Curated Commons // Edition 9
Thank you for subscribing and welcome to the ninth edition of Curated Commons. Let’s dive right in.
Who owns what you “purchase”?
A question that has always been around over the years when it comes to digital content - are you really ‘purchasing’ content online, or is it more a case of renting as long as the company you purchased from is around or has rights to the content? Amazon argues that you are in fact taking a limited license, and they have the right to ‘delete’ purchased content.
When an Amazon Prime Video user buys content on the platform, what they're really paying for is a limited license for “on-demand viewing over an indefinite period of time” and they're warned of that in the company's terms of use. That's the company's argument for why a lawsuit over hypothetical future deletions of content should be dismissed.
Now extend this argument to not just digital content, but anything delivered digitally for which you can charge. For eg, car features. Something similar is playing out with Tesla which offers full autonomous driving as an aftermarket over-the-air downloadable update. Tesla is now clawing back the update from cars which are resold, again bringing up the point - what do you get when you purchase software - a right-to-use till you please, or a right-to-use till the company pleases?
Algorithms built on skewed math
At this point if you haven’t heard of a weird algorithmic bias situation every week, you are clearly not reading enough. Even then, the extent of the challenge keeps getting bigger and bigger with each passing day. A new study highlights this in healthcare.
The study analyzed health records for 57,000 people with chronic kidney disease from the Mass General Brigham health system that includes Harvard teaching hospitals Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women's. One third of Black patients, more than 700 people, would have been placed into a more severe category of kidney disease if their kidney function had been estimated using the same formula as for white patients.
That could have affected decisions such as when to refer someone to a kidney specialist, or refer them for a kidney transplant. In 64 cases, patients’ recalculated scores would have qualified them for a kidney transplant wait list. None had been referred or evaluated for transplant, suggesting that doctors did not question the race-based recommendations.
https://www.wired.com/story/how-algorithm-blocked-kidney-transplants-black-patients/
Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil is a good read if this topic interests you - https://weaponsofmathdestructionbook.com/
The rise of the global teacher
While remote work so far has largely meant people doing the job from outside office locations, but in the same geography, some new jobs are coming up which merge connectivity, need and tech, and break boundaries. There’s a booming market for Indian teachers to teach students in the US.
Online student-services company Chegg, based in Santa Clara, Calif., saw the number of its student subscribers surge 69% year over year to 3.7 million in the quarter through September.
One of the company’s more popular services—helping students work through difficult homework questions—depends on thousands of freelancers, largely from India, to do the answering. It added thousands more of them in recent months to respond to the surge in demand.
“One of the massive benefits of the Indian economy is the education system,” said Erik Manuevo, vice president of content and operations at Chegg. “In subjects that are often challenging, the Indian education system is better equipped to train individuals to become experts.”
The best banker in the world?
This week marked the retirement of one of the OGs of Indian banking - Aditya Puri, MD of HDFC Bank. And while he might not be known much outside Indian banking circles, his achievements in comparison to his global peers are staggering. The Economist did a nice piece on him with this chart. And he achieved this while apparently heading home for lunch daily, leaving office at 5:30pm, and not using a mobile phone!
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2020/10/29/who-is-the-worlds-best-banker
Masterclass in headline writing on corporate fines
Writing headlines is an art in these days of nuance-less outraging and shaming. But when it comes to informing people and helping them understand the real impact, some headlines clearly stand out from others. The Register won it this time around with this brilliant headline - Marriott fined £0.05 for each of the 339 million hotel guests whose data crooks were stealing for four years
Your name, address, phone number, email address, passport number, date of birth, and sex are worth just £0.05 in the eyes of the UK Information Commissioner's Office, which has fined Marriott £18.4m after 339 million people's data was stolen from the hotel chain.
https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/30/marriott_starwood_hack_fine_just_18_4bn/
Brain implants for immobilized patients
There’s tech that makes you worry about humanity, and there’s tech that makes you look up with optimism. Exoskeletons and brain implants are among the latter. Good read on some brain implants that hold promise for immobilized patients.
What should companies focus on? Shareholders or Stakeholders?
In recent years, there has been growing pressure on organizations to focus on ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) factors. Interesting read on a new report that tries to hold big financial firms accountable for financing projects with impact on biodiversity.
This week’s Bankrolling Extinction report finds that financial institutions provide the capital that is funding over-exploitation of our lands and seas, putting biodiversity in freefall. Last year, the world’s 50 biggest banks provided $2.6tn (£1.9tn) in loans and other credit to sectors with a high impact on biodiversity, such as forestry and agriculture. Bank by bank, the report authors found a cavalier ignorance of – or indifference to – the implications, with the vast majority unaware of their impact on biodiversity.
At the same time, some are pushing back against this growing trend of ‘stakeholder capitalism’ arguing for the primacy of shareholder wealth maximization. That appears unlikely to sustain though given the larger global movement for companies to start thinking about their raison d’etre/purpose. The FT has a piece on how the pandemic has put stakeholder capitalism on steroids.
https://www.ft.com/content/fcb05366-a3fb-4946-a026-5188d841b4a5
And on this topic, this example fuses big oil with shareholder capitalism - too pure!
Like what you see? Why not share it with your network?
Influencers & bots - who’s what?
One would be forgiven if they thought many influencers are bots, trotting on product recommendations one after the other. The pandemic is driving up the popularity of a new breed of influencers though - the algorithmic kind. Good read on the rise of influencer bots.
Virtual influencers were already gaining, well, influence long before Covid-19 struck. Seraphine’s flowing pink hair and cat-themed Instagram posts had attracted thousands of fans when the news that she was created by Riot Games Inc. — the studio behind smash-hit esports game League of Legends — sent her account viral. Now her follower count is nearly 400,000 and she’s making appearances in Shanghai to promote her music, while most flesh-and-blood social-media stars are stuck at home. Despite not being real, she still sometimes wears a mask.
K-pop fans as the new Internet saviors and culture torchbearers
Fighting conspiracy theories like Qanon requires coordinated global efforts at disproving them with fact checkers, strong regulations, platforms increasing moderation, and a lot more….or. K-pop fans.
More than 22,000 tweets bearing Korean pop stars flooded hashtags like #WhiteLivesMatter and #QAnon that evening, according to market researcher Zignal Labs. Some typical accompanying text: “Stan twitter RISE.” The barrage effectively commandeered the hashtag and rendered it all but unusable to white supremacists. QAnon devotees are familiar with this tactic, known as keyword squatting, because they use it all the time. “They got beaten at their own game by Korean pop fans,” says Mike Rothschild, a conspiracy theory researcher who’s writing a book about QAnon. “I’d never seen anything like it before.”
On the topic, this is a good read on how K-pop is finding a foothold in India and growing in popularity. Some interesting stats in there.
From China, with scale:
This neat little GIF turned up in one of the older FT articles. It speaks for itself!
Stuck in the American Internet, on infinite loop
The past few weeks have been a weird time for any Internet user not based in the US, or not interested in US politics. The challenge of key online platforms being headquartered in the US means the rest of the world is caught up in, as The Atlantic calls it, “Americas Culture War”. Too many features tweaked/disabled to reduce impact on the US elections. Also says a lot about how tech companies, albeit indirectly, are acknowledging the amount of influence their platforms can have. Algorithmic recommendations have played a big role in getting us to where we are, so might be good for all if we keep some of these taps turned off post the US election as well - https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/10/internet-world-trapped-americas-culture-war/616799/
Audio & tech - the past and the future
Very good read on evolution of the delivery of music and the role of tech.
To support engagement-based monetization, Spotify and its label suppliers had to define engagement. And they chose to do this on a per stream basis with a minimum stream time of 30 seconds (to avoid accidental plays, track skipping, etc.). However, this meant that a 10-minute track, five-minute track and 31-second track generated the same royalties.
So as the music industry has transitioned the majority of its revenues from CDs and downloads to streaming, major artists have relentlessly shortened and split their tracks. Why release a five-minute song if you can make it a two and a half-minute song that’s played twice? Or two different two and a half-minute songs? This meant artists had yet another reason to reduce track lengths
https://www.matthewball.vc/all/audiotech
Over two decades ago, pre-Skype, I was a big fan of a service called Rocket Talk. It allowed sending 30 (or was it 60?) second voice messages to other users of the service. This was on my 56Kbps dial-up connection! A few years later saw variants of this through a push-to-talk service on some early Sony Ericsson handsets. And now it’s back with some interesting use cases - this one called “voice note dating”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/4addyp/the-rise-and-rise-of-voice-note-dating
Two ways to celebrate Halloween!
Dress up as normal people doing normal things! Fab thread! My personal favorite below, but do scroll up and down for more!
Or, you do it the true tech nerd way, by getting a deepfake video of yourself from this intriguing website where you get on a zoom call and it quickly, and effectively, shows our low-trust future. More details here.
Best of the rest
How have dams reshaped Earth - some amazing pictures of those magnificent beasts of engineering - https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201021-how-dams-have-reshaped-our-planet
Facebook considered their algorithmic recommendation engine dangerous enough to be switching it off in wake of the US election. Make what you will - https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-suspended-group-recommendations-election
Whatsapp users now send around 100 Bn messages every day. My anecdotal estimates - half of them are Good Morning wishes on desi groups! - https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/29/whatsapp-is-now-delivering-roughly-100-billion-messages-a-day/
Amazon hired nearly 250, 000 people the past quarter. This is a scaling beast! - https://www.geekwire.com/2020/amazons-hires-248500-people-q3-jeff-bezos-challenges-large-employers-raise-minimum-wage/
Did you know about this soccer tournament played amongst contested territories and de facto states? Western Armenia, Abkhazia, Chameria were among the teams - https://penalty.online/artsakh-football-in-a-de-facto-state/
Tesla is now testing its ‘beta’ version of full autonomous driving on public roads. And while it can potentially get away with the T&Cs requiring drivers to still pay full attention, calling something full self-driving when the tech is yet to mature is, to put it bluntly, reckless. - https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/10/tesla-is-now-beta-testing-self-driving-software-on-public-roads/
Two very good visual explainers on how the virus spreads and how masks can help.
I leave you with this lovely little video. How long before we see adversarial bald heads for confusing cameras!
Stay safe, and happy reading! And if you liked the newsletter, please do share on your social networks. My DMs on Twitter are always open for any feedback.