The sculpture, Monument I, had been created for a show about the Hereafter Institute, a fictional organization that now lives only online. It purports to arrange a digital afterlife for its clients preserving their online presence and, through virtual reality, even the memory of their physical existence. On its website, the institute greets visitors with such deadpan sales pitches as, What will death mean when our digital souls outlive our physical bodies?

A video from the Hereafter Institute, an immersive art installation by Gabriel Barcia-Colombo, that purports to help clients preserve their digital profiles after they die.

In fact, sculpture and institute alike were the work of Gabriel Barcia-Colombo, a 35-year-old New York artist and teacher at New York Universitys Interactive Telecommunications Program. Working with a grant from Lacma, Mr. Barcia-Colombo invented the institute as a way of exploring the rituals of death in the digital age.

Now, at Mr. Goodmans invitation, he has curated the digital art exhibition at Sothebys. The young artists in the show several I.T.P alumni among them tend to share, despite their immersion in digital technology, a profound ambivalence about where it is taking us. They also seem to share the Black Mirror sensibility behind the Hereafter Institute: The perception, endemic to the satirical British TV series, that technology has led us into a digital fun house where nothing is as it seems and everything is as we fear it might be.

The show at Sothebys, called Bunker, runs through Aug. 10. It includes Jeremy Bailey, a Toronto artist who merges Snapchat with art history, portraying individuals through an augmented reality lens in poses that recall famous portraits from the past. A digital C-print of his wife as she stares at a tablet that appears to be coming to life recalls Dante Gabriel Rossettis Lady Lilith gazing into a mirror.

Its the idea of looking at oneself through the technology of the day, Mr. Bailey said by phone. An adjacent self-portrait shows him in the guise of the persona he has adopted that of an obnoxiously ebullient naf who proclaims himself a famous new media artist. He believes deeply that technology can help, and yet technology consistently lets him down, Mr. Bailey said of his alter ego. So damn it, why doesnt it deliver?

Elsewhere in the show, you can don a virtual reality headset to navigate the childhood home of Sarah Rothberg, who reconstructed her experience growing up in Los Angeles from old photos and home movies. Or view lacy, metallic sculptures by Ashley Zelinskie self-portraits whose surfaces are made up of the letters that spell out her genetic code. One piece in a series called Android has a cube embedded in the face; the cubes surface is made up of the computer code that was used to generate it.

Ms. Zelinskies human-digital mash-ups are about how were becoming one with our technology, she explained in her studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn a small, crowded loft with NASA fliers and Star Trek posters taped to the walls. In theory, the computer code on the cubes surface means the cube could be read by a computer which is why she sometimes says shes making art for robots as well as humans.

In fact, like the label on a can of pet food, the code on Ms. Zelinskies sculptures is meant for humans. Aliens, too, perhaps. I like taking ideas that have been reiterated again and again the human face, geometric forms and putting them in a time capsule made of math, she said. To me, this is preserving human culture.

Another Brooklyn artist in the show, Carla Gannis, seems less intent on preserving human culture than on documenting its degradation. In The Garden of Emoji Delights, based on the early-16th-century triptych by Hieronymus Bosch, she reimagines one of the best-known paintings of the Northern Renaissance as a gleefully hacked computer file, its frolicsome figures and hellish beasts transmogrified into cartoonlike characters. There are two versions a 13-foot-by-7-foot C-print (roughly the same dimensions as the Bosch), and a smaller electronic variant that lights up like a video game. The e-version presents a deliriously animated tableau that ends in catastrophe on all three panels Eden wiped out by a plane crash, Earth overtaken by forests, hell freezing over. Its mesmerizing, in a twitchy sort of way but in place of depth and enigma, we get candy-colored titillation and a nagging sense that nothing exists beneath the surface.

The most haunting work in the show is Jamie Zigelbaums Doorway to the Soul, which consists of a white pedestal surmounted by a 16-inch-high video monitor that stands at average human height. On the screen is a face every 60 seconds. You may not realize the feed is live, or that the faces belong to workers at Mechanical Turk, Amazons micro-employment site, who are being paid 25 cents to stare into their computers webcam for one minute.

That archetypal looking into someones eyes its a very powerful moment, Mr. Zigelbaum said.

But in this case, the other person is disembodied, and the moment you share is mediated by technology by video cameras, by digital networks, by Amazons microtasking platform. Youre looking into someones eye, but you dont know if they can see you or who they are, Mr. Zigelbaum said. The technology that makes the Mechanical Turk workers visible also renders them intangible. Communication is enhanced and impeded at the same time.

Whats not on view at Sothebys is anything by Mr. Barcia-Colombo himself. After seeing his Monument I, Mr. Goodman asked if he wanted to bring the Hereafter Institute to Sothebys. And I said great, Mr. Barcia-Colombo recalled, but its a complicated show, and its about death, so your clientele might not like it. With the show he did mount, he added: Some people are like, reserve that piece I want it! And others are like, this is Sothebys?

Mr. Barcia-Colombos Lacma installation was indeed complicated. For two days last August, museumgoers were offered a free consultation on their digital afterlife. To ensure a fully customized experience, they were asked to sign up in advance and to share access to their Facebook profiles.

When they showed up at the museum, they were greeted by actors in white lab coats and given a 3-D body scan that was used to generate a life-size digital avatar. They were shown a memorial virtual-reality film such as the one Mr. Barcia-Colombo made about his grandfather, a Spanish poet who fought against Franco and ended his days an emeritus professor of Spanish literature in Los Angeles.

Then they got to attend their own funeral, complete with a eulogy based on their social media posts. As the eulogy concluded, their avatar appeared onscreen, only to turn and walk off into the clouds.

As this suggests, Mr. Barcia-Colombo is actually less concerned with death than with memories of life with what happens to peoples Facebook pages when theyre gone, for instance. Its a common concern so much so that two years ago Facebook started allowing its users to appoint a legacy contact to manage their profiles after they die. But is that enough?

I wanted to design a digital urn some kind of object, some kind of memory machine you could step into, he said at N.Y.U., where he teaches animation and video sculpture. What if Facebook goes down?

An unlikely prospect at this point but were it to ever happen, he pointed out, there would be no record of the many billions of lives and trillions of likes that have been so casually, trustingly, innocently recorded on it. The whole point is to make that data physical, he said, so that a record exists of that persons life.

Gravestone makers and turntable manufacturers, please take note.

Here is the original post:

Young Digital Artists, Anxious About ... Technology - The New York ... - New York Times

SALT LAKE CITY For most people, being stuck behind a red light at an intersection in which you are the only driver and waiting, for no apparent reason, for the cycle to come back around is an exercise that can lead to frustration and bewilderment.

For Mark Pittman, one such experience on a frosty winter night near the University of Utah a few years back presented a problem that he decided to solve and it turned out to be the first steps toward the creation of a Salt Lake City tech company that is specializing in unraveling the when, where, how and why of human movement.

"I got stuck at a traffic light in 2014 leaving campus one night and didnt understand why," Pittman said. "The next day I called a city traffic engineer and asked why and he was nice enough to invite me to meet with him. He told me over an hour and a half conversation that Utah has one of the best transportation systems in the nation, (the Utah Department of Transportation) is considered a pioneer in innovation, we have sensors on a lot of traffic lights and, essentially, you shouldnt be complaining.

"And that wasnt good enough for me."

Pittman's takeaway from that conversation, and subsequent research into transportation technology, was revelatory. He discovered that while many government planners and engineers were talking about a revolution in "smart technologies" that were going to fundamentally reshape, and improve our mobility challenges, smart transportation systems "weren't really that smart."

To that end, Pittman's company Blyncsy has innovated an approach for gathering large amounts of movement data that relies on seeing "electronic handshakes" emitted by mobile devices that are Wi-Fi or Bluetooth enabled, and assembling and analyzing that data to glean insights about how we, collectively, get from A to B and back again.

Sensors, mounted on utility poles or structures in their customers' jurisdiction areas, gather those signals and compile them in Blyncsy's database. Through a dashboard interface, clients are able to log in and see real-time volumes, movement patterns and trends. While primarily a transportation tool, Pittman said his company has clients that are also utilizing the data to optimize things like movements of large crowds in convention and event venues.

He noted that the Sundance Film Festival has able to learn, and plan for, how attendees to the annual Park City event move in and around the city during the two-week event.

In describing his business Pittman is quick to recognize that, thanks to numerous well-publicized, large-scale breaches of consumer data, people are suspicious of the concept of their travel habits being tracked and catalogued. However, he said Blyncsy cannot, and does not, connect the anonymous signature sent out by things like cellphones, laptops and tablet devices to their owners and the company takes the additional step of re-anonymizing that coded information. Further, Pittman said that that part of the data collection is never shared with clients and, thanks to Blyncsy's participation in helping to craft legislation that was passed by the Utah Legislature in 2016, law enforcement agencies, except in very limited circumstances, cannot demand access to that information.

"We don't collect information on people, we collect information on movement," Pittman said. "People should not see us a surveillance player, because we're not. Our data is used to stretch your tax dollars and to make it more useful to transportation agencies and to empower them to do their jobs better."

Park City City Manager Diane Foster said Blyncsy has become an invaluable tool in the ongoing work to plan for, accommodate and improve the effects of the tens of thousands of visitors who make Park City their temporary homes for ski adventures and the Sundance Film Festival.

"One of the things we're starting to hear from residents is that it's just too much, it's too many impacts," Foster said. "One day, in December of 2015, we experienced complete gridlock in four intersections. That's bad for residents, bad for visitors and bad for return business. People come here to relax and get away from things like gridlock, which they expect in New York or L.A., but not in our mountain community."

Foster said that she and her transportation team can now easily access and monitor what's happening with traffic flow and volume and they use that data, in combination with other data sets like hotel bookings and weather forecasts, to take mitigating actions to keep people moving, and happy.

Park City is also in the throes of adding transportation options in and around the city with a new bus rapid transit system, new bike share program and plans in place to add "micro-transit" (a sort-of ride hailing meets transit system) in an effort to continue to improve the ease, and fluidity, of getting around. Foster said the information Blyncsy provides will likely play an ever-increasing role in the city's toolbox for addressing mobility issues for residents and visitors.

"Blyncsy has had incredible utility for us now," Foster said. "It's become a vital part of what we do and we believe the potential is huge."

Huge is exactly how Pittman is thinking about potential applications for Blyncscy, too. As autonomous driving technology continues its march forward, the work Pittman's company is doing now to learn the how and why related to our use of vehicles, and other transportation modes, will provide the information groundwork for how a potentially enormous network of connected and driverless vehicles will make life, at least the transportation segment of it, easier for all.

"In 15-20 years no one will own a car anymore," Pittman said. "Everyone will Uber to work everyday and the single most difficult task for them will be how to schedule those cars. How to pick up the right people in your neighborhood at the right time to get them all to work by 8 a.m. and picked up by 5 p.m.

"Those are the kinds of problems were working to tackle."

Blaine Leonard, technology and innovation engineer for UDOT, highlighted that data is becoming an increasingly necessary and significant part of the job his agency is tasked with doing and concurred with Pittman that as driverless cars become a functional reality on state managed roadways, that data will become an even bigger factor.

"We're collecting an incredible amount of data on how traffic moves on our highways and actively working on building that information set to a much larger scale," Leonard said.

New sensor technology, similar to Blyncy's, is being implemented on UDOT-managed roadways and that information, compiled with other volume and flow data and third-party information the agency is able to access (like the ability to track vehicles equipped with OnStar and other vehicle-based navigation systems) will become increasingly relevant as automobile technology, like autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles, become more the norm, according to Leonard.

Pittman's ability to anticipate, and address, future data needs is an attribute that Park City investor Dean Fogel saw early on in Blyncsy's incarnation and convinced him that the effort was worthy of his financial support.

"I was attracted to Mark Pittman because of his passion and desire to launch Blyncsy into an unknown market," Fogel said. "Hes demonstrated that he has the flexibility in his strategic thinking to know when to pivot to the right opportunities."

Fogel's angel investment, along with some very early start-up money earned in a competitive Get Seeded program at the University of Utah's Lassonde Institute, has led to nearly $3 million in financing for Blyncsy, mostly from Utah-based investors. Pittman said the company is nearing $1 million in annual revenues and is on a mission to secure working relationships with all 50 state transportation agencies, in addition to other clients.

Pittman is unequivocal in the need, both now and into the future, about the kind of work his company performs.

"The critical piece of our transportation future is data," Pittman said. "The future is more data driven than we even believe or want to believe."

Continue reading here:

Salt Lake company brings tracking technology to solve movement problems - Deseret News

Walking around at San Diego Comic-Con, the booth for a small publisher known as Sunday Press stands out in the quieter half of the convention. Standing amidst retailers hawking bagged rarities and boxes of superhero comics, the books on display are distinctive: theyre massive almost two feet to a side and they bear names like Dick Tracy: Colorful Cases of the 1930s, White Boy in Skull Valley, Society Is Nix, Gleeful Anarchy at the Dawn of the American Comic Strip, and others. The outfit is run by Peter Maresca, a comic collector-turned publisher who describes himself as a discount archivist, and who has earned recognition from the broader comic community for his efforts producing amazingly beautiful restorations of the comics that kicked off the entire industry.

As con-goers pass by the booth, Maresca talks to the one or two who stop by, providing a detailed history lesson behind some of the books on display. He explains that he has been collecting classic comics since he was in his 20s, acquiring complete runs of some of the stories, including a strip called Little Nemo in Slumberland, illustrated by Winsor McCay. That strip debuted in 1905 in the New York Herald, and its been held up as an influential story by numerous creators, including Maurice Sendak, Alan Moore, and Neil Gaiman.

A century after they were published, the original comics were deteriorating

But a century after they were first published, those original comics were deteriorating badly. Maresca realized that he had an opportunity to honor the comic and its creator for its centennial. He had a full run of the series, and could assemble a collected edition that would restore and reintroduce the comic to fans and newcomers alike. Importantly, he wanted to recreate the look and feel of the original comic, which included its massive size. Publishers thought it was a neat idea, but ultimately passed on the project.

So Maresca decided to publish the book himself.

The goal, he explains, was to recreate the experience of reading the original comics when they were first released.

Maresca mused that many have predicted that computers would eventually replace old-fashioned reading, but explained that it was computers and software that allowed him to restore the century-old cartoon for a modern audience.

While the comics had received retrospective treatments and reprints, he explains that these were often small reproductions, which made the fine details difficult to see. But he wanted to do more than just showcase the art.

What I originally wanted to do, he says, was to give people the opportunity to experience the comic strips they had been a hundred years ago, which is impossible to do with the smaller books.

In the century since they were published, the original comics have aged with time, yellowing and tearing. This presented Maresca with a challenge: he wanted to replicate the original experience, so he turned to Photoshop. Each page was scanned in two parts, which he then stitched together. From there he set about adjusting the colors and removing the wear and tear that theyd accumulated over the years. Some imperfections remained, like the ink smears that the comics originally came with.

Marescas goal was to recreate the original reading experience, not just the art

Once he cleaned up the panels, Maresca created a new background that resembled the texture of newspapers from the early 1900s, so that each page would be consistent, and then dropped the panels in.

I tried to keep the warm colors of the strip, without having to have a totally faded out background, he says. Its a bit of a hybrid between a brand new newsprint and a comic strip that looks kind of faded.

Once he completed his post-production work, Maresca shipped the digital files to a printer in Malaysia, which could print the files directly from the PDF in 11 colors something that wasnt possible before. From there, the large nature of the book meant that it had to be hand-stitched.

The final product is a book that approximates what the comic would have looked like when it was first published, in size and in color. People say that the books are too big for a bookshelf, Maresca jokes, so I suggest sliding it under the sofa, and on Sunday morning, pull it out and read a page or two on the floor. He goes on to say that hes gotten a number of comments from people who say that the books bring back memories for people, making them feel as though theyre six years old, leaning over a colorful page of cartoons on after the paper arrived.

Maresca set up Sunday Press as his own publishing company, and produced his first run of the books, which promptly sold out after a positive review in The New York Times, and set about producing his next project, a similar treatment of another McCay cartoon, Little Sammy Sneeze. In the years since, hes gone on to produce twelve books in all, earning 14 Eisner nominations and two wins.

While popular in their day, these are comics that have largely been forgotten by all but dedicated fans and industry professionals. The books produced by Sunday Press help restore these comics for a new generation of fans and students. With the advances in printing and photo manipulation in recent years, the earliest comic books will be easily accessible for the next generation of cartoonists.

So much talent and creativity went into these stories, Maresca says. That shouldnt be forgotten.

Visit link:

How technology is putting the earliest comics back into the hands of fans - The Verge

Greg Clark, the secretary of state for business, energy and industrial strategy. Photograph: Richard Gardner/Rex/Shutterstock

A 246m investment in developing battery technology in Britain is to be launched by the government as part of its drive towards what it says is a modern industrial strategy.

The business and energy secretary, Greg Clark, will announce the funding, including a 45m competition to make batteries more accessible and affordable, in a speech on Monday that should spell out further the governments plans to increase productivity and growth.

The 246m, to be spent over four years on research and innovation in battery technology, is likely to have particular benefits in the automotive sector and renewable energy.

The search for an industrial strategy was launched in January by Theresa May, designed to help Britains economy after Brexit, garnering more than 1,900 responses from businesses and other organisations in a three-month consultation. A white paper is due later in the year, but Clark is expected to say of the strategy: For all our citizens to be able to look forward with confidence to a prosperous future, we need to plan to improve our ability to earn that prosperity. To enjoy a high and rising standard of living we must plan to be more productive than in the past.

He will also say: Economists have pointed to what they have called a productivity puzzle in Britain. That we appear to generate less value for our efforts than, say, people in Germany or France. In other words, we have to work longer to get the same rewards.

Its not that we want or need people to work longer hours. Its that we need to ensure that we find and seize opportunities to work more productively as a country, as cities and regions, as businesses and as individuals. If we can do so, we can increase the earning power of our country and our people.

Investing in science and research was the first of 10 pillars of the outlined industrial strategy. Clark will add that the strategy could bring together concerted effort on areas of opportunity that have previously been in different sectors, or which require joining forces between entrepreneurs, scientists and researchers, industries, and local and national government.

Professor Philip Nelson, chief executive of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, said: Batteries will form a cornerstone of a low carbon economy, whether in cars, aircraft, consumer electronics, district or grid storage. To deliver the UKs low-carbon economy we must consolidate and grow our capabilities in novel battery technology.

Richard Parry-Jones, formerly of the UK Automotive Council, will chair a board overseeing the investment.

Clark will also confirm another 25m to be allocated to research and development of connected autonomous vehicles, this time on schemes for off-road, driverless vehicles destined for construction, farming and mining.

The rest is here:

Business secretary to announce investment in battery technology ... - The Guardian

The WNBA has a long ways to go to reach the popularity of other U.S. professional sports leagues. But new technology platforms like Twitter and FanDuel are becoming important growth tools for the 21-year-old organization as it looks to expand its marketing efforts around the world.

WNBA Commissioner Lisa Borders was in Seattle this weekend for the WNBA All-Star Game, held in the Emerald City for the first time since the league launched back in 1997. She spoke to reporters before the game on Saturday at Key Arena and shed light on the leagues growth in recent years.

Borders, who took over in 2016 after leadership stints with public, private, and non-profits ranging from Coca-Cola to the Atlanta City Council, noted traditional metrics like attendance numbers, points per game, or three-point shots to show how the WNBA is progressing.

But she also took time to talk about new metrics, and specifically viewership data from the WNBAs new streaming deal with Twitter. The site has streamed 10 WNBA games this season, with an average of 800,000 viewers, and a third of which have surpassed 1 million. For comparison, Twitters Thursday Night Football NFL streams averaged 3.5 million viewers last season.

Borders pointed out how 60 percent of those watching on Twitter live outside the U.S.

What does this tell you about attendance in arena and our traditional metrics? Borders said. New metrics like Twitter tell us that there is a hunger for our game and womens basketball in particular. This is a global game played in more than 200 countries.

Beyond streaming, Borders said Twitter is also valuable because it lets the 144 WNBA players communicate with fans directly, even when the WNBA season wraps up in the U.S.

Many of our players are global citizens and play during the secondsix months of the year in the international markets, she said. So those markets are now able to follow our players on a consistent basis throughout the year on a platform like Twitter and can even broaden the reach of the WNBA today.

Added Borders, on Twitter: We think its going to increase the number ofeyeballs watching the WNBA, making them moreaware of the league, of our players, and what anextraordinary sport that we play.

Borders also called out FanDuel, the daily fantasy sports giant that just had its merger with DraftKings canceled, and said there are more than 1 million fans playing WNBA-related games on the platform. The league inked a deal with FanDuel this year and launched the first official womens sports fantasy game.

Were talking about exposure here, she explained. In the fantasy space, as well as the social and digital space, were seeingtremendous growth in terms of numbers.The first thing with any product in any business ismaking sure that people know you exist and they areaware of where you are and what youre doing. So FanDuel in the fantasy space its completely new to our league, which means a new pool of people and a deeper and broader set of interests.

The WNBA is embracing new tech platforms as it comes off a season that saw the highest attendance numbers in five years and records for digital viewership, social media traction, and retail sales. The league also saw double-digit growth in TV viewership. Those are promising numbers for a league long-critiqued for its lack of relevance; technology certainly seems like a way for the WNBA to shed that reputation.

Technology could also help grow interest in the league as it relates to the players themselves. Longtime WNBA veteran Sue Bird, who made her record-tying 10th All-Star appearance this weekend in Seattle, spoke at the GeekWire Sports Tech Summit last month and explained how she wants to see the big innovations in data that are driving more conversations and interest in the NBA and mens basketball make their way to the womens game.

It starts conversations and thats what our league needs, it needs to be talked about, and thats how you get it out there and get people to be involved and become fans, Bird said.

Bird is also a big believer in using technology to improve performance on the court. But she said a lot of the tech you see in other leagues like how NBA players use tablets on the bench during games is lacking in the WNBA, mostly for financial reasons.

We dont have necessarily the means to have some of that technology in our everyday [routine], Bird said. I dont think youre going to see any of us with an iPad on the bench any time soon.

Read the rest here:

WNBA sees 'tremendous growth' with technology platforms like Twitter and FanDuel - GeekWire

We mustnt be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology. This has happened again and again in historytechnology has advanced and this changes social conditions and suddenly people have found themselves in a situation which they didnt foresee and doing all sorts of things they didnt really want to do.

Visionary thinker and author Aldous Huxley made that statement in a 1958 interview. The context was broad-ranging and had nothing to do with transportation. But couldnt this prophetic quote just as easily apply to our current situation with the advancing technology that inevitably will determine our transportation infrastructure and how we get from point A to point B?

Weve already been caught by surprise when it comes to smartphones. These little gadgets are impressive technology, indeed, but we are doing all sorts of things we shouldnt do with them, such as staring at the miniature screens instead of watching the road.

It may be too late to get a hold on the smartphone mania, but we still have time with the burgeoning technology of intelligent cars and roadways. Some of that tech already here, but its only the tip of the iceberg. On the horizon is a day when cars will be able to do most, if not all, of the work.

It appears that transportation leaders are working diligently to get ahead of the curve so as to avoid being caught by surprise.

But the express lanes project is just one of several that have already begun.

Heres a rundown of other pilot projects aimed at the future of smart transportation:

One of three projects initiated by the U.S. Department of Transportation in 2015 is based in New York City, according to an article in Public Roads, a Federal Highway Administration publication that laid out details for the pilot programs.

This program takes aim at how connected-vehicle technology can improve safety in packed urban areas, according to the Public Roads article, which notes that there are about 4,000 injuries and 250 traffic-related deaths on the streets of New York each year.

In this pilot, 310 intersection signals have been fitted with instruments that will communicate with specially equipped vehicles and pedestrians who have devices to help them safely cross streets.

According to the Public Roads article, drivers who use the reversible express lanes on the Lee Roy Selmon Expressway in Tampa experience significant delays in the morning commuter rush (Sound familiar?).

The expressway is surrounded by connector roads and other streets where trolleys and pedestrians are added to the mix.

For this pilot, some 1,500 cars, 10 buses and 10 trolleys will be fitted with communication devices allowing them to communicate with units that will be installed along the roadside. Also, 500 pedestrians will use smartphone apps as part of the program.

The third pilot project is focused on Interstate 80 in Wyoming, considered a major freight corridor (Sound familiar?), through which more than 32 million tons of products are hauled annually, according to the Public Roads article.

For this program, vehicle-to-vehicle technology will be installed in tractortrailers, state fleet vehicles, snowplows and police patrol cars so they can communicate with roadside equipment along a 400-mile stretch of the interstate.

The vehicles will be able to receive information on such things as roadway alerts, parking notifications and trip guidance.

Buckle up, folks, its a brave new world.

See the original post here:

GETTING THERE: Technology can be friend or foe - Fredericksburg.com

MediaCity in Salford Quays, Manchester, where almost a quarter of children live in poverty. Photograph: Ian Dagnall/Alamy

Its barely a few hundred yards, but might as well be 100 miles. MediaCity in Salford Quays, Manchester, is one of the biggest digital tech hubs in the UK, benefiting from almost 2bn of investment in recent years but try telling that to many of the young people living nearby.

The citys economy is booming yet almost a quarter of Salfords children live in poverty. It is one of the most deprived areas in the country: household debt is on the rise, theres been a 72% increase in homelessness since 2013 and almost a third of students are eligible for free school meals. The contrasting experiences of these disadvantaged young people growing up on Salfords crumbling estates and the young professionals working in digital startups a few streets away are acute. The digital divide is measured by more than metres.

Technology is part of our everyday lives; it has become integral to the way we interact and communicate with each other. But it can also intensify even create some of the major social issues we face today.

The 2017 consumer digital index suggests that at least 300,000 young people, or 3%, of those aged 15-24 in the UK lack basic digital skills. These include the ability to use a search engine to find information, complete online application forms, manage money or solve a problem using a digital service.

The implications concern more than finding discounts for online shopping. If a young person in urgent need cannot complete an application form or search for help, they may struggle to even find a bed for the night. They can be excluded from accessing job vacancies or government services, which are increasingly moving online. Legal support, drop-in centre opening hours and counselling services are all just a few clicks away but only if you have the opportunity, confidence and ability to navigate the digital world.

Technology companies have responded to the need for digital up-skilling with a range of initiatives, but this only papers over the cracks. By and large these schemes are tailored to the young people who are already aware of and motivated to improve their own digital skills. What about those left behind? If were to really do something about this, we need to understand the extent to which technology and social exclusion are inextricably linked.

We have found that the young people least likely to have digital skills are those most likely to be facing multiple forms of chronic and acute disadvantage. Whether thats poor literacy skills, living in households affected by drug and alcohol abuse, or experience of the care or criminal justice system, these young people are being disenfranchised, both socially and economically. Without the means to access support, they are trapped in a cycle of disadvantage and vulnerability.

This also makes them among the hardest to reach, which is where the not-for-profit sector comes in. Our new Digital Reach programme, for example, is putting expert youth organisations, who have trusted relationships with disadvantaged young people, at the heart of the response.

By investing in six pilot schemes, running in partnership with organisations such as Action for Children and #techmums, we want to help more than 4,000 disadvantaged young people across the UK acquire basic digital skills as well as the confidence and opportunities that brings.

These charities and grassroots organisations are better placed than big tech companies to understand the needs of their users and tailor support accordingly. Working alongside trusted adults, in safe, familiar spaces, they can foster the kind of close relationships that are key to engaging these young people and giving them the chance to change their lives.

Technology allows us to reimagine how we tackle pressing social issues in unique and innovative ways. It can profoundly help those most in need, but we have a collective duty to ensure it does not leave anyone behind.

Chris Ashworth is programme director at Nominet Trust, the charitable foundation of Nominet

Talk to us on Twitter via @Gdnvoluntary and join our community for your free fortnightly Guardian Voluntary Sector newsletter, with analysis and opinion sent direct to you on the first and third Thursday of the month.

Looking for a role in the not-for-profit sector, or need to recruit staff? Take a look at Guardian Jobs

Continue reading here:

Bridging the digital divide: how to stop technology leaving young people behind - The Guardian

Where Have All the Technologies Gone? Inside Higher Ed (blog) I did not, for example, turn my doctoral dissertation on a worthy topic of Catholic women's higher education into a monograph or the recent manuscript I drafted on information technology in higher education into books. Many a productive morning when I ...

See more here:

Where Have All the Technologies Gone? - Inside Higher Ed (blog)

Updated 3 hours ago

Just for fun, I recently created a video of my beach vacation, posted it to Facebook and shared it with the world.

The entire production process took about 30 seconds and I reached hundreds of my friends online.

Doing the same thing 20 years ago, when I was in journalism school, would have taken far longer, moving images from one analog tape to another with a large and expensive editing bay. Sharing my work with the world? Almost impossible.

As we celebrate the 10th anniversary of the iPhone this summer , it's worth taking some time to reflect on how quickly our world keeps changing and considering whether we're capable of keeping up.

Back in 2007, Sree Sreenivasan, who is now the chief digital officer for New York City, was asked to predict the technology we would be using today .

He started out by compiling a list of all the technology that did not exist even 10 years before that. The list included a number of innovations that most of us could not live without today GPS, HDTV, text messaging, cable modems, Google, Facebook, USB flash drives, Xbox. It also featured some that few people would consider essential today, such as Myspace.

Without being too specific, Sreenivasan came pretty close to identifying where we are: What I do know is that technology will continue to get cheaper, faster and better in the years ahead. But with that will come more dangers from cybercrime to loss of privacy.

What's truly frightening is that 2007 might have been just the tipping point for technological accelerations.

Rapid change affects the ways we consume news and information, how we interact, our use of natural resources and the broad reach of individual humans. We can use that change for better or worse, as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman points out in his November 2016 book, Thank You for Being Late.

What one person one single, solitary person can now do constructively and destructively is also being multiplied to a new level, Friedman writes.

For journalists and media consumers, these exponential growths should be inspiring. The disruptions obviously are painful in job losses, particularly. But this period of journalism also holds great potential for the future.

One could argue that we sit on the cusp of journalism's greatest age, as Peter Herford, one of my former journalism professors at Columbia University, recently posted on Facebook.

There is more investigative journalism being practiced today than ever before, he said, yes with fewer resources than when the behemoths of journalism were at work, but collectives, cooperatives and the worldwide reach of the internet and social media have multiplied the power of journalists.

Mistakes will be made, and not every news outlet will find success.

We still need to find ways for journalists to make money.

Undoubtedly, the end product will look different than it has for the past half-century.

But journalism today reaches more audiences, engages them in meaningful new ways and has more impact than ever.

Andrew Conte is the director of the Center for Media Innovation at Point Park University.

View post:

Journalism & accelerating technology - Tribune-Review

Mandy Smithberger, director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Project On Government Oversight, said some of the mistakes made by the Navy on big-ticket programs have been self-inflicted. The service's tendency to "develop really complex technology that's expensive to maintain and not reliable," has been a major drawback.

Added Smithberger, "It's not necessarily that it's new technology but it's immature so it has to be proven technology."

Some analysts said the new ideas for the next-generation ships originated in the 1990s, when there was a "go for broke" mindset by some decision makers.

In the case of the Ford-Class carrier, the Navy decided to make all of the key changes in new technology upfront on the first ship in the class, rather than wait for successive carriers. The Navy plans to spend around $43 billion on the first three Ford-Class aircraft carriers.

At the same time, the Navy and other services have faced fiscal challenges due to the ongoing effect of the budget caps signed into law six years ago.

"The Budget Control Act, as far as it pertains to defense, was wrong-minded and that should not have been systematically reducing defense spending," said Brian Slattery, a policy analyst for national security at Washington-based Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

He also said the inability of Congress to pass regular budgets is "very disruptive" to Navy and other service programs.

For the Navy, though, the budget situation is particularly pressing because of Trump's stated goal for a larger Navy fleet.

As a GOP candidate last year, Trump pledged the Navy would build 350 surface ships and submarines. He has since accepted the Navy's new force structure goal of a fleet of 355 ships up from the battle force of 276 ships as of Friday.

However, reaching the Navy goal could cost approximately $400 billion more over 30 years than the service's previously stated force goal of 308 ships, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Based on CBO's calculations, the Navy would need to buy around 329 new ships over 30 years to reach the 355-ship fleet. That compares with the 254 ships it estimates would be bought under the Navy's prior force goal.

"Cost is probably the biggest challenge reaching the larger fleet size," said Smithberger. "You'd have to increase Pentagon spending a lot to afford everything that they're trying to buy. It will require cutting other services or other Navy priorities, including airplanes."

See original here:

The Navy's put down a 'significant bet' on the $13 billion USS Gerald R Ford, which some say is a risky gamble - CNBC

District 91 upgrades technology in...

IDAHO FALLS, Idaho - While teachers and students in District 91 are enjoying a summer off, technicians have been hard at work making some major technical upgrades at the two middle schools.

Justin Hurley is the Network Administrator in District 91 and has been working on planning these improvements for the better part of a year. They're getting rid of the decades old phone system, adding high tech digital clocks everywhere, and most importantly, putting in wiring for interactive white boards.

To do that they are installing miles of new cable. This week they were putting in cable trays in the attic of Taylorview.

"This cable tray makes it so we can have a new cable drop into a classroom for a teacher a lot faster." Hurley said. "Our main focus was dealing with audio video for the classroom."

Each classroom gets a sophisticated audio system.

"We know that hearing is the primary channel for learning, and so when a teacher is able to wear a microphone, a teacher is able to change her tone a little bit -- not always have that presentation tone and so it's a little calmer environment," director of secondary education Sarah Sanders said.

While Taylorview is still being worked on, the project is mostly completed at Eagle Rock. The interactive white boards with the projectors connect right to laptops and phones. Teachers can bring up material from the internet or downloads. They can even highlight and circle text on the white board.

"A teacher's able to bring things to life so much more, downloading videos and incorporate them into lessons," Sanders said.

These projects are paid for by state technology grants and supplemental levies.

The interactive white boards were put in all the elementary schools over the past couple years. Next on the list is upgrading the technology in the high schools.

See the article here:

District 91 upgrades technology in classrooms during summer vacation - LocalNews8.com

Billionaire Mark Cuban made an appearance today in New York City's Central Park at the second annual "OZY Fest", and he didn't disappoint.

Naturally, the conversation first gravitated towards President Trump, with moderator Carlos Watson leading a panel that also included Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush and comedian Samantha Bee. Watson first asked if any of the panelists would join President Trump's cabinet.

Cuban proclaimed that he wouldn't join Trump's cabinet, but he would meet with the President to converse about the state of our nation.

When it was Jeb Bush's turn, the former governor simply replied: "Let's move onto something [more] fun."

Watson then shifted gears to the hot-button topic of police brutality.

"I think every city is different," Cuban responded when asked if our police system nationwide is broken. "Different forces in different cities have different cultures."

Cuban also touched upon artificial intelligence during a one-on-one panel with Watson.

"However much change you saw over the past ten years with the Apple (AAPL) iPhone, that's nothing," Cuban continued. Cuban also claims that Montreal and China are "kicking our ass" with artificial intelligence.

Cuban also expressed concern about technology usurping the current standard of everyday business practices, leaving many unemployed.

"There's going to be a lot of unemployed people replaced with technology and if we don't start dealing with that now, we're going to have some real problems," said Cuban.

Dubbed as "TED meets Coachella", OZY Fest marries music, intellectual thought, food, and comedy into an all-day festival under the foliage of Central Park. Featuring a medley of speakers, this year's lineup is headlined by pop star Jason Derulo, HBO's Issa Rae, celebrity chef Eddie Huang, news anchor Katie Couric, and drag superstar Ru Paul.

Watch More with TheStreet:

Read this article:

Billionaire Mark Cuban: The Rise of Technology Will Cause a Lot of Unemployment - TheStreet.com

Lyft is taking a markedly different approach from Uber. While Ubers self-driving plans have mostly been a solo effort, Lyft has announced what it calls its Open Platform Initiative, a way to develop autonomous vehicle technology in conjunction with automakers and technology companies.

We want to bring the whole industry together with this, and we think theres a unique opportunity in time right now for Lyft to become a leader while doing it, said Raj Kapoor, Lyfts chief strategy officer, in a press event at the companys San Francisco headquarters.

Perhaps the best way to understand the initiative is through the lens of the smartphone.

Ubers approach is closer to that of Apple: Both companies want to control most of the product, whether the software or the hardware.

Lyft, in contrast, is acting a bit more like Google in its development of the Android operating system. Both companies are creating software that many different hardware manufacturers can use, while developing the technology collaboratively with hardware partners. In Lyfts ideal world, that could mean a quicker spread of Lyfts technology among automakers.

Automakers are scrambling to develop their own self-driving technology as they imagine how they might operate in a future in which fewer people own cars. Collaborating with Lyft could help bring that technology to market faster, while automakers could provide Lyfts ride-hailing network with more cars to serve riders.

Lyft is seeing early signs of traction. Early partners include Waymo, nuTonomy, Jaguar, Land Rover and General Motors. The public details of the partnerships are scant, but all of the companies have committed to working together to make self-driving cars commonplace.

There are potential drawbacks. Partners could decide to leave the Open Platform Initiative and develop their own software. Or companies could be wary of teaming up with Lyft because it is developing its own self-driving system.

Lyft executives believe that the self-driving-car race is in its early days, and that companies that may consider one another rivals still have much to gain from collaborating and learning while building the automobile fleets of the future.

Lyft is not getting into the business of manufacturing a car, Mr. Kapoor said. Were on our way to creating a self-driving system. Then the auto industry can bring it to life.

A version of this article appears in print on July 22, 2017, on Page B6 of the New York edition with the headline: Lyft Sets Open Platform Approach to Self-Driving Cars.

Go here to read the rest:

Lyft to Develop Self-Driving Car Technology in New Silicon Valley Facility - New York Times

Please enable Javascript to watch this video

LAS VEGAS, Nevada-- It's already getting harder to get free drinks while gambling in Las Vegas, thanks to some new technology. That soon could become commonplace, spreading from the strip to local casinos.

Arden Progressive Systems & Games wants to implement their new technology in casinos across the country, including here in the Quad Cities.

It's a green light, red light alert system designed to tell casino staff if you're playing enough to qualify for drinks on the house.

Here's how it works"

"It gets rid of the people that want to hang around and play a quarter and try to basically, I don't want to use the word scam, but basically take advantage of the system," said Albert Tabola, the technology's creator.

He says Ceasars Entertainment already uses the system in their hotels, and they've seen a 35% savings on comped drink costs since the technology roll-out.

Those numbers are too good for casinos around the country to pass up. Tabola is pitching his technology to local casinos, in hopes the technology will become common in casinos everywhere.

Tabola stresses, if you're a consistent player, this won't affect you. You will still get your comped drinks. He says it only affects the people who want something for nothing.

Read the original:

New technology making it harder to get free drinks at casinos - WQAD.com

Whether its done consciously or subconsciously, racial discrimination continues to have a serious, measurable impact on the choices our society makes about criminal justice, law enforcement, hiring and financial lending. It might be tempting, then, to feel encouraged as more and more companies and government agencies turn to seemingly dispassionate technologies for help with some of these complicated decisions, which are often influenced by bias. Rather than relying on human judgment alone, organizations are increasingly asking algorithms to weigh in on questions that have profound social ramifications, like whether to recruit someone for a job, give them a loan, identify them as a suspect in a crime, send them to prison or grant them parole.

But an increasing body of research and criticism suggests that algorithms and artificial intelligence arent necessarily a panacea for ending prejudice, and they can have disproportionate impacts on groups that are already socially disadvantaged, particularly people of color. Instead of offering a workaround for human biases, the tools we designed to help us predict the future may be dooming us to repeat the past by replicating and even amplifying societal inequalities that already exist.

These data-fueled predictive technologies arent going away anytime soon. So how can we address the potential for discrimination in incredibly complex tools that have already quietly embedded themselves in our lives and in some of the most powerful institutions in the country?

In 2014, a report from the Obama White House warned that automated decision-making raises difficult questions about how to ensure that discriminatory effects resulting from automated decision processes, whether intended or not, can be detected, measured, and redressed.

Over the last several years, a growing number of experts have been trying to answer those questions by starting conversations, developing best practices and principles of accountability, and exploring solutions for the complex and insidious problem of algorithmic bias.

Although AI decision-making is often regarded as inherently objective, the data and processes that inform it can invisibly bake inequality into systems that are intended to be equitable. Avoiding that bias requires an understanding of both very complex technology and very complex social issues.

Consider COMPAS, a widely used algorithm that assesses whether defendants and convicts are likely to commit crimes in the future. The risk scores it generates are used throughout the criminal justice system to help make sentencing, bail and parole decisions.

At first glance, COMPAS appears fair: White and black defendants given higher risk scores tended to reoffend at roughly the same rate. But an analysis by ProPublica found that, when you examine the types of mistakes the system made, black defendants were almost twice as likely to be mislabeled as likely to reoffend and potentially treated more harshly by the criminal justice system as a result. On the other hand, white defendants who committed a new crime in the two years after their COMPAS assessment were twice as likely as black defendants to have been mislabeled as low-risk. (COMPAS developer Northpointe which recently rebranded as Equivant issued a rebuttal in response to the ProPublica analysis; ProPublica, in turn, issued a counter-rebuttal.)

Northpointe answers the question of how accurate it is for white people and black people, said Cathy ONeil, a data scientist who wrote the National Book Award-nominated Weapons of Math Destruction, but it does not ask or care about the question of how inaccurate it is for white people and black people: How many times are you mislabeling somebody as high-risk?

An even stickier question is whether the data being fed into these systems might reflect and reinforce societal inequality. For example, critics suggest that at least some of the data used by systems like COMPAS is fundamentally tainted by racial inequalities in the criminal justice system.

If youre looking at how many convictions a person has and taking that as a neutral variable well, thats not a neutral variable, said Ifeoma Ajunwa, a law professor who has testified before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on the implications of big data. The criminal justice system has been shown to have systematic racial biases.

Black people are arrested more often than whites, even when they commit crimes at the same rates. Black people are also sentenced more harshly and are more likely to searched or arrested during a traffic stop. Thats context that could be lost on an algorithm (or an engineer) taking those numbers at face value.

The focus on accuracy implies that the algorithm is searching for a true pattern, but we dont really know if the algorithm is in fact finding a pattern thats true of the population at large or just something it sees in its data, said Suresh Venkatasubramanian, a computing professor at the University of Utah who studies algorithmic fairness.

Biased data can create feedback loops that function like a sort of algorithmic confirmation bias, where the system finds what it expects to find rather than what is objectively there.

Part of the problem is that people trained as data scientists who build models and work with data arent well connected to civil rights advocates a lot of the time, said Aaron Rieke of Upturn, a technology consulting firm that works with civil rights and consumer groups. What I worry most about isnt companies setting out to racially discriminate. I worry far more about companies that arent thinking critically about the way that they might reinforce bias by the source of data they use.

There are similar concerns about algorithmic bias in facial-recognition technology, which already has a far broader impact than most people realize: Over 117 million American adults have had their images entered into a law-enforcement agencys face-recognition database, often without their consent or knowledge, and the technology remains largely unregulated.

A 2012 paper, which was coauthored by a technologist from the FBI, found that the facial-recognition algorithms it studied were less accurate when identifying the faces of black people, along with women and adults under 30. A key finding of a 2016 study by the Georgetown Center on Privacy and Technology, which examined 15,000 pages of documentation, was that police face recognition will disproportionately affect African Americans. (The study also provided models for policy and legislation that could be used to regulate the technology on both federal and state levels.)

Some critics suggest that the solution to these issues is to simply add more diversity to training sets, but its more complicated than that, according to Elke Oberg, the marketing manager at Cognitec, a company whose facial-recognition algorithms have been used by law-enforcement agencies in California, Maryland, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Unfortunately, it is impossible to make any absolute statements [about facial-recognition technology], Oberg said. Any measurements on face-recognition performance depends on the diversity of the images within the database, as well as their quality and quantity.

Jonathan Frankle, a former staff technologist for the Georgetown University Law Center who has experimented with facial-recognition algorithms, can run through a laundry list of factors that may contribute to the uneven success rates of the many systems currently in use, including the difficulty some systems have in detecting facial landmarks on darker skin, the lack of good training sets available, the complex nature of learning algorithms themselves, and the lack of research on the issue. If it were just about putting more black people in a training set, it would be a very easy fix. But its inherently more complicated than that.

He thinks further study is crucial to finding solutions, and that the research is years behind the way facial recognition is already being used. We dont even fully know what the problems are that we need to fix, which is terrifying and should give any researcher pause, Frankle said.

New laws and better government regulation could be a powerful tool in reforming how companies and government agencies use AI to make decisions.

Last year, the European Union passed a law called the General Data Protection Regulation, which includes numerous restrictions on the automated processing of personal data and requires transparency about the logic involved in those systems. Similar federal regulation does not appear to be forthcoming in the U.S. the FCC and Congress are pushing to either stall or dismantle federal data-privacy protections though some states, including Illinois and Texas, have passed their own biometric privacy laws to protect the type of personal data often used by algorithmic decision-making tools.

However, existing federal laws do protect against certain types of discrimination particularly in areas like hiring, housing and credit though they havent been updated to address the way new technologies intersect with old prejudices.

If were using a predictive sentencing algorithm where we cant interrogate the factors that it is using, or a credit scoring algorithm that cant tell you why you were denied credit thats a place where good regulation is essential, [because] these are civil rights issues, said Frankle. The government should be stepping in.

Another key area where the government could be of use: pushing for more transparency about how these influential predictive tools reach their decisions.

The only people who have access to that are the people who build them. Even the police dont have access to those algorithms, ONeil said. Were handing over the decision of how to police our streets to people who wont tell us how they do it.

Frustrated by the lack of transparency in the field, ONeil started a company to help take a peek inside. Her consultancy conducts algorithmic audits and risk assessments, and it is currently working on a manual for data scientists who want to do data science right.

Complicating any push toward greater transparency is the rise of machine learning systems, which are increasingly involved in decisions around hiring, financial lending and policing. Sometimes described as black boxes, these predictive models are so complex that even the people who create them cant always tell how they arrive at their conclusions.

A lot of these algorithmic systems rely on neural networks which arent really that transparent, said Professor Alvaro Bedoya, the executive director of the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law. You cant look under the hood, because theres no such thing as looking under the hood. In these cases, Bedoya said, its important to examine whether the systems results affect different groups in different ways. Increasingly, people are calling for algorithmic accountability, instead of insight into the code, to do rigorous testing of these systems and their outputs, to see if the outputs are biased.

Once we move beyond the technical discussions about how to address algorithmic bias, theres another tricky debate to be had: How are we teaching algorithms to value accuracy and fairness? And what do we decide accuracy and fairness mean? If we want an algorithm to be more accurate, what kind of accuracy do we decide is most important? If we want it to be more fair, whom are we most concerned with treating fairly?

For example, is it more unfair for an algorithm like COMPAS to mislabel someone as high-risk and unfairly penalize them more harshly, or to mislabel someone as low-risk and potentially make it easier for them to commit another crime? AURA, an algorithmic tool used in Los Angeles to help identify victims of child abuse, faces a similarly thorny dilemma: When the evidence is unclear, how should an automated system weigh the harm of accidentally taking a child away from parents who are not abusive against the harm of unwittingly leaving a child in an abusive situation?

In some cases, the most accurate prediction may not be the most socially desirable one, even if the data is unbiased, which is a huge assumption and its often not, Rieke said.

Advocates say the first step is to start demanding that the institutions using these tools make deliberate choices about the moral decisions embedded in their systems, rather than shifting responsibility to the faux neutrality of data and technology.

It cant be a technological solution alone, Ajunwa said. It all goes back to having an element of human discretion and not thinking that all tough questions can be answered by technology.

Others suggest that human decision-making is so prone to cognitive bias that data-driven tools might be the only way to counteract it, assuming we can learn to build them better: by being conscientious, by being transparent and by candidly facing the biases of the past and present in hopes of not coding them into our future.

Algorithms only repeat our past, so they dont have the moral innovation to try and improve our lives or our society, ONeil said. But long as our society is itself imperfect, we are going to have to adjust something to remove the discrimination. I am not a proponent of going back to purely human decision-making because humans arent great. I do think algorithms have the potential for doing better than us. She pauses for a moment. I might change my mind if you ask me in five years, though.

Read more from the original source:

Technology Is Biased Too. How Do We Fix It? - FiveThirtyEight

Headlines for state attorneys general (AGs) have been dominated by tangles with the Trump administration from the travel ban case going to the U.S. Supreme Court to challenges to legacy regulations at federal agencies. Less visible are actions by state AGs to push forward their interests and influence in technology-oriented consumer products, as highlighted in panel topics at various attorney general meetings this summer.

An attorney general is often known as the top cop in his or her state. However, rather than having widespread criminal prosecutorial powers, state AGs utilize broad consumer protection authority. Particularly in assessing deceptive and unfair acts and practices with consumer-facing business, AGs are market regulators and enforcers.

For years, data breaches have been big news for state AGs, as there remains no federal compliance standard. Individual states maintain their own requirements for notification in case of a breach, and they are enforced by state AGs. Some states take the opportunity to establish heightened privacy standards for the types of data that companies can collect. For instance, the Illinois legislature recently passed legislation to restrict geolocation data, and the rules are to be enforced by the attorney general. Moving from reactive roles to proactive interests, state AGs are mapping out technology sectors where they see significant instances of security and privacy at stake.

Three huge technologies that will shape the future of consumers have the current interest of state AGs: driverless cars, the internet of things, and artificial intelligence. The interconnectedness of computing devices along with the capture of personal data, including at times when a consumer may be unaware, has some state AGs on high alert.The concern from AGs is not a particular innovation itself, but rather a self-realization of how AGs themselves should react to the seismic shift in consumer preferences where a desire for efficiency, personalization and freedom is trumping traditional notions of consumer protection.

First, with driverless or autonomous vehicles and connected cars, we have the Jetsons becoming reality. A fleet of cars without drivers roams the streets of Pittsburgh, and a production vehicles will show up at your door. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration categorizes five levels of automated driving from level one, which includes cruise control, to levels four and five, in which the vehicle monitors all roadway conditions and reacts appropriately. Between the ends of this spectrum is an incremental revolution, as more and more driver assistance features are introduced into vehicles.

With the productivity and safety gains for those no longer seated behind a steering wheel, state AGs recognize potential privacy concerns with location data, driving habits and occupant identification that could be at risk of unauthorized use or disclosure. State AGs will also seek to defend their state laws from the preemptive effects of federal regulations that may otherwise be necessary to usher the advancement of driverless technology. With state AGs clearly having a role to influence the driverless industry and its future, proactive engagement with AGs, even in spite of their enforcement role, is critical.

Second, the internet of things (IoT) describes smart devices connected together. Smart devices may be activated remotely, may detect information independently, or may be able to learn and repeat functions. IoT devices collect information from a persons home or surroundings, some which may be personal. Earlier this year, for instance, the FTC and the New Jersey attorney general scored a $2.2 million settlement with a TV manufacturer that collected viewing histories.

For state AGs, IoT enforcement considerations involve unfair and deceptive acts and practices. These include, for example, giving no notice to consumers about personally identifiable information that may be collected and possible HIPAA violations in sharing confidential health information. The proliferation of non-secure connected devices creates growing risks.

Last year, the Mirai virus searched the internet for vulnerable IoT devices, attacked them using common manufacturer default settings, and infected devices to control them for additional attacks. State AGs are aware of ways in which IoT devices from cordless tea kettles to connected medical devices could be compromised when poor security opens up possibilities to gain access to a wireless home network.

Third, artificial intelligence, or AI, certainly brings images of science fiction. AI involves computers performing tasks in ways that would otherwise require human intelligence, such as recognizing speech, having visual perception, or making decisions. Last year, an AI robot journalist wrote 450 stories on the Olympics, and sch superhuman feats will continue, as AI learns to understand pictures and videos of events.

State AGs understand how AI may be useful for law enforcement, such as managing unregistered drones by taking them safely out of the sky. This method of using technology advances to manage technology risks is certainly appealing and needs to be better understood by AGs across a variety of industries.

State AGs have already been receiving a similar education with their regulatory and enforcement authority toward the sharing economy, as traditional methods of consumer protection do not fit. More so, AI will transform our economy as a whole, which has state attorneys general considering how their consumer protection roles must change.

Joseph Jacquot is a partner at Foley & Lardner LLP. He previously served as chief deputy attorney general of Florida and as deputy chief counsel for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.

More:

State AGs are flexing their muscles to protect your technology privacy - The Hill (blog)

Earlier this month, the Nashville District Attorney completely retired charges against a man named Christopher Miller who was arrested in May by the citys police for attempting to sell the botanical substance called kratom.

The move brought renewed attention to this naturally occurring product that the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) last year proposed classifying as an illegal Schedule I substance a plan which the DEA uncharacteristically withdrew, following a public comment period characterized by opposition from a wide range of constituents.

In a previous blog post about competing interests in the e-cigarette market, I described the so-called Bootlegger and Baptist theory of regulation, a realpolitik analysis of perhaps the single most effective type of issue-driven coalitions.

The theorys title refers, of course, to the historical case of alcohol prohibition in America. At the time, those who favored criminalizing booze, beer and wine included mercenary figures who profited handsomely from a black market created by prohibition, along with teetotaling do-gooders concerned with saving souls.

The common purpose of these two disconnected groups with profoundly divergent motivations who nonetheless shared the same goal, led to the prohibition of alcohol in 1920.

It was arguably the governments appetite for lost revenue from taxes on the sale of booze which eventually fueled a successful constitutional amendment in 1933, overturning what the Bootlegger-Baptist coalition had achieved thirteen years earlier.

With current annual opioid sales of around $11 billion in the U.S., projected to grow to $18 billion by 2021, an epidemic of addictions plagues nearly every demographic group in the country.

The fact that kratom helps many hooked individuals kick the dangerous habit, according to various experts and observers, means it has potentially significant economic impacts for pharmaceutical companies selling opioid painkillers.

Given the major addiction epidemic, clearly not all customers for the pharmaceutical companies products are consuming them for legitimate medical reasons.

On the issue of whether kratom should be criminalized, viewed one way opioid pharmaceutical makers approximate the Bootlegger part of the equation, without implying any nefarious intent or negligence.

Ostensibly, these companies would profit or continue to profit, rather from the DEA making kratom a Schedule I substance, since it purportedly functions as a reverse gateway drug, helping opioid addicts beat their habits.

During the public notice and comment process for the DEAs plan to criminalize kratom, no vocal grassroots constituency emerged in support of the rule no Baptist to match whatever economic interests (Bootleggers) may have favored the plan.

According to Regendus data, an analytics solution that applies Natural Language Processing to rapidly analyze sentiment contained in public comments, the vast majority of more than 24,000 submissions were strongly opposed to the DEAs plan.

As a former federal prosecutor and criminal defense attorney, I was personally familiar with the DEA, whose policies and agents I regularly encountered on one side of a courtroom or the other.

On the defense side in particular, the courtroom is where the DEA normally faces opposition to its policies from certain elements of the public, i.e. the accused.

In the war on drugs, the agencys rules have major, life-changing impacts on individuals, their families and communities.

Many observers of the DEAs proposal to outlaw kratom and the agencys eventual withdrawal in the face of strong public opposition on the issue have noted the rarity of the outcome.

In this case, the public leveraged its legal right to comment and influence a rule-making process, to stop a rule in its tracks before their government acted to make them defendants or criminals.

Instead of a loss in the courtroom, anti-kratom interests inside and outside the DEA lost their case in the rule-making process.

John W. Davis II is founder and CEO of N&C Inc., a provider of solutions such as Regendus that help advocates analyze complex content, discover insights, and better represent the interests of clients and stakeholders.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.

Link:

How technology can help government fight the war on drugs - The Hill (blog)

Scott Mendell

Scott Mendell

On the move: Technology plays increasing role in relocation

Over the years, the tools of the trade Realtors have at their disposal have changed quite a bit. Due to the advances in technology and the use of various apps, Realtors are able to expedite communication with their clients and connect in a variety of ways.

This is especially helpful when assisting people who are relocating, because Realtors and their clients are often geographically separated during different stages of the process. As such, Realtors have come to rely on certain technologies to help them get the job done.

Scott Mendell, a broker associate with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Anderson Properties, said that when working with relocation clients, being truly mobile is incredibly important, which is made possible through the use of smartphones and tablets.

"I work with an iPad Pro, and I load everything needed for the day's agenda when I am going to be showing properties to relocation buyers. They can use an app called GoodNotes to make notes about each house they see right on the listing sheets," Mendell said.

He added that video chat apps like FaceTime have become invaluable to him when working with relocation clients, because they allow him to virtually show a property.

(Story continues below ...)

This was the case a few weeks ago when Mendell assisted clients who were moving to Houston from Utah. They were not able to find a house during their home-finding trip, but they had at least zeroed in on the area that they wanted. So, Mendell continued to send them information about listings, and then walked through their favorites while connected to them through FaceTime.

"Utilizing technology is really critical when working with relocation clients, because of the pace at which everything moves today," Mendell said. "Many companies are not giving their transferees long home-buying trips like they used to. So, agents have to be able to serve those clients when they are not physically in their office, and the way to do that is through technology."

In the same vein, Mendell said that because of the different modes of communication available today, it is important for agents to match and adapt to the communication styles of each client.

"The ability to use multiple forms of communication is important. Younger clients might like to use Snapchat and WhatsApp, while older clients rely on email. So, I have a form that asks my clients what their preferred method of contact is," said Mendell.

He added, "The No. 1 thing that keeps a relationship working and a transaction running smoothly is communication."

While technology and apps are important tools in an agent's arsenal, Bryan Beene, a sales associate with John Daugherty, Realtors, warned against their overuse, because he thinks it can hinder personal connection.

"I utilize the technologies that save me time, so I can be a bit more present for my clients," Beene said. "There is nothing that can replace the human connection, so whenever a new app comes out or there is new technology, I look at it, but it has to pass the litmus test of whether it's going to enhance my relationship with my clients, or just get in the way. If it gets in the way, it doesn't fly."

For Beene, the two most important apps he uses tend to be the HAR (Houston Association of Realtors) app, and Skype.

"I would say that the HAR app is the most valuable, because it gives me direct access to what my clients have already been looking at, and it's where they have been getting their information. They might see a property online and tell me that it looks like it has been on the market for a long time. Using the app, I can access that record and give them accurate information," Beene said.

He uses Skype primarily as a way of introducing himself to his clients before they arrive in Houston.

"I always use Skype to introduce myself to relocation clients. We talk face to face on Skype, which is usually a long meeting, so that we can get to know each other. We get to establish a relationship, and that is so much more effective than an email or even a phone call," Beene said. "I notice that when I use technology to create a relationship with my clients first, that they have less anxiety about the move and there is a lot more excitement.

"I use technology for the connection, and since we can't meet in person, Skype is basically how I can re-create the experience for them as if they were here in town."

Michelle Sandlin is an award-winning writer, journalist and global mobility industry expert. Her work is frequently featured in Worldwide ERC's Mobility magazine, and in various business and industry related publications and corporate blogs. Follow her on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/TheMichelleSandlin and on Twitter: @MichelleSandlin. Also visit "On the Move" at blog.chron.com/onthemove.

Read more from the original source:

On the move: Technology plays increasing role in relocation - Chron.com

Even as the Nasdaq Composite is reaching fresh all-time highs, Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU) stock's 138% rally over the past 12 months puts the Nasdaq's 25% rise to shame. These numbers certainly don't lie, but they also only tell part of the story when it comes to Micron.

Take a step further back to view the bigger picture, and one sees a company that has experienced both sweeping successes and stinging failures over the years, a point investors enamored by its recent rally must keep in mind. To get a better sense of the company and the forces that drive it, let's examine three charts that sum up Micron Technology and its long-term share price dynamics.

Image Source: Micron Technology

Perhaps the most important thing to understand when looking at Micron is that the DRAM and flash memory chips it sells are effectively commodity products. Market spot prices control what they can charge, which means that Micron's revenue is almost entirely dependent on the current supply-and-demand dynamic for both types of memory chips.

This can lead to the same sort of tremendous top-line fluctuations that are experienced by oil producers or other commodity-based businesses, as you can see from Micron's historical revenue chart.

MU Revenue (TTM) data by YCharts

As you can see, the general direction of Micron's sales has been upward, as technology and computing power have become more integral parts of our everyday lives in recent years.

However, since the year 2000, the company's revenue has experienced four major contractions that, predictably, led to steep losses for Micron shareholders (more on that below). Before turning to its stock price though, we need to look at the rest of Micron's cost structure, which plays an important role in a broader discussion of the giant chipmaker.

As is the case for most companies that lack pricing power, Micron Technology's margin structure shows a tremendous amount of variability. When times are good, the company can produce significant profits. However, when memory chip prices soften -- either due to economic weakness or market-wide supply-and-demand imbalances -- its profits can nosedive deep into the red as the following charts demonstrate.

MU Gross Profit Margin (TTM) data by YCharts

It's also important to note that Micron's cost structure differs from that ofchipmakers like Qualcomm in that it owns and operates its own semiconductor manufacturing plants. This means Micron's cost structure is more rigid than that of firms that outsource their chip fabrication.

The added fixed costs that come with this strategy make Micron's bottom line more sensitive to revenue changes. Big picture, it's important to note that Micron's lack of pricing power (gross margins) and its more rigid cost structure (net margins) go a long way toward explaining the company's highly cyclical stock price.

Because of the above factors, it should come as no surprise that Micron's stock has also swung wildly over the years. Take a look at the company's historical performance against its benchmark, the Nasdaq Composite.

MU data by YCharts

This nicely captures my cautious take on Micron, particularly for long-term buy-and-hold investors. Micron can generate market-beating returns when investors buy its shares during a pricing rut and hold them until memory prices recover, which is exactly the scenario that has played out with Micron over the past year or so.

Unfortunately, shareholders who have mistimed their investments -- we don't believe in trying to time the market here at The Fool -- have lost their shirts. To be sure, times are flush at Micron right now, and the continued recovery in its business has Wall Street analysts as bullish as ever. However, the company's highly cyclical nature and lack of meaningful pricing power suggest this same scenario will eventually take place.

Ultimately, this isn't an attempt to dissuade investors from buying Micron stock. Rather, it's an earnest warning that owning Micron shares comes with legitimate risks that need to be fully understood prior to investing.

Andrew Tonner owns shares of Apple. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Apple. The Motley Fool owns shares of Qualcomm. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

More:

Micron Technology Inc. in 3 Charts - Motley Fool

Miami Herald

'Trains are 19th century technology,' Miami-Dade mayor says in touting cheaper options Miami Herald After running a campaign ad last year touting More Rail Lines, Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez on Wednesday defended his new pitch for modernized express bus systems running north and south of Miami. My mind was there for more rail lines, ... and more »

More:

'Trains are 19th century technology,' Miami-Dade mayor says in touting cheaper options - Miami Herald