DataDownload: What happened this week…. and next

8 min readOct 21, 2020

DataDownload: What happened this week…. and next A weekly summary of all things Media, Data, Emerging Tech View this email in your browser

So — how was your week?

We spent our week buttoning up next week’s NYC Media Lab Summit. Andrew Yang, Tristan Harris, Sara Fischer, Jay Rosen. Cory Doctorow, Nina Jankowicz, Justin Hendrix, Steven Strauss, Maria Gotsch, Amba Kak, Vernon Reid, Trevor McFedries, Aria Dean, Lisha Li, Alex Porter, Matthew Niederhauser.. and 8 fantastic workshops and a virtual Expo Hall that’s not to be missed. Whew.

And there’s still time to get your Summit Tix — free or with swag!

In today’s newsletter, we deep dive into NYC Tech and Media — with VC’s who are looking around the corner — and Jerry Seinfeld because… (well he’s the definition of “comfort food” in media form). Some interesting insights into where hyperlocal news may be going.

And a look at the future of Vaccine tech. If you haven’t checked out Trevor McFedries… listen to Masters of Scale.

Finally — next Tuesday we’re going to gather in a pre Media SUMMIT screening of The Social Dilemma. It’s virtual — and you’re invited. It’s on Netflix, and we’ll watch it together. Sign up here.

See you soon.

Please reach out with ideas, suggestions, or feedback is always welcome. Steve@nycmedialab.org.

Steve

Steven Rosenbaum
Managing Director
The NYC Media Lab
Steve@NYCMediaLab.org Must-Read What Happens if Trump’s COVID Gets Worse?

USA Today writes: “Since President Donald Trump disclosed early Friday that he and First Lady Melania Trump had tested positive for the coronavirus, White House officials have sought to assure the country that the president remains well enough to discharge his duties even as he was readied for transfer to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.”

“If Trump’s condition worsens, leaving the 74-year-old commander-in-chief incapacitated, the Constitution provides for a line of authority to steer the government in his absence.”

5 min read

“Don’t bet against the Big Apple”

TechCrunch writer Anthony Ha surveyed New York VCs on their thoughts on the startup scene, and the overall sentiment is bullish. As AF Ventures’ David Levinson put it, “New York simply has too much to offer, from its richly diverse population, cultural significance and vast collection of industries to lose its entrepreneurial spirit.” Here are a few reasons why VCs are rooting for NY:

Jessica Lin of Work-Bench on Fortune 500 needs: “Here are a few examples of our portfolio companies seeing uptick in Fortune 500 customer demand due to COVID-19: FireHydrant is an incident response platform helping with service reliability; Spring Health is a precision mental health benefit platform; Arthur is a model monitoring solution, which is needed given the heterogeneous ML environments in Fortune 500 companies.”
Eric Hippeau, Lerer Hippeau on resilience: “New York is resilient and will come back stronger than ever, but it will take some time. The most innovative businesses are often started in a downturn. These periods shine a light on systematic gaps and key problems that fuel creative solutions and entrepreneurism.”

10 min read

You might remember back in August Jerry Seinfeld penned a rebuttal against James Altucher’s LinkedIn essay proclaiming that “NYC is dead” — which didn’t receive the warmest attention. In a recent 60 Minutes, Seinfeld revisited the episode, saying that he has nothing against Altucher but “I just don’t want New Yorkism to die. I don’t want it to be replaced by deep concern and over-sentimentality. You can have those things, but be a little badass, too. We don’t care if things are tough. Everything is always tough. It’s tough to live here.”

3 min read Read More “Mass Customisation” of Neighbourhood Data Can Help Hyperlocal News Become More Sustainable

“The core problem in local and hyperlocal news is that there is no sustainable business model,” Gabriel Kahn, journalism professor at USC Annenberg School for Journalism

Hyperlocal news — also called microlocal journalism — refers to news coverage on a very small, local scale. As you can imagine, this is expensive to support — contributors tend to be citizen journalists who are sometimes unpaid volunteering, and budgets are tiny. But Hyperlocal news gives areas that may be ignored by mainstream media a voice — without them, “news deserts” proliferate.

Kahn is part of Crosstown, a nonprofit community data project based in LA. One of the initiative’s goals is to make producing local news cheaper through mass customization of public datasets.

“States, countries and towns accrue massive amounts of data, covering everything from police departments to potholes…. Every line of data is then geo-located…. Journalists can then access the data and spot newsworthy trends at a glance. It is comparatively as simple as a Google search, no coding skills needed.”

4 min read Read More YouTube Is About to Age-Restrict Way More Videos

YouTube is in the process of deploying an AI system to automatically age-gate videos. While the company is prepping for inevitable mistakes, it notes that its new algorithm likely won’t affect monetized videos much as these already adhere to advertiser-friendly guidelines.

But as we’ve seen countless times, YouTube’s AI systems don’t play nice, and sometimes even encourage predatory or extremist behavior… leading to further restrictions. The YouTube team also took the rollout as an opportunity to reconsider where they drew the line for age-restricted content, according to a recent blog post. Though, “after consulting with experts and comparing ourselves against other global content rating frameworks, only minor adjustments were necessary.”

3 min read

Read More What We’re Watching The Surprising Future of Vaccine Technology

“As United Neuroscience co-founder Lou Reese explains in this video, the issue with vaccines is that they don’t work against ‘non-external threats.’ This is a problem, especially now when internal threats (things that cause cancers, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and other chronic illnesses) are killing people more than external threats like viruses. The future of vaccine tech, which scientists are already working toward today, is developing safe vaccines to eradicate these destructive internal agents without harming our bodies in the process.”

16 min watch

Watch Now What We’re Listening To Podcast: ‎How to Build Authentic Connection at Scale

Creative media studio Brud is the brainchild behind virtual superstar Miquela Sousa, and the mastermind behind Brud is Trevor McFedries. “Once you build a connection with your audience, they won’t care HOW you made it — just how it makes them feel.” Listen to McFedries’s interview on Masters of Scale here.

43 min listen

Listen Now Virtual Events Virtual Event: We’ve added artist and performer Vernon Reid to the NYC Media Lab Summit 2020
Date: October 9, 10:15AM-11AM
Vernon was the lead guitarist for Living Colour, and won a Grammy for “Cult of Personality.” Don’t miss Vernon’s session: A musician’s perspective on innovation and its role in the creative process: Vernon Reid in conversation with ASCAP’s Brooke Eplee.
Register Here (free)

Virtual Event: ETL Speaker Series — George Scangos, Vir Biotechnology
Date: October 7, 7:30PM
George Scangos, PhD, has served as Vir Biotechnology’s president and CEO. He previously served as CEO at Biogen, a publicly traded biopharmaceutical company focused on treating neurological diseases. Register Here.

Virtual Event: Immigrants At Work: Stories of First Generation Americans
Date: October 8, 5:30PM-7PM
Join General Assembly for a panel discussion with entrepreneurial leaders who are representing a cross-section of the underserved immigrant population in New York and beyond. Register Here. A Deeper Look Diversity in AI: The Invisible Men and Women

After researchers demonstrated how the Face Depixelizer unpixelated people of color to white faces, Twitter and the media exploded, and the AI community was roughly divided into two camps: some said the tool’s bias stemmed from bad data, while others said it was short-sighted decision making. Given the years of racial bias found in commercial systems, this wasn’t all too surprising, say Georgia Tech professors Ayanna Howard and Charles Isbell. But they ask a more fundamental question here: “Why didn’t it occur to anyone to test the software on cases involving people of color in the first place?”

One part is well-documented: “Black workers represent only 2.5% of Google’s entire workforce and 4% of Facebook’s and Microsoft’s. Gender comparisons are also stark: Globally, only 22% of AI professionals are female, while 78% are male.” The other part is recognition, which Howard and Charles explore through the lens of ML best practices:

Recognize that differences matter: “Just as differences in data matter, differences within workforces matter too. The AI approach to embracing diverse data is analogous to the recognition that there is a difference between equality and equity in the workforce: Equality means providing everyone the same resources within an established process, but equity demands paying attention to what happens throughout a process, including examining the fairness of the process itself.”
Recognize that diversity in leadership matters: “For example, after the desegregation of schools in the United States that followed the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education court case, the U.S. saw a significant drop in diversity among teachers. There is a direct line between this drop in diversity among the gatekeepers of education and a corresponding drop in Black students being recommended for gifted-and-talented programs.”
Recognize that accountability is necessary: “Report after report showcases that companies that lag in gender and ethnic diversity among their workforces, management teams, executives, and boardrooms are less likely to achieve above-average profitability. In our minds, this correlates with a well-known saying in the AI and computing community: ‘Garbage in, garbage out.’”

7 min read