Why Messi is grossly overpaid and how blinking can expose our medical history – Haaretz

Around the middle of our meeting, observing my fingers on the computer keyboard, Lior Shamir tells me he is sure it will soon be possible to extract a great deal of personal information from my typing rhythm. In theory, Your medical condition could be gleaned just from the speed of your typing, says the Israeli-born professor. He speaks with the ease of a scientist who for years has been breaking images down into millions of fragments of information, and thereby translating reality into dimensions of which most of us are not even aware.

I have no doubt that in another 50 years quite a bit will be written about this period, he notes in his dry, analytical, measured and restrained style. They will write about how people gave all their personal data so freely to organizations, even though they didnt have the slightest idea what use is being made of the sensitive information, he continues. For a moment its not clear whether hes more outraged by the invasive collection of information or by the nonchalance with which people surrender their privacy.

Shamir, an associate professor in the computer science department of Kansas State University, has no intention of becoming part of the intrusive effort to round up everyones personal information even though probably few scientists in the world could collect it as efficiently, systematically and precisely as he. In recent years he has published a series of fascinating and widely discussed research studies, based on the advanced programs he has developed.

Using them, he is able to break down vast quantities of information into dry data and exact numbers. He has studied hundreds of political speeches, thousands of works of art, hundreds of hours of music, the performance of thousands of soccer players, and numberless images of galaxies moving through space. He has also done a comparative analysis of thousands of hours of dialogue between whales in the ocean depths, in different parts of the world.

An example is an article Shamir published last December in the Journal of Popular Music Studies, which generated considerable attention. Its a comparative analysis, unprecedented in scope, of the changes in the nature of Western popular music from the 1950s to today. He analyzed 6,150 songs, all of which appeared on Billboard magazines top 100 chart from 1951 to 2016. The program he wrote breaks down the songs content into levels of anger, fear, anxieties, love and other emotions.

The results of the study show clearly how music changed over the years, he says. The emotions that were expressed in the music of the 1950s are completely different from the emotions contained in songs of the 2000s. Todays music expresses far more anxiety, far more sadness, and there are far fewer expressions of happiness.

Shamir pulls from his laptop a detailed graph quantifying the language disparities between Eminem and John Lennon, and between Bob Marley and Elton John. All told, the research shows, since the 1950s expressions of anger and disgust have doubled, fear has surged by 50 percent and, at the same time, openness and personal security have plunged by dozens of percentage points.

The professor makes no pretense of being a music critic or a scholar of culture. But he does not want his research to remain at the level of arid graphics, and tries to impart a social-cultural interpretation to the findings. In the 1950s, music played a very different role from what it did beginning in the mid-1960s, he explains.

In the 1950s, music was meant to entertain, to make people happy. But from the mid-1960s, we see a sharp rise in the fear and anger being expressed in the songs, the immediate context of which was the Vietnam War and the flower generation that sprang up in its wake. In that period, music changed its goal; it became a tool for social protest. The leading example is Bob Dylan, who enjoyed tremendous popularity in those years. In parallel, we see the change undergone by the Beatles, for example with Nowhere Man [December 1965], their first song that doesnt deal with love and romantic themes.

Did the songs become angrier and less happy because society grew more frightened and angrier, or was it the singers who changed and suddenly developed a social and political awareness? We will never know what would have happened if Bob Dylan had created his music in the 1940s, but we can assume that there were quite a few critical artists in the 1940s, too, only their music was received with less openness than was the case in the 1960s and 1970s. So the change occurred in the public, which was now receptive to their music. In the same way, today there is far greater openness toward rap songs that contain a great deal of verbal violence, which in the past simply would not have been acceptable. You can find violent songs in the 1940s and 1950s, too, but their public consisted of small, marginal groups.

How do you account for the openness you describe?

It has to do with the fact that the style of speech in the public space has undergone a change. Things that used to be spoken in private can be heard today in public, including in the political field, which has become far more outspoken. In addition, the internet and the social networks have made artists far less dependent on the big recording companies, which is also why they are a lot less limited in what they can say.

Shamir offers an amusing example, in which the program he developed faced an interesting public test. In 2016 there was a big scandal when some claimed the theme song of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics very much resembled the song Let it Go [from the Disney movie Frozen], he relates. In the wake of this, the periodical Foreign Policy asked me to let the program analyze the song and see what it resembled. To Shamirs delight, the program did not let him down. The computer immediately identified the great musical resemblance between the two songs, he says with a satisfied smile.

In connection with computer-generated information-gathering, what leaps instantly to mind is the controversy surrounding the British firm Cambridge Analytica, which made headlines after revelations of its involvement in the 2016 U.S. election campaign. The company specialized in collecting data and analyzing information it had acquired from 50 million different Facebook profiles. With these it generated personality and behavioral models that enabled the firm to create personalized political campaigns. For every American user, a political slogan that played on his deepest fears; for every Facebook fan, an election broadcast adapted to personality, friends, hobbies, likes, desires, education, age and other information that was collected about him from his own account.

Although this whole phenomenon has often been described in terms of a danger to democracy Shamir seems to treat it as small change, as the tip of the iceberg.

What they did is dangerous and problematic, but its still nothing, he says. Im talking about the ability to create a complete model of your medical condition and your probable life expectancy from the pace of your typing, the time at which you open the computer in the morning, the frequency of your tweets, the number of Facebook friends, your age, the content of your emails, the pictures you upload to Instagram, the clips you put on Facebook, the number of hours youre active at the computer.

Today, we know that a persons walking pace can be an indication of how many years he has left to live. Through the pupils of the eyes we can know which diseases a person suffers from. There have been cases of someone uploading a picture to the social network and a physician diagnosing, through the eyes, that hes suffering from a certain disease. People wear all kinds of smart watches with sensors that record sensitive medical information, such as pulse and blood pressure.

Sounds intense? Shamir doesnt stop there: The way you move the mouse can provide plenty of information about you. Even the frequency of your blinking can supply sensitive medical information about you. A human being cannot analyze so much information, he doesnt have the tools to cope with more than a few dimensions at a time. But a program can be created that will allow you to analyze 4,000 different dimensions for every person, and at the same time cross-check the information with that of tens of millions of other people.

Who has an interest in compiling a vast digitized database about blink frequency and the waking-up habits of millions of people?

Think about what will happen when life insurance companies possess all that sensitive information and will be able to decide, on the basis of an evaluation of the lifespan of every person, whom to sell a policy to and how much to charge each client. And what about old-age homes, which obviously will prefer to accept people with a short life expectancy, who will pay a high initial price and vacate the room as quickly as possible, over those who will occupy a place for many years. Banks and financial institutions will be able to draw up a profile not only of your medical situation but also of your decision-making habits, and on that basis evaluate the prospect of your repaying a loan, or not. Employers will be able to decide on the basis of the profile whom to hire and whom to reject.

To the bone

Shamir, 47, was born in Kiryat Ono and studied computer science at Tel Aviv University. He is married, with two daughters. His wife, Mirit, also works at Kansas State, as coordinator of the program for advanced degrees. In 2003, Shamir moved to the United States, earning his PhD in computational science and engineering at Michigan Technological University. His postdoctoral work was done at the National Institutes for Health in Baltimore, where he tried to develop logarithms for early detection of arthritic diseases in elderly people.

Some arthritic diseases are incurable, but if they are caught early, its possible to delay significantly their rate of development by changing eating habits, losing weight and so on, he notes. The problem, which crops up in most of his research studies, is not a lack of information per se, but the difficulty of analyzing all the information. In this case, there were thousands of x-ray images with very minor levels of deviation, which the human eye cannot detect.

For decades, thousands of people came to the institute every few years to be x-rayed, the professor relates. When 40 percent of them came down with arthritic diseases later in life, the institute staff went back to the early x-rays and fed them into Shamirs program, with the aim of discovering a pattern that could indicate the existence of early symptoms. What the computer found is that the disease starts with the bone and not necessarily with the cartilage, as was usually thought until then, he explains now.

But why waste time talking about arthritis, when there are far more interesting subjects at hand, such as a comparative analysis between annual salary and the field performances of thousands of soccer players around the world?

The truth is that Im not really interested in soccer, Shamir admits, adding that the study sprang from a masters dissertation written in his department. He and his students drew on information collected by FIFA, the international soccer association, which included the detailed monitoring of 6,082 players from dozens of leagues worldwide (not including Israel, by the way).

The height of their leaps, speed, power, pass accuracy, ball losses, goals, assists, fouls, head-butting all told, no fewer than 55 different criteria for each player in the 2016-2017 season were analyzed. I asked Shamir about the importance of a study like this. He admitted that if hed had to invest a lot of time on it, he probably would have dropped it. Its a study that has entertainment significance. There is no exciting scientific discovery. But a few seconds later, he adds, On the other hand, billions of people around the world follow soccer, so who am I to say its not important enough?

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Why Messi is grossly overpaid and how blinking can expose our medical history - Haaretz