Daily Archives: February 6, 2021

To avoid online censorship, government must force Big Tech to be more transparent, expert says – Yahoo Sports

Posted: February 6, 2021 at 8:49 am

Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: AP (3), Getty Images

Censorship online by Big Tech is a bad idea, in large part because its a distraction from the problem of how social media companies promote, spread and amplify harmful information, according to author Peter Pomerantsev.

Its ridiculous to think that you can regulate the billions of things people say every day, or that we should, or that its even feasible. So I dont think thats the way forward, Pomerantsev said in an interview on The Long Game, a Yahoo News podcast. Therell be a way to get out of the whole tricky thing of taking one comment down or leaving it up.

The way out, he said, is through forcing the tech companies to be transparent about how they are manipulating the spread of information, and holding them accountable to prevent public harms.

Pomerantsev is a Russian-born journalist now based in London whose parents were hounded by the KGB secret police in Soviet Russia. His book This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality argues that phrases like freedom of expression have been hacked by authoritarian leaders and governments like Vladimir Putin in Russia and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines.

Authoritarians use freedom of speech as an excuse to spread massive amounts of disinformation at the click of a button, while employing online mobs and troll farms to drown out and intimidate critical voices and obscure truth. This constitutes a sort of censorship through noise, Pomerantsev and two others wrote in a recent article for the London School of Economics Institute of Global Affairs, where he is a visiting senior fellow.

But countering autocrats doesnt have to mean removing the posts of ordinary people or taking them off their preferred social media platforms, he said, which has become a growing concern among many Republicans.

We thought that for a long time, the federal government is infuriating, Tucker Carlson said on Fox News Wednesday. The bigger threat to your family turned out to be huge publicly held corporations, particularly the tech monopolies.

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In fact, focus on censorship and cancel culture actually distracts from solving the problem of disinformation and all the chaos and confusion and real-world harm it brings with it in a way that preserves free speech, Pomerantsev said.

A lot of the virality is amplified artificially. Thats kind of how a lot of these platforms were designed, he said. That kind of artificial amplification I think really has to end.

Fake amplification everything from gaming algorithms and search engine optimization through to amplification through coordinated inauthentic activity I think that probably has to end if the internet is going to be a just reflection of society and not this kind of weird funhouse mirror that distorts everything, Pomerantsev said.

One of the first steps toward reducing disinformation is algorithm transparency: revealing how the social media and Big Tech companies engineer which information rises to the top and is seen by large numbers of people. Google, Facebook and TikTok have all taken some recent steps in this direction, Axios reported this week, but it was voluntary and most experts think this issue needs to be overseen by government regulators.

When Trumps people would say, Google pushes conservative views right down, liberal news up, we dont know because Google has not shown anyone its formulas that shape search results, Pomerantsev said. Thats ridiculous.

Carlson addressed the same root cause on his show. Twitter refuses to release data on who it bans, he said.

Rep. Tom Malinowski, D-N.J., and Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., sent letters to Facebook, YouTube and Twitter in late January urging the companies to address the fundamental design features of their social networks that facilitate the spread of extreme, radicalizing content to their users. The letters were co-signed by 38 other House Democrats.

The lawmakers drew a straight line between the focus of social media companies on maximizing user engagement and the assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 by Trump supporters who believed the former presidents lies about the 2020 election.

The rioters who attacked the Capitol earlier this month were radicalized in part in digital echo chambers that these platforms designed, built, and maintained, and that the platforms are partially responsible for undermining our shared sense of objective reality, for intensifying fringe political beliefs, for facilitating connections between extremists, leading some of them to commit real-world, physical violence, Malinowski and Eshoo wrote.

The lawmakers cited a Wall Street Journal investigation from last May that revealed Facebook knew in 2018 that its algorithms sometimes radicalized its users, but did not take action to reduce this because it would reduce profits. Our algorithms exploit the human brains attraction to divisiveness, a presentation created internally said, noting that the company was serving more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention and increase time on the platform.

Malinowski and Eshoo have proposed a change to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act a law targeted for reform by conservatives as well that would hold tech companies accountable for content they proactively promote for business reasons, if doing so leads to specific offline harms.

Malinowski said in a hearing this week that this is a solution that Republicans and Democrats should be able to agree on. We can believe that the biggest problem is on the right, on the far right or on the far left it doesnt matter. We can debate that. Whichever of those things you believe you should be for this, because the mechanism works the same way. It pushes people on the left further left. It pushes people on the right further right, until they reach an extreme.

Pomerantsev pointed to the United Kingdoms approach, which says in his words that companies have to think about the harms they cause, and those harms could be around public health or some forms of personal abuse.

And the question is what are the companies doing almost like in a health and safety kind of regime to mitigate that? So are their algorithms making it too easy for people to bully others or to harass them? Pomerantsev said. Are the way their systems are designed making it too easy to spread this information thats dangerous to peoples health?

The British have said there needs to be a regulator thats making a judgment about whether theyre doing enough around those issues, and are working to set up a system in which Ofcom, its communications regulator, could issue fines if the companies are found at fault.

The tech companies have lobbied the British government against giving Ofcom punitive regulatory powers.

But as Pomerantsev wrote in his book and expounded on in his interview with Yahoo News, the Big Tech companies have acquired so much information about their users which is most people that there is a real question about whether they are infringing upon freedom of thought.

To some degree our private thoughts, creative impulses, and senses of self are shaped by information forces greater than ourselves, he wrote in This Is Not Propaganda.

Are they actually invading your freedom of thought? Are they actually crossing the line of you, and then using it against you? he said. What is that line of our unconscious that deserves to be protected?

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Conservative claims of online censorship ‘a form of disinformation:’ study | TheHill – The Hill

Posted: at 8:49 am

Claims that conservative voices are being censored online by social media platforms are not backed by evidence andarethemselves a disinformation narrative, according to areport released Monday.

The New York University Stern Center for Business and Human Rights report concluded that anti-conservative bias claims, boosted by some top Republican lawmakers including former President TrumpDonald TrumpChamber of Commerce CEO to leave: reports Fox News Media cancels Lou Dobbs's show GOP lawmakers call for Pelosi to be fined over new screenings MORE, are not based on any tangible evidence.

The claim of anti-conservative animus is itself a form of disinformation: a falsehood with no reliable evidence to support it. No trustworthy large-scale studies have determined that conservative content is being removed for ideological reasons or that searches are being manipulated to favor liberal interests, the report stated.

Republicans have ramped up accusations that social media companies have an anti-conservative bias after Facebook and Twitter took action to ban Trumps account following the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.

Twitter says it has permanently banned the former president from its platform, while Facebook is leaving the final decision up to its independent oversight body.

The allegation of censorship has been key in Republicans attacks on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects social media platforms from liability associated with third-party content posted on their sites.

Despite the repeated accusations by Republicans, the report found that by many measures, conservative voices including that of the ex-president, until he was banished from Twitter and Facebook often are dominant in online political debates.

For example, the report highlighted the engagement on Trumps Facebook page compared to now-President Bidens page during the three months leading up to Election Day. Trumpelicited 87 percent of the total 307 million post interactions between the two, compared to Bidens 13 percent.

Additionally, the report noted that Fox News and Breitbart News led the pack in terms of Facebook interactions with posts by media organizations from Jan. 1 through Nov. 3 of last year. Fox News had 448 million interactions and Breitbart had 295 million; the closest behind them was CNN, at 191 million interactions.

With Biden in office, Republicans have continued to push back against Section 230 over the unfounded accusations of anti-conservative biases.

The report recommends the Biden administration work with Congress to update Section 230, rather than pushing for a repeal of the law as Trump sought before leaving office.

The controversial law should be amended so that its liability shield is conditional, based on social media companies acceptance of a range of new responsibilities related to policing content. One of the new platform obligations could be ensuring that algorithms involved in content ranking and recommendation not favor sensationalistic or unreliable material in pursuit of user engagement, the report stated.

Bidens nominee to serve as the secretary of Commerce, current Rhode Island Gov. Gina RaimondoGina RaimondoDaines seeks to block Haaland confirmation to Interior Hillicon Valley: Democratic senators unveil bill to reform Section 230 | Labor board denies Amazon request to delay local union vote | Robinhood lifts restrictions on GameStop, other stocks Cruz blocks vote on Biden Commerce secretary nominee over Huawei concerns MORE (D), said last week during a Senate confirmation hearing that the law needs some reform, indicating the administration is open to amending it.

Biden during his presidential campaign said Section 230 should be revoked, but he has largely not detailed plans moving forward.

The report also recommends the Biden administration create a new Digital Regulatory Agency. The agency would be charged with enforcing the responsibilities of a revised Section 230.

Additionally, it recommends the Biden administration pursue a constructive reform agenda for social media, including pressing the companies on improving and enforcing content policies.

As for social media companies, the report recommends the industry provide greater disclosure on content moderation actions, offer users a choice among content moderation algorithms, undertake more vigorous human moderation of influential accounts and release more data for researchers.

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Conservative claims of online censorship 'a form of disinformation:' study | TheHill - The Hill

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Facebook and Twitter should not be in the censorship business – MarketWatch

Posted: at 8:48 am

Facebook and Twittersuspending former President Donald Trumps accountsin the wake of a mob storming the Capitol raises yet again the issue of the discretion that federal law affords internet platforms to regulate speech and Big Techs monopoly power.

Bigness is not necessarily a problem and can be an asset. Facebook FB, +0.60% is a leader in artificial intelligence research, Google GOOG, +1.73% gave us Android, Amazon AMZN, +0.63% pioneered cloud computing, and Apple AAPL, -0.31% pioneered the modern smartphone.

Facebook may have a monopoly by providing a substantially differentiated digital bulletin board, but it is a free service, making questionable the economicharm to consumersthesine qua nonof modern antitrust enforcement.

In the advertising market,Google has the largest market share. And it is noteworthy that the Justice Departmentdid not charge Facebookin its suit against Google for manipulating the ad-marketing algorithms.

In this previous column, I argued that the Federal Trade Commission suit against Facebook is wrongheaded. It could be interpreted as an attempt to rein in the company owing to gross data privacy misdeeds going back to theCambridge Analyticaaffairand enablingRussian meddling in the 2016presidential campaign. And for the complaints ofDemocratic and Republican politiciansabout editorial abuses at both Twitter TWTR, +0.48% and Facebook.

Forcing Facebook to divest Instagram and WhatsApp, as the FTC seeks, wont solve the data-mining and privacy problemsthat would require legislation similar to theEuropean Union General Data Regulationthat mandates users be informed, understand and consent to the data collected about them and how it will be used.

Section 230of the Communications Decency Act provides Twitter, Facebook and other internet platforms with expansive legal immunity for the statements and other material that users post. It exempts service providers from civil liability for actions taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable. And for providing users with tools to restrict access to such materials.

As a candidatePresident Joe Biden called for revoking those protectionsand permitting the websites to be sued. More generally Democrats would like Twitter, Facebook and others to remove what they view as false information, whereas Republicans believe the two platforms exhibit ananticonservative bias.

All sides appear to miss even bigger problems.

Justice Clarence Thomas argues that lower courts apply Section 230 too expansively. Internet platforms have been found exempt from liability even when they know the content or activity it enables is illegalfor example, child pornography, human trafficking, and terrorism.

With millions of daily posts, it is impossible for Twitter and Facebook to catch everything, but they could be compelledor be held criminally or civilly libelto remove material they know is illegal or facilitates crimes. And for failing to pre-emptively screen material that could incite civil unrest until the full context of an incident is determined and accurately portrayed.

As for political and other speech, Twitter and other platforms have been accused of anticonservative bias in the content they exclude and promote. This is broadly protected, because the First Amendment applies to restrictions that may be applied by government entities, not private actors. And thecourts do not treat internet platforms as public squares where viewpoint discrimination is impermissible.

Absolute neutrality is impossible but the ruminations of politiciansas long as their posts are not illegal and do not incite illegal assembly, destruction of property or violenceshould be left to the intelligence of voters. After all, what is true and not true is often in the eyes of the beholder.

They may be technology wizards, but Jack Dorsey and other internet magnates should not be exercising broad censorship powers.

European officials were shocked by the recent Facebook and Twitter bans on Trump andsuggested such decisions should be left to elected officials to arbitrate.

Importantly, Twitter, Facebook and other social media have become so pervasive that they have become the public squareand legally should be treated as such. Neutral arbitration panelswith equal representation chosen by Republican and Democratic leadersshould oversee editorial decisions to ensure some measure of objectivity.

Its not perfect but if you want perfection you will have to wait for the hereafterSt. Peter wont be facing a primary challenge anytime soon.

PeterMoriciis an economist and emeritus business professor at the University of Maryland, and a national columnist.

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Facebook and Twitter should not be in the censorship business - MarketWatch

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EXPLAINER: Why Does NJ Women’s Prison Have Ugly History’? – NBC New York

Posted: at 8:46 am

New Jerseys attorney general, charging three male prison guards with misconduct this week in connection with an attack on female inmates, said the states lone womens prison has an ugly history. Indeed it hasnt even been a year since the U.S. government said abuse at the facility was an open secret.

But how was abuse an open secret? Why wasnt something done about it? Below is a closer look at the history of the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women.

This week, Attorney General Gurbir Grewal charged one guard with assault and misconduct and two sergeants at the prison with misconduct counts, saying they also tried to cover up the January attack on at least six inmates.

One woman was punched 28 times and pepper-sprayed, while another had bones broken near her eye, Grewal said.

More charges could be coming, he said.

News from the prison spurred lawmakers to call for the state Department of Corrections commissioners resignation, led to criminal investigations and pushed Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy to hire a former state comptroller to conduct a separate investigation.

WHO SAYS ABUSE WAS AN OPEN SECRET? AND WHY?

Federal prosecutors found former and current prisoners called sexual abuse an open secret.

The prosecutors uncovered a culture of acceptance of sexual abuse of inmates details to back the claim up.

In April, at the height of the COVID-19 outbreak, the U.S. Justice Department published a scathing report about the prison, located in Clinton, Hunterdon County, more than 50 miles (80 kilometers) west of New York City.

Five guards and one civilian worker at the prison pleaded guilty or were convicted of sexually abusing more than 10 women from 2016 to 2019.

The report found that there were insufficient cameras, and that one storage room without a surveillance camera, had a a mattress lying in it.

Guards regularly called prisoners disparaging names, graphically commented on their appearances and remarked on their sexual inclinations.

The report also found that when inmates reported abuse, the response could be retaliatory, with inmates being subjected to body orifice scanners and then being placed into solitary confinement.

Two women filed explosive court papers against New York City, claiming theyre the latest victims of visitor sex abuse by correction officers in the citys jails. Sarah Wallace reports.

HOW DID THE STATE RESPOND TO THE REPORT?

The state Department of Corrections oversees the prison, and a spokesperson for the department says its committed to changing the culture at the facility and has made a number of changes, including: hiring more female guards, installing more surveillance cameras and increasing training for prisoners and staff.

The department also is hiring an assistant commission for womens services.

DID THE JANUARY INCIDENT INVOLVE SEXUAL ASSAULT?

None of the charges Grewal brought this week are for sexual assault. But that doesnt mean sexual assault hasnt been raised. One inmate, Ajila Nelson, told NJ.com that she was attacked, kicked in the face, groped and sexually assaulted.

More than 25 women have now filed notices of claim against New York City alleging they were sexually abused by correction officers during visits to jails. Sarah Wallace reports.

IS THE STATE DOING ENOUGH?

Not for some, no. Every Democratic state senator signed a letter asking Murphy to fire Corrections Commissioner Marcus Hicks.

Murphy has said he finds the reports of the attack at the prison sickening, but declined to speak further about it, including on Friday at a news conference. Murphy has hired Matt Boxer, an attorney and former state comptroller and federal prosecutor, to investigate what happened in January at the prison.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

The three guards face March hearings in state court, and the attorney general suggested more charges could be coming. Tom Eicher, the director of the Office of Public Integrity and Accountability under Grewal, said additional charges are likely.

A timeline for the investigation ordered by the governor isnt clear, nor yet is the cost to the public of hiring an outside firm to look into the matter.

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EXPLAINER: Why Does NJ Women's Prison Have Ugly History'? - NBC New York

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Cabin pressure: the turbulent history of flight attendants – The Verge

Posted: at 8:46 am

Tracy* kept it together when her mom died in mid-March in New York. She kept it together when she came back from the funeral on an Amtrak rather than an airplane because there were no flights operating to get her home.

It wasnt until she went back to her job as a flight attendant and saw out of the galley window row upon row of airplanes stacked nose to tail with cloth covers over their engines and sensors.

Tracy has been flying for over 16 years. She worked during the Great Recession, when passenger traffic fell by 10 percent and forced several airlines to declare bankruptcy. She worked during the years of nightmarish tarmac delays prior to 2010, when airlines werent required to taxi back to the gate to let passengers off even after delays of three or more hours. And she worked during the SARS epidemic in 2004, H1N1 in 2009, and the Ebola scare in 2014. But nothing in her training or her experience prepared her for the sight of so many airplanes from so many airlines with nowhere to go and no passengers to fly. For the first time in her entire career, she broke down and cried while on the job.

This has to be the beginning of the end, she thought. How are we going to recover from this?

Two months earlier, in January 2020, the outlook for the year was bright. Airlines had just posted their seventh consecutive year of multibillion-dollar profits and were expected to continue doing just as well. For an industry historically defined by cycles of boom and bust, there seemed to be no storm clouds on the horizon the economy was good, gas prices were stable, and business travel was expected to grow to a record $1.6 trillion for the full year.

But then the bottom fell out of commercial aviation. On March 1st, nearly 2.3 million passengers took a flight somewhere in the United States. Just 30 days later, that number was just over 136,000, a 94 percent drop against the previous year. And the number would keep falling.

Airlines were pushed to the brink. Delta burned through $60 million in cash a day; American Airlines, $70 million; and United, $100 million. In April, Congress passed the CARES Act, which included $25 billion in loans and grants to keep payrolls full and airlines out of bankruptcy, but even that was only enough to keep the industry afloat for six months.

In October, with the COVID-19 pandemic showing no signs of abatement and Congress failing to pass an extension to the CARES Act, airline executives switched to plan B. They stopped service to smaller airports and retired entire fleets of aircraft. They took on a collective $67 billion in new debt including some creative new strategies, like mortgaging their frequent flyer programs. But most of all, they tried to scratch what revenue they could out of the few people willing to travel. And there was no guarantee these drastic measures would work.

Weve got 12 to 15 months of pain, sacrifice, and difficulty ahead, said Scott Kirby, CEO of United Airlines, in mid-October.

And the nations flight attendants would have to bear more pain, sacrifice, and difficulty than most.

On March 17th, the Department of Homeland Security designated airlines as critical infrastructure and flight attendants as essential workers. This wasnt an honorific: in the DHSs own words, essential workers have a special responsibility to maintain your work schedule and ensure continuity of functions. And as flight attendants went back to work, they found that they were not returning to friendly skies. Just as the pandemic changed everything else about travel, its also turned their chief role as the face of the airline from takeoff to landing from a source of pride into a source of dread.

Within weeks, several hundred flight attendants tested positive for COVID-19. By the end of April, it had claimed the lives of five.

Once it started going like wildfire, there was a lot of fear within the flight attendant community, recalled Lori Lochelt, who flew for 22 years. There was so much unknown about the virus. Could it live on metal surfaces, the seat back pockets, the tray tables?

Despite this, most major airlines were rumored to actively prohibit flight attendants from wearing masks while on-duty, although only American Airlines went on record acknowledging such a policy. (At the time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that only people with COVID symptoms wear a mask).

This did not make sense to us, said Paul Hartshorn, Jr., the head of communications for the Association of Professional Flight Attendants (APFA), which represents the 27,000 US-based flight attendants at American Airlines. Our major fight was to move the airlines towards a policy of everyone wearing some face covering in the airplane cabin. It just had to happen.

By April, airlines allowed their cabin crews to wear masks. And a month later, they required passengers to mask up, too. Flight attendants became the mask police, which led to even more trouble both on the ground and in the air.

At least one passenger on every flight has a mask issue, said Connor*, a flight attendant with two years of experience. It gets a little bit tiring to have to remind people, and when you remind them they get a little upset.

Tracy agreed. You always have a couple of jerky people. You can remove your mask when youre eating or drinking, so you have the guy eating one sunflower seed at a time so he can keep the mask off the whole flight.

Sometimes, passengers get outright belligerent. In late October, a viral video showed someone slap a flight attendant in the face when she tried to enforce the mask policy during boarding. The offender was quickly de-boarded.

Other passengers make it all the way to their seats before picking a fight over masks. And although flight attendants have the law on their side, quoting federal regulations at a disobedient passenger does little to get them to actually wear a mask if they dont want to.

Ben*, the lead attendant on a Boston-bound flight, found this out the hard way. After takeoff, one of his colleagues told him that there was a passenger on board who had taken off her mask and was refusing to wear it, despite pleas from every single one of the cabin crew.

Im a free American and you cant make me, she told them. Stop infringing on my rights.

The best Ben could do was give the customer a so-called yellow card, a slip of paper first pioneered by British Airways (hence the soccer reference) that warns passengers: follow crew member instructions or get banned from the airlines.

She remained maskless for the rest of the flight.

The pandemic has laid bare the many ways airlines tend to leave their flight attendants out on a metaphorical island, without the tools or support to deal with the difficult situations they might face in the sky.

Of the 40 flight attendants who talked to The Verge, only one recalled an instance where a flight was diverted to deal with an especially unruly maskless passenger. The rest of the time, the cabin crew and the passengers around the offender just had to grit their teeth and endure the risks until they landed.

What a shitshow it was, said Lochelt, who took early retirement in August because of the pandemic travel conditions. I didnt want to fly in this environment anymore.

It might seem like the job has gotten a lot worse from the so-called Golden Age of travel between 1960 and 1978. Dinah Barron-Hess, who flew during the 70s and wrote about her experiences in Fly By: A Life Aloft, recalled an age of caviar, prime rib carved in the aisle, an ice cream sundae cart and every top shelf wine, champagne, and liquor.

First class was truly first class, she told The Verge. There were fewer people, and I had more time to be a gracious hostess.

And more time to accrue some amazing stories. In February 1979, Barron-Hess was trying to prepare her first class section for landing when a drunken passenger blocked her way.

Do you need a ride into the city? he said. I have a limo.

Behind her, someone spoke up. It was a voice that was unmistakable to everyone in the cabin in fact, it would have been unmistakable to almost everyone in America at the time.

She has a ride to the city, said the voice, with me.

Dressed in a dark suit, a narrow black tie, and his trademark horn-rimmed glasses was legendary actor Cary Grant. He was in his 70s at the time but, said Barron-Hess, still incredibly handsome.

Awestruck, her harasser backed off. Grant, true to his word, did indeed take her into the city.

Nowadays, the inflight service is not quite so glamorous.

Most people dont really realize, flight attendant training is 95% emergency preparation training, and 5% service training, said Joe Thomas, who hosts the Grounded with Flight Attendant Joe podcast. Which is weird, because when you get on the plane, its the complete opposite.

Still, although in-flight celebrity encounters are rare, normal passengers provide more than enough entertaining stories. Before a departure in Las Vegas, Thomas was surprised to see two passengers coming down the jetway with a third, completely limp, dangling between them with an arm around each of their shoulders.

Hi guys, he said, is everything okay?

One of the men gestured to their unconscious friend. Oh yeah, he said. Dans just a little tired.

Thomas could smell the alcohol even from inside the airplane. Dan wasnt just a little tired; he was flammable.

Sorry, fellas, he said. Dan isnt going anywhere today.

If theres one constant between the age of COVID and the mythical Golden Age of flying, its that flight attendants have to deal with harassment on a daily basis. Nowadays, its much more overtly hostile. But even in the Golden Age, it was there: rampant sexism that often rose to the level of sexual assault. And in both cases, it was caused by the massive economic pressures that come with such a volatile industry.

In the 1960s, the average flight was only half full: all of that champagne and lobster might cause the well-heeled to flock to first class, but it didnt fill the tens of millions of empty seats in the back of the airplane. So airlines sought a competitive edge that everyone could appreciate. And they found it in their cabin crews.

As long as there have been flight attendants, there have been overly friendly passengers, as one air hostess told The New York Times in 1936. Its usually at the end of the run when were off duty and the man is away from home and lonesome, she said. If we like him we sometimes go to dinner and a show if we arent already going out with the pilot.

But in the 1960s, airlines learned to weaponize this interest. They hired flight attendants with a specific look: women no older than 27, weighing less than 135 pounds, between 52 and 57 in height, and unencumbered by a husband. And each airline hired for different personalities. Pan Am stewardesses were sophisticated and worldly. Braniff and Pacific Southwest, sexy and flirtatious. United wanted the girl next door.

A TV commercial for Eastern Air Lines dramatized the process but only slightly by having a Woody Allen sound-alike dismiss a parade of young women who werent a fit: Shes awkward. Shes married. She wears glasses. Honey, no.

Even with such strict guidelines, airlines had a wealth of applicants. In 1961, Pan Am placed a recruiting ad in a London newspaper for flight attendants. A thousand women responded: the airline hired just 17, including Betty Riegel, who flew for eight years and wrote a book about her experiences.

She can still remember the airlines grooming standards: hair above the collar, no necklaces or bracelets, eye shadow in regulation blue, and only one approved shade of lipstick Persian melon by Revlon.

We were required to wear girdles, she added. Every month, the supervisor would get the scales out to check we hadnt gone over our maximum weight.

Above all else, flight attendants must always remain young and unattached. Anyone who got engaged or pregnant could be fired on the spot. And no matter what, your career was over as soon as you turned 32.

Yet, every new hire at every airline had one trait in common, as Barron-Hess found out from a drunk HR executive one evening: across the entire industry, he told her, recruiters primarily looked for tens who think they are sixes.

In 1967, the airlines soft sell of their cabin crews turned harder. Two flight attendants named Trudy Baker and Rachel Jones published a book that purported to be the uninhibited memoirs of two airline stewardesses. But mainly, it was positioned as a step-by-step guide to picking up flight attendants, who, the book assured readers, were ready and willing targets.

Good or bad, meeting men is the name of the stewardess game, wrote Baker and Jones.

The book was a smash hit, selling 3 million copies and spawning three sequels except Trudy Baker and Rachel Jones didnt exist. The book had actually been written by an American Airlines publicist named Donald Bain.

Truthful or not, Coffee, Tea, or Me? planted the image of stewardess sexpots in the popular imagination, and airlines were quick to capitalize on it. Miniskirts and go-go boots became part of the standard uniform at Southwest Airlines. Braniff featured designer catsuits in psychedelic patterns. And Trans World Airlines made its flight attendants don disposable paper outfits in styles like British wench, Roman toga, or Manhattan penthouse just before meal service.

No one was more on the nose than National Airlines and its 1971 Fly Me campaign. In one commercial, a bikini-clad flight attendant named Judy runs down the beach while she says in voice over, Fly me to Houston. Or fly me to New Orleans. You can fly me morning, noon, and night. Just say when! The campaign drove a 23 percent increase in passenger bookings.

More than a few passengers took that image a little too seriously. In her 1974 memoir Sex Objects in the Sky, American Airlines flight attendant Paula Kane talked about the barrage of harassment that she had to endure in the wake of Coffee, Tea, or Me? everything from patting and pinching to full-on sexual assault. One elderly passenger asked a colleague of Kanes to retrieve his coat from the overhead compartment for him. When she did, he shoved his hand up her skirt.

When asked what the airline was doing to stop such handsy behavior, one supervisor replied, They might get a pat, but the girls are moving so fast they scarcely have time to get pinched.

Forty years later, the problem persists. A 2018 survey by the Association of Flight Attendants found that 68 percent of flight attendants have experienced sexual harassment at some point during their careers, and 1 in 5 have been physically assaulted on an airplane in the prior year.

One passenger pulled a female flight attendant down into his lap and asked if she wanted to join the mile-high club. Another slapped a flight attendant on the buttocks as she bent over to get a can of pop out of the drinks cart for him. Others ask flight attendants where their hottest layover was or whether they wanna come to my room and tie me up?

For their part, flight attendants try to brush it off as just part of the job.

You can tell that type of person, said Tracy. The kind of guy that would want to hit on a flight attendant is the same guy who would hit on the bartender, the waitress, anyone in that serving role. Depending on the person, they can take it too far.

But flight attendants who are the victims of sexual harassment also experience higher rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide.

Were at 36,000 feet with nowhere to go, a flight attendant named Teri told NPR in 2018. So if something happens in the air, youre forced to deal with that until youre on the ground.

If it happens at all. This past March, the Department of Transportation released a study on in-flight sexual assault, which found that airlines generally do not contact law enforcement every time that they learn of an in-flight sexual misconduct incident.

In that same report, the DOT asked the 12 largest US-based air carriers if they would be willing to revise their process for reporting in-flight harassment.

Most of them responded that they would not, it concluded.

I became a flight attendant because I wanted to travel, said Joe Thomas. A lot of people say, oh, its because I want to give good customer service. But I dont really believe that. I believe you become a flight attendant because you want to see the world.

The job itself pays a wage that is right at the national median. But you get free flights in your off-time and discounted hotels, cruises, rental cars, and pretty much everything else related to hospitality. On the job, you have a flexible work schedule and freedom from much direct supervision. And you get to visit a different city every day just by going to work.

Betty Riegel, who worked Pan Ams Pacific routes out of San Francisco in the 1960s, would often spend days-long layovers in places like Tahiti, Sydney, Manila, and even the occasional war zone.

We flew Vietnam out of San Francisco, she recalled, and so we were landing in Saigon with the snipers bullets flying all around us. And staying at altitude until the last minute, and coming down almost vertically.

The flip side of it is missed holidays, family gatherings, and an unpredictable early career. Its not until flight attendants accrue seniority, which can take a year at a small airline, and five or more at the legacies, that they have control over when they work and where they go. And that still doesnt mean youre working on the same schedule as the rest of the world.

Its not your usual 9 to 5. It is completely a lifestyle you have to adapt to, said Tracy. You really have to alter your entire existence, and if you hang on, the rewards on the tail end are worth it.

That lifestyle is also a big reason why so many gay men turn to flying. In 2015, a London School of Economics study found that, proportionally speaking, there are more gay men working as flight attendants than there are working as hair stylists or nurses.

Flying first became a refuge for gay men in the 1950s, according to Phil Tiemeyer, a historian of gender and sexuality at Kansas State University. For the entire decade, federal and state governments barred gay men and women from an increasing number of careers: the military, the civil service, and many professional jobs teachers, doctors, lawyers, even bartenders.

Airlines only hired a few hundred men as cabin crew in the 1950s (and virtually none between 1960 and 1971). But a huge proportion were gay up to 90 percent, according to some former stewards. And they found, ironically, that the very policies that forced women out of the profession allowed gay men to stay in it. Male stewards didnt have to retire upon turning 32. Marriage restrictions didnt apply to male stewards at the time, and they obviously didnt get pregnant, either. So while female flight attendants stayed on the job for an average of 18 months, male flight attendants accrued experience and seniority that the constant influx of female new hires couldnt.

So airlines tolerated gay men in the cabin, if only to keep their most senior stewards in place. And as airlines consolidated around major hubs San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York the pull toward aviation became even stronger.

As Tiemeyer described it: You can make decent money, you can work with other gay men, you dont have to worry about job security because the unions protect you and the companies decide to tolerate you, and you can go to all these exciting gay cities.

Its a legacy that endures to this day.

I always knew I wanted to get out and see the world, said Rich, a flight attendant who blogs as one half oftwoguysonaplane.com. But it never seemed like he would get there. He was on food stamps, struggling to pay his rent every month. One night I had a couple glasses of wine and decided to Google dream jobs. Two weeks later, I was flying all over for interviews with major airlines and luckily for me, one of them said yes.

Its been seven years since he took a chance on air travel. In that time, he met his husband, whos also a flight attendant, on a flight. Three years later, the two of them were married in an airplane hangar. They launched their travel blog together at twoguysonaplane.com.

As gay men, we often struggle while growing up with being labeled and feeling trapped, he said. Flying allows for a great deal of freedom to be exactly who you are, an opportunity which we dont always receive as members of the LGBTQ+ community.

Becoming a flight attendant didnt just change my life, it saved my life.

In times of crisis, though, the lifestyle can keep flight attendants chained to a job whose other benefits are disappearing before their very eyes.

In 1978, President Carter signed the Airline Deregulation Act, which dissolved commercial aviations regulated cartel and opened the industry to real competition for the first time in forty years. For consumers, this meant more flights and lower fares. By 1980, 134 new airlines were launched. Five years later, domestic capacity had increased by 50%, while the median ticket price had fallen by almost 25%.

But it was a classic race to the bottom. That kind of lost revenue was unsustainable in an industry where profit margins rarely made it to double digits. By 1988, over 100 airlines had gone out of business. Even the legacy carriers that defined the Golden Age started to disappear: Braniff and National in 1982, Pan Am and Eastern in 1991.

To survive, airlines cut costs to the bone. In 1980, a mid-career flight attendant working a normal schedule made about $4,200 in todays dollars. By 1995, a flight attendant with the same seniority and same hours would earn only $2,550 a 40% decrease in pay for the same work. And all but two airlines terminated their pension plans, refusing to pay out more than $12 billion in retirement benefits.

Wages and benefits werent the only things that airlines did away with post-deregulation.

When airlines took away things that passengers took for granted meals, blankets, pillows it was always the flight attendants who were left to deliver the bad news, said aviation historian and former flight attendant Gailen David, who flew between 1988 and 2012.

The clientele changed, too. With the rise of the modern frequent flyer program in the 1980s, a new generation of passengers largely business travelers who had previously flown economy now found their way into first class. It was a good way to reward flyers whose steady demand has always kept airlines afloat.

But some of them had trouble acclimating to the new amenities, as Cecilia*, a flight attendant who worked first class in the 1980s, recalled.

Sir, may I offer you some hors doeuvres? she asked one particular passenger at the start of service.

He looked confused and pointed to the food cart. Whats that?

Sir, we have goose liver pat, smoked salmon, shrimp cocktail, and caviar.

Caviar?

Uh, its roe, she said. Then, she clarified: fish eggs, sir.

He lit up. Okay, he said, give me two. Make em fried!

None of aviations past crises, however, compare to COVID-19. Not deregulation, not the 1973 oil crisis, not even September 11. To try and survive, airlines have cut schedules, retired older airplanes, and borrowed over $100 billion in loans and Federal aid. Theyve invested in electrostatic sprayers and medical-grade disinfectant, in a bid to make people comfortable with flying again. And theyve deployed their flight attendants not only to enforce their patchwork mask rules, but also to try and recreate some semblance of the way things used to be, even behind layers of personal protective equipment.

But most of all, theyve looked to reduce the largest line-item on every airlines balance sheets: wages and benefits.

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Biden Wants the Biggest Stimulus in Modern History. Is It Too Big? – The New York Times

Posted: at 8:46 am

This package is sized not simply to fill the hole, said Wendy Edelberg, director of the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution. Its trying to do somewhat different things. A lot of people and businesses are desperately hurting right now, so this money is relief aimed at those people, and in order to be really confident youre reaching them all, you need to send a lot of money.

But that doesnt change the fact that the aggregate money the government is pumping out adds up to more than the missing economic activity, which could have meaningful consequences for the years ahead. And that is before accounting for other expected proposals from the Biden administration, such as large-scale funding of new infrastructure.

There are pros and cons, she said. Running the economy hot might be a good thing, but there also might be a painful adjustment with a period of slow growth on the other side of the mountain.

In an economy running hot, employers face shortages of workers and must bid up their wages to attract staff. This, along with potential shortages of various commodities, can, in theory, fuel a vicious cycle of rising prices.

For the last 13 years, arguably longer, the United States has had the opposite problem. Large numbers of Americans of prime working age 25 to 54 have been either unemployed or outside the labor force altogether. Wage growth has been weak most of that time, and inflation persistently below the levels the Federal Reserve aims for.

Some argue that estimates of potential output by the C.B.O. and private economists are too pessimistic that Americans should dare to dream bigger. We dont really know what the G.D.P. output gap truly is, said Mark Paul, an economist at New College of Florida. Economists for decades have erred and been too cautious, thinking that full production is significantly lower than it actually is. Weve been consistently running a cold economy, creating massive problems for social cohesion.

In a paper published in December, he said a pandemic aid package of more than $3 trillion would be justified based on the scale of job losses that have been endured. The output gap looks worse based on employment than it does when you look at G.D.P., in part because job losses have disproportionately occurred in sectors that generate relatively low economic output per worker, such as restaurants.

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Change Healthcare betting on accelerated use of AI in hospitals with Optum acquisition – FierceHealthcare

Posted: at 8:46 am

Artificial intelligence is poised to be widespread in hospital revenue cycle operations in just the next three years.

And that provides a big opportunity for Change Healthcare's end-to-end AI solutions, according to Neil de Crescenzo, president and CEO of Change Healthcare.

Two-thirds of doctors report using AI in some revenue cycle capacity today, and nearly all expect to be using it in three years, a Change Healthcare survey found.

"As providers begin to use AI more strategically, there is an opportunity for significant financial, operational and clinical gains, including improving the end-to-end revenue cycle, claims accuracy, denial reduction, clinical insights, and level of care prediction," de Crescenzo said during the company's third-quarter fiscal 2021 earnings call Thursday.

"These trends will continue to increase demand from payers and providers for Change Healthcare's platform of integrated solutions and services," he said.

Despite these tailwinds, Change Healthcare saw its software and analytics revenue drop 4% year over year from $387 million to $372 million during its third quarter ending Dec. 31.

Network solutions revenue was up 28% to $193 million from $151 million a year ago, and revenue for technology-enabled services totaled $222 million, down 8% year over year.

RELATED: UnitedHealth Group's Optum to buy Change Healthcare for $13B

Change Healthcare exited the third quarter on a mixed note. The company reported revenue of $785 million in the quarter, down 3% from $808 million during the same period last year. The company's top line missed Wall Street estimates by 0.1%.

Revenue was negatively impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, partially offset by new sales volumes, company officials said

The Nashville, Tennessee-based healthcare technology company reported a profit of $110 million during the quarter and adjusted earnings per share of 34 cents. That beat Street estimates of 30 cents per share. The company posted adjusted net income of $106 million or 33 cents per share in the third quarter of fiscal 2020.

The company exited the quarter with cash and cash equivalents of $137 million compared with $167 million in the preceding quarter.

In early January, UnitedHealth Group's Optum unit announced plans to buy Change Healthcare for $13 billion, or $7.84 billion in cash plus about $5 billion in debt. That transaction will be completed in the second half of 2021, executives said.

"We are excited by the opportunity to unite two technology and service companies focused on serving health care. The combined capabilities will more effectively connect and simplify core clinical, administrative and payment processes, resulting in better health outcomes and experiences for everyone at lower costs," de Crescenzo said.

"We share a common mission and values, and importantly, a sense of urgency to provide our customers and those they serve with the more robust capabilities this union makes possible," he said.

RELATED: Change Healthcare see potential growth as IT budgets increase during COVID-19

Underlying market trends for the business remain positive on multiple fronts, he said, including federal rules being implemented surrounding interoperability and price transparency as well as continued advances in value-based care initiatives, including the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' (CMS') new Medicare direct contracting model.

During the quarter, the company launched 13 new products spanning medical network, decision support, data solutions and interoperability solutions to help payers comply with the CMS patient access and interoperability rule, de Crescenzo said.

In November, Change Healthcare launched social determinants of health analytics, a national data resource that will enable health systems, insurers and life sciences organizations explore how geodemographic factors impact patient outcomes.

The company also entered into an agreement with Carnegie Mellon Universitys Delphi Research Group to roll out Delphi's enhanced COVIDcast real-time COVID-19 indicators. The addition of Change Healthcare's de-identified COVID-19 claims data helps researchers track and forecast pandemic patterns, the company said.

Change Healthcare also sold its Capacity Management business for $67 million.

"The sale aligned with our strategy to concentrate on the primary areas of our business that achieve the best outcomes for our customers through the power of the Change Healthcare platform," de Crescenzo said.

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New Open AI Energy Initiative Launches to Expand AI Use in Energy Industry – EnterpriseAI

Posted: at 8:45 am

Shell, C3.ai, Microsoft and Baker Hughes are collaborating on an Open AI Energy Initiative (OAI) that aims to grow AI use across the energy and process manufacturing industries.

The OAI is envisioned by the partners as an open ecosystem of AI technologies that will provide a framework for energy operators, service providers, equipment providers and the software vendors who serve them to create new AI and physics-based models, monitoring, diagnostics and more to help solve critical industry needs, according to the group.

Some 92 percent of all facility systems shutdowns and process upsets are unplanned, which often leads to service disruptions which cause problems for customers. That is one of the industry challenges the OAI will be targeting as it works to gather and disseminate AI technologies and information that can be freely used to prevent such disruptions, the group said.

As it begins its work, the OAI will first focus on using AI to improve systems reliability, uptime and performance of energy assets and processes.

Powering the OAIs launch is the BakerHughesC3 (BHC3) AI Suite and cloud services from Microsoft Azure, which are being used to provide a broad range of capabilities to OAI users. Included in the AI Suite is a BHC3 Reliability application, which will serve as a foundation for the first work. BHC3 Reliability is an AI-based application that provides reliability, process, and maintenance engineers with AI-enabled insights that can be used to predict process and equipment performance risks.

BHC3 AI Suites ability to integrate enterprise-scale data from disparate data sources and train AI reliability models that cover full plant operations while taking full advantage of Azure, Microsofts scalable, enterprise-class cloud infrastructure. The OAL will combine the BHC3 Reliability application and Azure resources with technologies from all four partners and other leading energy companies to offer interoperable AI models, monitoring, diagnostics, prescriptive actions and services, according to the group.

Ed Abbo, of C3.ai

What we're enabling is the transition and or digital transformation of the energy industry, Ed Abbo, president and Chief Technology Officer at C3.ai, told Enterprise.AI. What that means is that we're allowing for a marketplace of AI applications and AI algorithms that initially will start with reliability, to reduce what's referred to as non-productive time in the oil and gas industry and in process industries.

The OAI is being created as an open ecosystem so that other energy companies, power companies, oil and gas vendors, refining companies and software makers can participate, subscribe to the groups algorithms and then publish their algorithms through the marketplace, said Abbo.

Non-productive time in oil and gas is when a refinery is down because a piece of equipment isn't working or a pump or compressor is not working, he said. Where AI fits in is that these are algorithms that can anticipate or predict the need for maintenance in advance of failure, to basically make predictions based on the data from sensors and prior maintenance on things that are likely to fail in the not-so-distant future that would cause downtime.

Armed with those predictions and warnings, plant or systems operators are alerted so they can take actions to improve the operational efficiency and uptime of the facility, said Abbo.

The four partners of the OAI provide a very solid foundation for the nascent group because its representative of the ecosystem that we believe will form around this initiative, added Abbo. The fact that Shell is in it and is publishing their algorithms [as part of the project] is highly encouraging, because that means that other oil and gas companies will follow suit. The fact that Baker Hughes, as an equipment provider and all-field services provider, is included means that others will also participate. And software vendors like C3.ai and ... Microsoft [being involved] is an industry first using AI applications. I think we'll see this ecosystem grow.

Driving Targeted AI Changes for the Energy Sector

Dan Brennan, of Baker Hughes

Dan Brennan, a senior vice president and general manager for energy technology company Baker Hughes, said the OAI envisions driving AI to make changes that can help resolve the challenges being faced in these industries.

The opportunity here is leveraging AI technologies to take really a dramatically different approach, and it's what we refer to as a system of systems approach, said Brennan. By having scalable technology that allows operators to ingest data including maintenance records, telemetry and more, it can then be used to identify systems problems early. It's the word early that's the important thing here for the energy industry. If you're able to avoid or at least know within 30 or 60 days that there is a maintenance event that has to occur, there's a tremendous amount of logistics and scheduling that has to go in there. Is there a planned maintenance window coming up? Is there an unplanned maintenance window coming up? The opportunity here for AI is really to start to get awareness early in the process where there's potential degradation or failures coming in.

Those problems can include pipes that are about to crack, shaft bearings that will soon fail, vibrations that are starting to ominously grow within facilities and a myriad of other potential machine failures.

The short answer is it could be all the above, said Brennan. If you take the example of a refinery or petrochemical facility and really large complex facilities, they're generally very well-instrumented today. So, there could be data that's coming off of a condition monitoring system. Generally speaking, most of our customers have pretty mature implementations of these operational technology systems that are out there.

A Step Forward for AI in Industry

Kevin Prouty, an energy and manufacturing insights analyst with IDC, called the creation of the new OAI a solid move.

Kevin Prouty,, of IDC

Its the culmination of a series of trends in all industries, but especially in oil and gas, he said. Its taking an infrastructure platform (Microsoft Azure), an AI platform (C3.ai), an industry technologist (Baker Hughes), and an industry titan (Shell) and getting them all on the same AI page.

Through the OAI, the four partners potentially solve a lot of sticky issues that have plagued data management and AI, namely who owns the data, the models, and the IP, said Prouty. C3.ai and Baker Hughes have solved many of the technical issues with AI, but having a prebuilt platform that solves many of those issues will accelerate AI adoption and the push for Industry 4.0 in energy.

The use of AI in working to solve some of the biggest problems in the energy industry is probably the most compelling application of AI today, said Prouty.

Its that step towards autonomous operations that Industry 4.0 has been striving for, he said. Its still a way off, but getting the operating models out in the open and having non-technical issues addressed is a big first step.

The ideas seen in the OAI initiative could be used for other industries as well, he added. Chemical and petrochemical [initiatives] are only a short step away from oil and gas operations, he said. Also important is that Shell has made a significant commitment to support the initiative with its own models and analysis, added Prouty.

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Soccer looks to AI for an edge: Could an algorithm really predict injuries? – ESPN

Posted: at 8:45 am

Artificial intelligence can drive a car, curate the films and documentaries that you watch, develop chess programmes capable of beating grandmasters and use your face to access your phone. And, one company claims, it can also predict when footballers are about to suffer an injury.

Off the field, football has gone through a huge transformation in the 21st century, with the emergence of GPS-driven player performance data in the early 2000s, followed in the 2010s by the advanced analytics that now form a major part of every top club's player recruitment strategy. Just last month, Manchester City announced the appointment of Laurie Shaw to a new post of lead AI scientist at the Etihad Stadium, taking him from his role as research scientist and lecturer at Harvard University.

Football has always searched out innovations to make small, but crucial, differences. Many have become staples of the game, including TechnoGym to improve biomechanics, IntelliGym to improve cognitive processing and cryogenic gym sessions to ease the strain on muscles. Others have fallen by the wayside. Anyone remember nasal strips or the ball-bending properties of Predator boots?

The use of AI to predict when players are on the brink of suffering an injury could prove to be the next game-changing innovation that becomes a key component at the elite end of the game.

In a game dominated by clubs wanting to discover the extra 1% in marginal gains, keeping a player fit is arguably the most important challenge facing any coach. A depleted squad can lead to negative results and, if a team suffers too many, the manager or coach is generally the one who pays the price. This season has been more challenging than most, with the COVID-19 pandemic leading to fixtures being crammed into a reduced time frame, and players being forced to play 2-3 games a week on a regular basis.

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The toll on players' fitness is borne out by the injury lists. Crystal Palace and Southampton fulfilled their midweek Premier League fixtures with 10 first-team squad members sidelined. Champions Liverpool lost to Brighton on Wednesday with eight absentees, including long-term injury victims Virgil van Dijk, Joe Gomez and Joel Matip. Research by premierinjuries.com shows that up to and including match-week 21 of the Premier League this season, there has been a five percent increase in time lost to injuries this season. At the same stage last season, there were 356 "time-loss absences" (a player missing at least one league game), but the number has jumped to 374 this time around. With COVID-related absences, the number is 435.

Liverpool had suffered 14 time-loss absences at this stage of last season, but they're now up to 29 in 2020-21. Their league position -- fourth place, seven points adrift of top spot -- suggests they are paying a price for their sharp increase in players lost to injury.

But finding reliable injury prevention technology is the holy grail of sports scientists and fitness coaches. By November, ESPN reported a 16% rise in muscle injuries in the Premier League compared to the same stage last season. So can AI successfully predict when players are about to be injured?

Since the start of the 2017-18 season, La Liga side Getafe have partnered with the California-based AI company Zone7 to break down performance data and predict when players are at risk of injury. In simple terms, clubs like Getafe in Spain, Scottish Premiership leaders Rangers and MLS sides Real Salt Lake and Toronto FC send their training and match data to Zone7, who analyze it using their algorithm and send back daily emails with information about players who may be straying close to the so-called "danger zone."

Between the start of the 2017-18 season and March 2020, when La Liga was suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Getafe recorded a substantial reduction in injuries.

"Three seasons ago, during the first year with Zone7, we saw a reduction of 40% in injury volume," Javier Vidal, the Getafe's Head of Performance, said. "As the Zone7 engine became more reliable and we had access to more data in the second year, we saw a reduction of 66 percent in the volume of injuries.

"This means that of every three injuries we had two seasons ago, we now have only one."

Jordi Cruyff, the former Barcelona and Manchester United midfielder, told ESPN that he has become a "minor, minor investor" in Zone7 after trialling the AI tool during his time as sporting director at Maccabi Tel Aviv in 2017. But he admits that he was only convinced by the AI technology after monitoring the data, even though Maccabi's then-coach declined to use it.

"I presented the tool to our then-coach and he wasn't too interested." Cruyff told ESPN. "So for the four to five months the coach was in charge, he would follow his own plan, but we would still give our performance data to the company, which they would run through their algorithm. I would then receive an email before training each day with which players were at risk and it actually predicted five of seven injuries.

"I thought 'wow.' Once or twice could be a coincidence, but catching five out of seven muscular injuries is a different thing. I would wait until after training to be told if a player had been injured. I would then go back to look at my email and there was the name. We were lucky in some ways that the coach wasn't interested in it because it gave us the chance to test it.

2 Related

"It was the perfect test, although I wish the coach would have listened, because then we would have avoided some injuries."

Tal Brown, who founded Zone7 with Eyal Eliakim in 2017 having worked together in the Israeli Defense Forces Intelligence Corps, spoke to ESPN to explain how AI can be used to detect injury risk.

"Every single player is now using a GPS vest, they are being tested for strength and flexibility at their clubs, many teams distribute watches to their players to measure sleep, so the reality is that somebody working for a club needs to look at two dozen dashboards every day -- multiplied by 20 players, multiplied by six days a week," Brown said via Zoom. "It is becoming a puzzle that a human brain wasn't really meant to solve.

"We can use a chess metaphor. Chess programmes used to be pretty simplistic and the experts could beat them, but today, a Google chess programme is unbeatable. It's not because Google has taught that chess programme 10,000 equations manually, it is because the programme has automatically studied every recorded chess game played in the history of mankind and, using AI, has developed its own understanding and interpretation.

"We are not there yet as a company. We don't have access to every single football injury that ever occurred, but we are getting much better and there will be a point where a programme focused on injury risk will out-perform humans in interpreting data."

More than 50 clubs across the world now use Zone7's AI programme. Many wish to remain anonymous, in an effort to protect any competitive advantage that the tool may provide -- football clubs are notoriously protective of such proprietary data -- while others simply do not wish to discuss any pros or cons they have discovered while using it. Despite repeated attempts by ESPN to speak to Real Salt Lake and Toronto, neither MLS team responded to enquiries.

1:32

Julien Laurens puts Eden Hazard's latest injury into context for Real Madrid.

Rangers, 23 points clear at the top of the Scottish Premiership and on course for a first domestic title since 2011, adopted Zone7's AI tool last summer and, while keen to make a broader assessment after a full season of use, they believe it's been a valuable addition to their injury prevention strategy.

"I believe AI, coupled with the experience levels of those using it, will eventually become a bedrock within clubs' decision-making as data and technology advances," Jordan Milsom, Rangers' head of performance told ESPN. "Given our players had been exposed to one of the longest lockdowns of all [93 days] and the unknowns associated with such prolonged layoffs, we felt investing in such a system may well provide another layer of support for how we managed the players on what would clearly be a challenging season.

"We haven't used the system long enough compare season-to-season analysis, and it's important to understand we are a department that is data-informed and not data-driven. But it is my opinion that if such systems are used in this way, it can have many positive benefits."

Rangers manager Steven Gerrard has praised the club's fitness and sports science department, saying in December that the team were enabling his players to "hit top numbers," and Milson says that the AI data is helping to inform player rotation, even to the extent of highlighting which players should be substituted during games.

"All of our GPS and heart rate training load data from sessions and games is uploaded automatically into the Zone7 system," Milsom said. "The platform digests this, performs its modelling and provides us with risk alerts each day for players.

"Generally, there would be 1-2 players who may be flagged [for further monitoring]. Sometimes, these flags relate to overload -- other times it's under-load. This allows us to have a deeper dive into why specifically they are at risk. This information will feed into our general staff discussions to determine if any further areas support this information. As we typically compete every 3-4 days, if risk is associated with overload, I can often use that information to help support in-game substitutions as a means of maximising player availability, whilst potentially reducing risk through reduced minutes if and when possible."

The key to the success of the AI tool is the amount of data Zone7 are able to upload and analyse. While Brown stresses that "nobody ever sees your data. We don't own it and we're not allowed to retain a copy of it, post-relationship, so it's very strict," the volume of information provided by each client club is used to create a huge database that then enables the programme to predict injury risk.

"We can use 200 million hours of football data because we are working with 50-60 clients," Brown said. "As a result, we have 50-60 times more data than a typical team has, so the data set is very large. But what is important is that it's not just the injury in the sense of the date it occurred and what happened, it is every single day of training and games and medical data leading to the injury, going back as much as a year prior.

"That amount of information gives us the ability to look at the daily data leading to an incident and, using AI and deep learning, to find patterns that repeat themselves before hamstring injuries or groin injuries or knee injuries happen. That's how it works.

"If you are trying to forecast an event, which is an injury, you need to have a big database of incidents. A typical team would have something like 30-40 incidents a year for a squad, so multiply that by several years of historical data."

1:17

The Gab and Juls show analyse Liverpool's loss to Brighton and look forward to their next game against Man City.

ESPN has spoken to people in sports science who believe that AI is a positive innovation if used alongside existing methods. "Their results are impressive," said one sports scientist, who has worked with several Premier League clubs in the past and spoke on condition of not being named. "The issue is the level of individualisation with injury results is high, so lots of variant data only gives you a small answer. Therefore, it definitely has to be a blended approach."

Zone7's AI tool is not restricted to sports. In tandem with Garmin wearable devices and Zone7, medical staff in Israel are having their health and well-being monitored during the COVID-19 pandemic and there is a similar project with a major hospital in New York City. There are also projects ongoing with military and special forces. In football, however, Getafe are the best example of AI being used successfully to improve the fitness record of a team, as explained by head of performance Vidal.

"It would take 200 people all day to analyse the data, but with this, I get the recommendations within minutes." Vidal said. "We use our own high-quality ultrasound to clinically to evaluate players that show predefined risk indications. After starting to use Zone7, some players would report feeling fine despite the engine identifying immediate risk for them.

"In many cases, our ultrasound tests confirmed muscular damage, allowing us to address this before the injury occurred. These players could have sustained injury but for the AI detection."

Cruyff, now coaching in China with Shenzhen FC, believes AI can become a key component for teams, but he makes clear that AI alone cannot be regarded as the silver bullet to prevent all injuries.

"It's not a deciding tool," he said. "You can see a risk of injury and decide to take the risk or not. It's part of the modernisation of sport. You have so many things -- video analysts, GPS tracking devices -- and I think this is a part that maybe we missed, but it is coming, little by little."

Serbia And Key International Sovereigns Lead With Data And AI To Become Vaccination Champions – Forbes

Posted: at 8:45 am

Serbia and international players leverage Data and AI to become vaccination leaders

2021 is a defining year in humanity, where government efforts towards vaccination will determine how we live our lives in the coming years. All over the world, countries have been working tirelessly on the distribution and administration of vaccines, attempting to halt the effects of ongoing mutations straight in their tracks. However, some nations have emerged as clear winners in this effort over others. By leveraging the power of advanced technologies and artificial intelligence, nations like Serbia, Greece, the UAE and Israel have been able to set up an optimized and effective vaccine distribution framework. We will take a deep dive into what each of these countries is doing correctly, and identify key takeaways as to what laggard countries can do to replicate their success.

Serbia provides a perfect case study. Citizens in Serbia have many options. They can choose if they want to get vaccinated via an approval mechanism, choose which vaccines they want to get and in which location they want to get vaccinated. I became very intrigued with Serbias solution and reached out to key stakeholders for their comments. According to Vukain Grozdi, Advisor to the Prime Minister, The vaccination campaign in Serbia was carefully planned and prepared in advance - even before we received the first shipment in December 2020. Since the speed of the immunization was critical, we decided to reengineer the entire process and to heavily rely on technology. The software we developed provides for speeding up each phase of the process by three times, in the same time taking in consideration our citizens preferences. In fact, Serbia is the only country in the world where citizens can choose the vaccine type.

Indeed, according to euronews, Serbia has the second fastest vaccine rollout in Europe, Furthermore, prime Minister of Serbia, Ana Brnabi stated, We opted for this unique approach in order to give our citizens the freedom to choose - as a means to increase the public trust and therefore boost the immunization rate... This solution is in fact a result of the extensive focus we put on digitalization for the past four years. Digital government and digital education, along with digitalization of the economy are the core of our mandate.

Immunization is now available across Serbia at 410 vaccination sites in almost all cities. In Belgrade, vaccination is performed at 18 sites, one of which is at the Belgrade Fair, where there are 50 vaccination booths with over 8,000 citizens can be vaccinated on a daily basis. Moreover, according to N1, The Financial Times ranked Serbia seventh globally and second in Europe on its list of countries with the most people inoculated against the coronavirus globally. Serbia has administered 4.5 doses of vaccines from different manufacturers per 100 people or about 300,000 doses overall as of January 26. That ranks it second on the list of European countries and seventh globally. Adding to this fact is Peter Janji, Deputy Secretary General of the Government. Upon consultation with these countries, it became clear to us that success could only be achieved using the right organization assisted by the right technology. Our team led by the Prime Minister secured a flawless organization and strong coordination across many different stakeholders. We then sketched a supporting technological solution to manage the immunization process. Developed only in weeks by our local teams, the information system provided for seamless automation of the process.

Moreover, The Government has also implemented a new modern vaccine delivery and scheduling platform, called the System for immunization management of the Republic of Serbia. According to Verica Jovanovi, Director of Serbias National Health Institute As an institution with decades of experience in immunizing the population, for the first time, we have a tool by which we can monitor both the epidemics and immunization of each citizen in real-time.

The internet based digital platform gives access to citizens and call center operators ( registration interest, notification systems and inquires management), medical staff and assisting volunteers (immunization registration, issuance of vaccination certificates), supply chain and warehouse workers (procurement and distribution of vaccines), as well as for management (orchestration, management of vaccination sites and medical staff, monitoring and reporting). Hundreds of primary healthcare centers, mass-vaccination sites at the Belgrade Fair, the National Institute of Public Health along with its regional branches, several government agencies, the National e-Government Portal, and several call centers facilitating information sharing, interoperability and governance are all integrated in the system. Citizens complete a simple electronic form available on the National e-Government Portal, or contact call centers for the operators to register their interest in the software. A complex AI algorithm automatically schedules the appointments a few days in advance for every particular citizen checking the desired vaccine type against the age eligibility, profession (priority groups), health conditions and available time slots at the vaccination sites.

This platform provides a competitive advantage in leveraging artificial intelligence algorithms. Citizens can swiftly register for immunizations through this management system, which provides notifications in real-time about progress, tracking and vaccination schedules. All citizens have access to the National eGovernment Portal, meaning that no section of the population is left in the dark. Aside from facilitating and expediting vaccination, the solution provides real-time monitoring and allows for informed analytics on critical aspects of the operation, such as data on general population interest in immunization and actual consumption. This helps decide if and where to boost public information campaigns, whether to procure additional doses etc. It also analyzes the number of vaccinated citizens according to age, profession and location, and helps impose new or relax the existing epidemiological measures. In addition, monitoring the distribution chain (including the cold-chain) end-to-end through the entirety of Serbias warehouses and vaccination sites, transportation equipment, and storage capacities is critically important for optimization of the distribution process.

Not only does it seem that the government is pleased, but also Serbian citizens across social media are expressing satisfaction with this digital government initiative and overall experience. By implementing an efficient digital national framework that makes use of AI, Serbia has fast-tracked its vaccine rollout at an impressive rate that continues to climb.

In addition to Serbia, the UAE has also implemented a variety of data and AI-driven solutions for vaccination. As per Business Standard, The UAE is one of the quickest nations in the world for vaccine rollout. Dubai is planning to immunize 70% of its population by the end of 2021, as per Reuters. Thanks to AI, such a plan is fully achievable. According to Trends Research, The UAEs utilization of AI technologies against the Covid-19 pandemic has been focused on the collection of accurate information to ensure that preventative and safety measures are efficient and successful. Some examples of the UAEs use of AI to fight Covid-19 include the launching of official Covid-19 testing and tracing app called Alhosn by the Ministry of Health and Prevention, which gives fast access to test results and contract tracing for accurate control of the virus, as an AI-based tool that has proved to be a secure medium for patients private information. In addition, Abu Dhabi has also used programmed robots to spray disinfected areas as part of its sterilization program. In Dubai, the ambulance service has rolled out a self-sanitization device that allows paramedics and their families to sterilize clothing through a sanitization corridor, which is an AI-driven tool used to disinfect clothes of paramedics and their families. Clearly, the data driven and AI fueled approach to vaccination has enabled the UAE to reach the top in terms of combatting Covid.

Greece is also an up-and-comer that is winning the vaccine rollout game. According to an article in Entrepreneur Magazine, Two data scientists built a machine learning system named Eva to help Greece safely reopen to nearly 80,000 tourists a day. The system, known as Eva, is nearly twice as efficient at detecting cases as random testing and it can predict spikes in other countries ten days before they show up in official case counts. Thanks to robust data stores, the Machine Learning algorithm employed by Eva is able to forecast the risk of spread and infection of Covid in advance, enabling the government to plan more efficiently, locate at-risk populations at a faster pace, and optimize the nations immunization protocols. According to the Greek Governments data-driven and forward-thinking approach, the country has been able to mitigate Covid and allow for more effective vaccine distribution amongst its citizens.

Lastly, Israel (the worlds startup nation) has also seen large success in its vaccine distribution. Israel has delivered five million doses of the vaccine to a population of about nine million - and about one million people have received two doses, according to BBC. Israel has already been recognized as the most organized and efficient health system in the world because of its experience in national emergencies coupled with first-class medical hospitals and R&D. This is due to a number of reasons, all related to the smart use of data and AI. One of the most important aspects of an efficient AI system is a robust set of data. Due to the way that the Israeli healthcare system operates, the nation has access to enormous quantities of medical records. Israels health system has been structured to streamline the central collection of real-time clinical information from all its citizens, creating one of the worlds largest medical data sets. This way, the nation became a world center for the development of digital and AI-personalized healthcare systems, and especially in the creation of efficient structures to fight Covid.

Best Practices on Vaccine Leadership

Based on the recent successes of vaccination in Serbia, the UAE, Greece and Israel, we have learned the following:

There are a limited number of best practices around the world. However, these learnings provide us a glimpse of what it takes for a nation to implement a successful vaccination campaign. This includes agility and organizational efficiency. The governments listed here stepped up to address humanity challenges and demonstrated the power of digital and AI technologies.

In Serbia, for example, many of these lessons will be embedded into the countrysNational Digital Health strategy. As per Mihailo Jovanovi, CEO of the Office for the IT and eGovernment of Serbia, Important lessons in agility were acquired since March 2020, but also the advanced govtech ecosystem built under the vision and leadership of the Prime Minister Ana Brnabi was crucial for the success of this operation. The solutions effectiveness and sophistication exceeded even our own expectations - the minute the vaccine touches the Serbian ground we know exactly which citizen is going to take it and we immediately notify him/her to show up at the chosen vaccination site. Everything is done in less than 48 hours!

Clearly, we can no longer afford to take the power of artificial intelligence for granted. In these times where we are dealing with assaults of multiple Covid variants on all fronts, the only solution that can fight covid faster than it could mutate is artificial intelligence.

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Serbia And Key International Sovereigns Lead With Data And AI To Become Vaccination Champions - Forbes

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