Inequity, and the Role of Tech Entrepreneurship
Date: August 26 7PM-8:30PM
Organized by Justice Through Code and supported by the Center for Justice at Columbia University and the Tamer Center for Social Enterprise at Columbia Business School, this session will explore how the tech sector can address systemic racism. Register Here.

Virtual Event: Fireside Chat with Waymo CPO
Date: August 25, 2:30PM-3PM
Dan Chu, CPO at Waymo. Dan will discuss what it’s like to work in this dynamic role and what it takes to get your foot in the door. Register Here. A Deeper Look What Happens When AI Is Used to Set Grades?

With year-end graduation exams canceled for high school seniors worldwide, the International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO) decided to opt for using ML to set scores based on past work and other historical student data.

Results… were not good — and the fallout is a stark lesson in what companies should avoid doing when planning their ML deployment. The IBO results were so off the mark that thousands of students and parents launched a protest campaign. Governments are preparing formal investigations, and lawsuits are being filed — some for data abuse under GDPR.

Exams were initially canceled due to the pandemic. In response, IBO subcontracted the development of an ML model to predict an overall score for each student. What’s mind-boggling is how quickly IBO decided to deploy an unproven method of automated grading, offering little explanation for lower-than-expected scores and a flawed appeal process (the model’s assessment was the item of dispute, not graded papers).

8 min read

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DataDownload: The digital election

Written by NYC Media Lab