Who is the man whose online anger brought Egyptians onto the streets?
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Intro Video
Wednesday, September 25, 2019
Bill Cosby hit with $2.75M legal bill after losing dispute
Bill Cosby has been hit with a $2.75 million legal bill as he marks the end of his first year in prison.
The 82-year-old Cosby had challenged a California arbitration award that upheld nearly $7 million of a $9 million bill submitted by just one firm in the run-up to his first sexual assault trial in Pennsylvania in 2017.
A judge sided Friday with Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, of Los Angeles, rejecting Cosby’s claim that the bill was “egregious.”
Cosby spokesman Andrew Wyatt isn’t commenting on the fee dispute.
But he says the actor is holding up well in a suburban Philadelphia prison, mentoring other inmates as he marks a year in prison Wednesday.
Cosby is serving three to 10 years for drugging and molesting a woman in 2004. The Pennsylvania Superior Court is weighing his appeal of the 2018 conviction.
The post Bill Cosby hit with $2.75M legal bill after losing dispute appeared first on theGrio.
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No charges against ex-officers who mocked Black woman and made her walk home
Charges will not be filed against two white ex-Detroit police officers who were fired amid an investigation into racist comments and social media posts about a traffic stop.
Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy said Tuesday there is “insufficient evidence to criminally charge” Gary Steele or Michael Garrison.
Steele was fired in February after a video on his Snapchat account showed him saying “priceless” and “bye Felicia” as a black woman walked home. Her car was stopped for speeding and had an expired license plate. The video’s captions read “what black girl magic looks like” and “celebrating Black History Month.”
Police announced in March that Garrison, Steele’s partner, was fired after investigators found he had made disturbing comments about blacks and other minorities.
The Associated Press left a message seeking comment from the police union.
The post No charges against ex-officers who mocked Black woman and made her walk home appeared first on theGrio.
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Tuesday, September 24, 2019
How cities can leverage citizen data while protecting privacy
India is on a path with dual — and potentially conflicting — goals related to the use of citizen data.
To improve the efficiency their municipal services, many Indian cities have started enabling government-service requests, which involves collecting and sharing citizen data with government officials and, potentially, the public. But there’s also a national push to protect citizen privacy, potentially restricting data usage. Cities are now beginning to question how much citizen data, if any, they can use to track government operations.
In a new study, MIT researchers find that there is, in fact, a way for Indian cities to preserve citizen privacy while using their data to improve efficiency.
The researchers obtained and analyzed data from more than 380,000 government service requests by citizens across 112 cities in one Indian state for an entire year. They used the dataset to measure each city government’s efficiency based on how quickly they completed each service request. Based on field research in three of these cities, they also identified the citizen data that’s necessary, useful (but not critical), or unnecessary for improving efficiency when delivering the requested service.
In doing so, they identified “model” cities that performed very well in both categories, meaning they maximized privacy and efficiency. Cities worldwide could use similar methodologies to evaluate their own government services, the researchers say. The study was presented at this past weekend’s Technology Policy Research Conference.
“How do municipal governments collect citizen data to try to be transparent and efficient, and, at the same time, protect privacy? How do you find a balance?” says co-author Karen Sollins, a researcher in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), a principal investigator for the Internet Policy Research Initiative (IPRI), and a member of the Privacy, Innovation and e-Governance using Quantitative Systems (PIEQS) group. “We show there are opportunities to improve privacy and efficiency simultaneously, instead of saying you get one or the other, but not both.”
Joining Sollins on the paper are: first author Nikita Kodali, a graduate student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; and Chintan Vaishnav, a senior lecturer in the MIT Sloan School of Management, a principal investigator for IPRI, and a member PIEQS.
Intersections of privacy and efficiency
In recent years, India’s eGovernment Foundation has aimed to significantly improve the transparency, accountability, and efficiency of operations in its many municipal governments. The foundation aims to move all of these governments from paper-based systems to fully digitized systems with citizen interfaces to request and interact with government service departments.
In 2017, however, India’s Supreme Court ruled that its citizens have a constitutional right to data privacy and have a say in whether or not their personal data could be used by governments and the private sector. That could potentially limit the information that towns and cities could use to track the performance of their services.
Around that time, the researchers had started studying privacy and efficiency issues surrounding the eGovernment Foundation’s digitization efforts. That led to a report that determined which types of citizen data could be used to track government service operations.
Building on that work, the researchers were provided 383,959 anonymized citizen-government transactions from digitized modules from 112 local governments in an Indian state for all of 2018. The modules focused on three areas: new water tap tax assessment; new property tax assessment; and public grievances about sanitation, stray animals, infrastructure, schools, and other issues.
Citizens send requests to those modules via mobile or web apps by entering various types of personal and property information, and then monitor the progress of the requests. The request and related data pass through various officials that each complete an individual subtask, known as a service level agreement, within a designated time limit. Then, the request passes on to another official, and so on. But much of that citizen information is also visible to the public.
The software captured each step of each request, moving from initiation to completion, with time stamps, for each municipal government. The researchers then could rank each task within a town or city, or in aggregation across each town or city on two metrics: a government efficiency index and an information privacy index.
The government efficiency index primarily measures a service’s timeliness, compared to the predetermined service level agreement. If a service is completed before its timeframe, it’s more efficient; if it’s completed after, it’s less efficient. The information privacy index measures how responsible is a government in collecting, using, and disclosing citizen data that may be privacy sensitive, such as personally identifiable information. The more the city collects and shares inessential data, the lower its privacy rating.
Phone numbers and home addresses, for instance, aren’t needed for many of the services or grievances, yet are collected — and publicly disclosed — by many of the modules. In fact, the researchers found that some modules historically collected detailed personal and property information across dozens of data fields, yet the governments only needed about half of those fields to get the job done.
Model behavior
By analyzing the two indices, they found eight “model” municipal governments that performed in the top 25 percent for all services in both the efficiency and privacy indices. In short, they used only the essential data — and passed that essential data through fewer officials — to complete a service in a timely manner.
The researchers now plan to study how the model cities are able to get services done so quickly. They also hope to study why some cities performed so poorly, in the bottom 25 percent, for any given service. “First, we’re showing India that this is what your best cities look like and what other cities should become,” Vaishnav says. “Then we want to look at why a city becomes a model city.”
Similar studies can be conducted in places where similar citizen and government data are available and which have equivalents to India’s service level agreements — which serve as a baseline for measuring efficiency. That information isn’t common worldwide yet, but could be in the near future, especially in cities like Boston and Cambridge, Vaishnav says. “We gather a large amount of data and there’s an urge to do something with the data to improve governments and engage citizens better,” he says. “That may soon be a requirement in democracies around the globe.”
Next, the researchers want to create an innovation-based matrix, which will determine which citizen data can and cannot be made public to private parties to help develop new technologies. They’re also working on a model that provides information on a city’s government efficiency and information privacy scores in real time, as citizen requests are being processed.
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Quantum sensing on a chip
MIT researchers have, for the first time, fabricated a diamond-based quantum sensor on a silicon chip. The advance could pave the way toward low-cost, scalable hardware for quantum computing, sensing, and communication.
“Nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers” in diamonds are defects with electrons that can be manipulated by light and microwaves. In response, they emit colored photons that carry quantum information about surrounding magnetic and electric fields, which can be used for biosensing, neuroimaging, object detection, and other sensing applications. But traditional NV-based quantum sensors are about the size of a kitchen table, with expensive, discrete components that limit practicality and scalability.
In a paper published in Nature Electronics, the researchers found a way to integrate all those bulky components — including a microwave generator, optical filter, and photodetector — onto a millimeter-scale package, using traditional semiconductor fabrication techniques. Notably, the sensor operates at room temperature with capabilities for sensing the direction and magnitude of magnetic fields.
The researchers demonstrated the sensor’s use for magnetometry, meaning they were able to measure atomic-scale shifts in the frequency due to surrounding magnetic fields, which could contain information about the environment. With further refining, the sensor could have a range of applications, from mapping electrical impulses in the brain to detecting objects, even without a line of sight.
“It’s very difficult to block magnetic fields, so that’s a huge advantage for quantum sensors,” says co-author Christopher Foy, a graduate student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). “If there’s a vehicle traveling in, say, an underground tunnel below you, you’d be able to detect it even if you don’t see it there.”
Joining Foy on the paper are: Mohamed Ibrahim, a graduate student in EECS; Donggyu Kim PhD ’19; Matthew E. Trusheim, a postdoc in EECS; Ruonan Han, an associate professor in EECS and head of the Terahertz Integrated Electronics Group, which is part of MIT's Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL); and Dirk Englund, an MIT associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, a researcher in Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), and head of the Quantum Photonics Laboratory.
Shrinking and stacking
NV centers in diamonds occur where carbon atoms in two adjacent places in the lattice structure are missing — one atom is replaced by a nitrogen atom, and the other space is an empty “vacancy.” That leaves missing bonds in the structure, where the electrons are extremely sensitive to tiny variations in electrical, magnetic, and optical characteristics in the surrounding environment.
The NV center essentially functions as an atom, with a nucleus and surrounding electrons. It also has photoluminescent properties, meaning it absorbs and emits colored photons. Sweeping microwaves across the center can make it change states — positive, neutral, and negative — which in turn changes the spin of its electrons. Then, it emits different amounts of red photons, depending on the spin.
A technique, called optically detected magnetic resonance (ODMR), measures how many photons are emitted by interacting with the surrounding magnetic field. That interaction produces further, quantifiable information about the field. For all of that to work, traditional sensors require bulky components, including a mounted laser, power supply, microwave generator, conductors to route the light and microwaves, an optical filter and sensor, and a readout component.
The researchers instead developed a novel chip architecture that positions and stacks tiny, inexpensive components in a certain way using standard complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology, so they function like those components. “CMOS technologies enable very complex 3-D structures on a chip,” Ibrahim says. “We can have a complete system on the chip, and we only need a piece of diamond and green light source on top. But that can be a regular chip-scale LED.”
NV centers within a diamond slab are positioned in a “sensing area” of the chip. A small green pump laser excites the NV centers, while a nanowire placed close to the NV centers generates sweeping microwaves in response to current. Basically, the light and microwave work together to make the NV centers emit a different amount of red photons — with the difference being the target signal for readout in the researchers’ experiments.
Below the NV centers is a photodiode, designed to eliminate noise and measure the photons. In between the diamond and photodiode is a metal grating that acts as a filter that absorbs the green laser photons while allowing the red photons to reach the photodiode. In short, this enables an on-chip ODMR device, which measures resonance frequency shifts with the red photons that carry information about the surrounding magnetic field.
But how can one chip do the work of a large machine? A key trick is simply moving the conducting wire, which produces the microwaves, at an optimal distance from the NV centers. Even if the chip is very small, this precise distance enables the wire current to generate enough magnetic field to manipulate the electrons. The tight integration and codesign of the microwave conducting wires and generation circuitry also help. In their paper, the researchers were able to generate enough magnetic field to enable practical applications in object detection.
Only the beginning
In another paper presented earlier this year at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, the researchers describe a second-generation sensor that makes various improvements on this design to achieve 100-fold greater sensitivity. Next, the researchers say they have a “roadmap” for how to increase sensitivity by 1,000 times. That basically involves scaling up the chip to increase the density of the NV centers, which determines sensitivity.
If they do, the sensor could be used even in neuroimaging applications. That means putting the sensor near neurons, where it can detect the intensity and direction of firing neurons. That could help researchers map connections between neurons and see which neurons trigger each other. Other future applications including a GPS replacement for vehicles and airplanes. Because the magnetic field on Earth has been mapped so well, quantum sensors can serve as extremely precise compasses, even in GPS-denied environments.
“We’re only at the beginning of what we can accomplish,” Han says. “It’s a long journey, but we already have two milestones on the track, with the first-and second-generation sensors. We plan to go from sensing to communication to computing. We know the way forward and we know how to get there.”
“I am enthusiastic about this quantum sensor technology and foresee major impact in several fields,” says Ron Walsworth, a senior lecturer at Harvard University whose group develops high-resolution magnetometry tools using NV centers.
“They have taken a key step in the integration of quantum-diamond sensors with CMOS technology, including on-chip microwave generation and delivery, as well as on-chip filtering and detection of the information-carrying fluorescent light from the quantum defects in diamond. The resulting unit is compact and relatively low-power. Next steps will be to further enhance the sensitivity and bandwidth of the quantum diamond sensor [and] integrate the CMOS-diamond sensor with wide-ranging applications, including chemical analysis, NMR spectroscopy, and materials characterization.”
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Looking under the surface of politics in Latin America
Danny Hidalgo’s research involves looking under the surface of elections and political campaigns, and probing some of their questionable elements. It turns out there’s a lot to see down there.
Hidalgo, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Political Science, is a scholar who studies the nexus of elections, campaigns, and money in Latin America, and particularly in Brazil, hammering away at the question of who, exactly, benefits from the system.
Consider one Hidalgo study of municipal elections that were plagued by the alleged practice of “voter buying,” in which people would be brought into a city to vote illegally. Voter audits that discouraged voter buying, Hidalgo has found, shrank the electorate by 12 percentage points and lowered the chances of mayoral reelection by a whopping 18 percentage points.
Even when the rules are being followed, the influence of money in politics is evident. In another study, Hidalgo showed that firms focused on public-works projects, which donate to winning candidates from the ruling party, get a boost to their government contracts that is at least 14 times the value of their contributions.
A lot of Hidalgo’s studies focus on elections themselves. In still another study, Hidalgo and a co-author showed that local politicians who were incumbents were twice as likely as nonincumbents to be granted control over community radio stations; in turn, they also showed that radio access significantly boosts the vote share of politicians.
“Corruption and accountability are central themes of politics in Brazil,” Hidalgo says, sitting in his office, discussing his work. “Let’s try to think rigorously and bring our social science tools to bear on them.”
That rigorous thinking, as well as the exacting quantitative methods Hidalgo uses, are built on a foundation of firsthand knowledge. There is nothing like living somewhere, and learning about it in person, to spur productive research.
“I’m very much of the mind, and maybe this is more old-school, of having research questions come to you based on what’s important in the places that you’re studying,” Hidalgo says. “In some sense, you just have to spend a lot of time in Latin America.”
Travelin’ man
Indeed, many of Hidalgo’s research interests have been formed by his sense of place.
Hidalgo was born in Mexico but grew up in Los Angeles, with parents who were highly attuned to Mexican politics. During Hidalgo’s teenage years, in the 1990s, the country’s lurching transition toward a multiparty democracy was a major talking point in his household.
“Around my kitchen table there was a lot of discussion of Mexican politics, and what was going on, and that got me interested in politics in other countries, and how politics works in places where the institutions aren’t quite as strong as in the U.S.,” Hidalgo recounts. “So because of that I had an interest in Latin American politics generally.”
Hidalgo went to college at Princeton University, where he graduated with a BA in politics in 2002. His focus on Latin American politics was enhanced by an undergraduate study abroad program that landed him in Buenos Aires.
“Basically I lived there in the lead-up to the enormous depression that occurred in Argentina, before this period when they had four or five presidents in a matter of months,” Hidalgo says. “That was a very interesting time to be living in Buenos Aires.”
After graduation, though, Hidalgo departed for a different part of the world: Hangzhou, China, where he taught English while figuring out his future. Again a social crisis hit soon after Hidalgo’s arrival, this time in the form of the SARS epidemic that shut down cities and scared off travelers.
“From one day to the next, Hangzhou went from having incredibly bustling streets, to nothing,” Hidalgo remembers. And when an acquaintance of a friend contracted SARS, Hidalgo reluctantly departed. “The program that I was with essentially said, ‘You have to be under quarantine for a while, or you have to leave,’ which was too bad, because I really liked living in China and I wanted to stay.”
At loose ends back in the U.S., Hidalgo applied for a Fulbright scholarship to study in Brazil, got it, and spent his first year in Brazil doing research.
“I loved my time in Brazil. I was fascinated. It was so huge and with so much heterogeneity,” Hidalgo says. “A lot of my work stems from that.”
Hidalgo adds: “In China there’s been incredible economic development, but a complete lack of accountability. … In Brazil in some sense [it’s been] the opposite, with a long period of sluggish growth, from the late 1970s to mid-90s, but increasingly it became this vibrant democracy, very competitive. It had a traditional oligarchical conservative political class, but there emerged a working-class president [Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, from 2003 through 2010] from a left-wing party, which typically didn’t reach political power in Latin America. It was a fascinating contrast.”
Brazilian politics have since changed, rather dramatically, but Hidalgo’s interest had been sparked. Back in the U.S. again, Hidalgo attended graduate school in political science at the University of California at Berkeley, earning his PhD in 2012. He was hired out of graduate school by MIT and has been on the Institute faculty since then, embarking on many research trips in the intervening years. For his work, Hidalgo received tenure from MIT earlier this year.
The case-driven scholar
While Hidalgo’s work is clearly situated at the junction of money, politics, and power, he uses a diversity of methods to get his results. He isn’t necessarily trying to build an overarching theory of how politics works; rather, he has identified an array of ways that money and politics interact.
“Some scholars have a theory first and look for cases,” Hidalgo says. “I care about societies and politics and try to find out what’s important. There’s an interplay between theory and cases, but I’m more case-driven.”
Hidalgo is also not set on studying Brazil to the exclusion of other countries. In fact, at the moment has embarked on a study of transparency in local U.S. governments. The study uses search technology to see how much government information is available online for residents of towns and cities in the U.S.
“In some ways the availability of basic information about the government is actually better in some parts of Latin America,” Hidalgo says, referring to the notorious case of Bell, California — a small town where in 2010 a reporter for the Los Angeles Times discovered that the city manager had a million-dollar salary. There was no local paper, however, which might have caught the inflated salaries of local officials sooner.
“The death of local media is just incredibly salient, and these are the kinds of people who care about this stuff,” Hidalgo says. “I don’t think transparency is always a salient issue for citizens. It’s really often external pressure from journalists that makes [discoveries]. I think it’s just important for information about the basic operations of government.”
All the more reason, then, for scholars like Hidalgo to look at money in politics as well.
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Shonda Rhimes readies ‘Notes on Love’ anthology series at Netflix
Shonda Rhimes is readying her ninth Netflix project and it sounds pretty cool.
Notes on Love is an episodic anthology series that will examine the “unexpected, life-changing, euphoric, hilarious, surreal, and all-consuming places where love intersects with our lives.”
The first season will focus on marriage and Shonda Rhimes and Betsy Beers will produce the whole season and be joined by some pretty big-named executive producers for certain episodes including Norman Lear, Aaron Shure, Steve Martin, Diane Warren, Jenny Han, Lindy West and Ahamefule J. Oluo.
Notes on Love is the ninth project resulting from Rhimes’ epic overall deal with Netflix that she inked back in 2017.
ICYMI, here are a few of the other projects on the horizon from Shondaland:
The Residence: Based on Kate Andersen Brower’s book, The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House, which offers a vividly accurate insider’s account of White House residence staffers and the upstairs-downstairs lives they share with the First Families at one of the most famous homes in history.
The Warmth of Other Suns: Based on Pulitzer-Prize winning author Isabel Wilkerson’s award-winning book of the same name, this powerful, groundbreaking series tracks the decades-long migration of African-Americans fleeing the Jim Crow South in search of a better life in the North and the West between 1916 and 1970.
Hot Chocolate Nutcracker: A documentary offers a behind-the-scenes look at the Debbie Allen Dance Academy’s award-winning reimagining of the classic ballet The Nutcracker. This staged contemporization – with its inclusive cast of all ages and its blend of dance traditions – has further cemented Debbie Allen’s legacy as one of the most significant forces for good in dance.
Pico & Sepulveda:Set in the 1840s against the surreal and sensual backdrop of the then-Mexican state of California, the series tracks the end of an idyllic era there as American forces threaten brutality and war at the border to claim this breathtaking land for its own.
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Hyundai Makes Another Match in the Self-Driving Game
Newscaster out 8 months after Martin Luther King slur
A St. Louis newscaster who has been off the air since uttering what he called an unintentional racial slur while talking about Martin Luther King Jr. in January is now out of a job.
KTVI-TV general manager Kurt Krueger told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that the station and Kevin Steincross parted ways “by mutual agreement.” Krueger declined to provide any additional information, citing it as a personnel matter.
Steincross does not have listed phone number.
Steincross was discussing a tribute to the black civil rights leader on Jan. 17 when he referred to King as “Martin Luther coon Jr.” He apologized a few hours later, saying he accidentally misspoke.
The NAACP had urged the station to fire Steincross.
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Florida cop who arrested 6-year-old girl over school tantrum fired
The Florida officer who was under fire for arresting and handcuffing two six-year-olds at an elementary school before hauling them off to a youth detention center, has now been fired.
—Florida cop who arrested 6-year-old girl for throwing tantrum, suspended—
Officer Dennis Turner caused outrage when he locked up a first-grader Kaia Rolle at Lucious and Emma Nixon Academy for a temper tantrum last week, without consulting his superiors over how he should handle the child.
The girl’s grandmother Meralyn Kirkland said the child was acting out because of her lack of sleep from a medical condition. She said received a disturbing call telling her that Kaia was getting locked up, WKMG reports.
“I said, ‘What do you mean, she was arrested?’ They said there was an incident and she kicked somebody and she’s being charged and she’s on her way,” Kirkland recalled.
Turner additionally arrested another 6-year-old, previously reported as age 8, on a separate incident and took both children to the Juvenile Assessment Center to be processed. One of the kids was processed, but contrary to previous reports, Kaia was not fingerprinted and instead taken back to school after a supervisor learned about the insane arrests.
On Monday, Orlando Police Chief Orlando Rolón said in a press conference he was “sick to my stomach” after hearing about the incident.
Statement from OPD Chief Orlando Rolón. pic.twitter.com/qd7msBx0Fw
— Orlando Police (@OrlandoPolice) September 23, 2019
Previously Rolon said Turner did not follow protocol.
“The Orlando Police Department has a policy that addresses the arrest of a minor, and our initial finding shows the policy was not followed,” Police Chief Orlando Rolon told the outlet.
The chief said he personally delivered a departmental message that no juvenile is to be arrested without a manager’s approval.
—Meghan Markle connects with teen girls in South Africa: ‘I a woman of color and your sister’—
“No 6-year-old child should be able to tell somebody that they had handcuffs on them,” Kirkland previously said.
Kirkland said the officer even made light of Kaia’s medical condition.
“He says, ‘What medical condition?’ ‘She has a sleep disorder, sleep apnea,’ and he says, ‘Well, I have sleep apnea, and I don’t behave like that,”‘ Kirkland said.
Turner was initially suspended but has now been officially fired.
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