Analysis

Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

by Caroline Criado Perez, Imagine a world where your phone is too big for your hand, where your doctor prescribes a drug that is wrong for your body, where in a car accident you are 47% more likely to be seriously injured, where every week the countless hours of work you do are not recognised or valued. If any of this sounds familiar, chances are that you’re a woman. Invisible Women shows us how, in a world largely built for and by men, we are systematically ignoring half the population. It exposes the gender data gap – a gap in our knowledge that is at the root of perpetual, systemic discrimination against women, and that has created a pervasive but invisible bias with a profound effect on women’s lives. Award-winning campaigner and writer Caroline Criado Perez brings together for the first time an impressive range of case studies, stories and new research from across the world that illustrate the hidden ways in which women are forgotten, and the impact this has on their health and well-being. From government policy and medical research, to technology, workplaces, urban planning and the media, Invisible Women reveals the biased data that excludes women. In making the case for change, this powerful and provocative book will make you see the world anew.

Viruses like SARS-CoV-2 may have been circulating in bats for decades

Research has concluded that the lineage from which SARS-CoV-2 came has been circulating among bats for decades. The researchers found that the virus which causes Covid-19 diverged from other bat viruses about 40-70 years ago. They warn SARS-CoV-2 is likely to include other viruses with the ability to infect humans. The lineage that gave rise to the SARS-CoV-2, the virus that is responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic, has been circulating in bats for decades, researchers report. They also warn it likely includes other viruses with the ability to infect humans. The discoveries, which researchers made by reconstructing the evolutionary history of SARS-CoV-2, have implications for the prevention of future pandemics stemming from this lineage. “Coronaviruses have genetic material that is highly recombinant, meaning different regions of the virus’s genome can be derived from multiple sources,” says Maciej Boni, associate professor of biology at Penn State. “This has made it difficult to reconstruct SARS-CoV-2’s origins. You have to identify all the regions that have been recombining and trace their histories.” A SARS-CoV-2 ‘family tree’ The team used three different bioinformatic approaches to identify and remove the recombinant regions within the SARS-CoV-2 genome. Next, they reconstructed phylogenetic histories for the non-recombinant regions and compared them to each other to see which specific viruses have been involved in recombination events in the past. They were able to reconstruct the evolutionary relationships between SARS-CoV-2 and its closest known bat and pangolin viruses. The researchers found that the lineage of viruses to which SARS-CoV-2 belongs diverged from other bat viruses about 40-70 years ago. Importantly, although SARS-CoV-2 is genetically similar (about 96%) to the RaTG13 coronavirus, which was sampled from a Rhinolophus affinis horseshoe bat in 2013 in Yunnan province, China, the team found that it diverged from RaTG13 a relatively long time ago, in […]

A revamped wealth tax could fuel the Covid-19 recovery

With Covid-19 support schemes increasing governments’ debt burdens, countries are in search of tax receipts. Wealth taxes mean the rich are taxed on the assets they own rather than their earnings. A smart approach to wealth taxes could boost innovation and investment. Earlier this month, Millionaires for Humanity, a group comprising 83 of the world’s richest people, called on governments to increase their taxes in the wake of COVID’s economic fallout. The idea is promising but to be truly successful it must be implemented in such a way that gains broad support from the rich. Otherwise, it will simply incentivise them to take their capital – and their residency – elsewhere. Wealth taxes – where the rich are taxed on the assets they own rather than their earnings – represent one of the most popular new policy ideas in the last year. American senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders both suggested the idea in their respective campaigns for the 2020 Democratic party primary. In the UK, the opposition Labour party has made a wealth tax one of its flagship policies, with public debt reaching record-breaking levels due to COVID-19 relief schemes. Despite strong arguments and some high-profile advocates for wealth taxes, many countries have in fact moved away from them recently. In 1990, 12 OECD countries had a wealth tax. By 2018, it was intact in only three countries. This is, in part, explained by poor economic returns from wealth taxes. French economist Eric Pichet estimated that France lost double the actual revenues they gained from their version of the wealth tax due to capital flight – it was abolished in 2017. It seems that the only effective wealth tax is a wealth tax “by consent”. Left-wing support for wealth taxes can create the impression that they are an attack on capitalism. But smart wealth taxes can […]

Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism

by Wendy Liu Former insider turned critic Wendy Liu busts the myths of the tech industry, and offers a galvanising argument for why and how we must reclaim technology’s potential for the public good. Innovation. Meritocracy. The possibility of overnight success. What’s not to love about Silicon Valley? These days, it’s hard to be unambiguously optimistic about the growth-at-all-costs ethos of the tech industry. Public opinion is souring in the wake of revelations about Cambridge Analytica, Theranos, and the workplace conditions of Amazon warehouse workers or Uber. We’re starting to see the cracks in the edifice, as we realise that the wealth that the tech industry is so good at creating is neither sustainable nor always desirable. Abolish Silicon Valley is both a heartfelt personal story about the wasteful inequality and unsubstantiated lies of Silicon Valley, and a rallying call to engage in the radical politics needed to upend the status quo. Going beyond the idiosyncrasies of the individual founders and companies that characterise the industry today, Liu delves into the structural factors of the economy that led to Silicon Valley in its current form, and links them to the economy at large. Ultimately, she proposes a more radical way of developing technology, where innovation is conducted for the benefit of society at large, and not merely to enrich a select few.

Media have helped create a crisis of democracy – now they must play a vital role in its revival

Denis Muller, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Advancing Journalism, University of Melbourne. In May 2020, with the world still in the grip of the coronavirus pandemic, Margaret MacMillan, an historian at the University of Toronto, wrote an essay in The Economist about the possibilities for life after the pandemic had passed. On a scale of one to ten, where one was utter despair and ten was cautious hopefulness, it would have rated about six. Her thesis was that the future will be decided by a fundamental choice between reform and calamity. She saw the world as being at a turning point in history. It had arrived there as a result of the conjunction of two forces: growing unrest at economic inequality, and the crisis induced by the pandemic. It was at such times, she argued, that societies took stock and were open to change. Such a time, for example, was in the immediate aftermath of the second world war, which resulted in radical reforms to international political and economic frameworks. She was writing against a backdrop of a larger crisis – the crisis in democracy. The most spectacular symptoms of this were the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States and the Brexit referendum. Both occurred in 2016, and both appealed to populism largely based on issues of race and immigration. In the four years since, many books have been written on this crisis, among them Cass Sunstein’s #republic, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die, and A. C. Grayling’s Democracy and its Crisis. Then, somewhat surprisingly, in May 2020 a new spirit of what might be called “economic morality” announced itself. This came from within the Republican Party of the United States. It happened while Trump, that most amoral of Republican presidents, was in office, and reasserted some of the […]

Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower’s Inside Story

Full Title:Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower’s Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again By Brittany Kaiser In this explosive memoir, a political consultant and technology whistleblower reveals the disturbing truth about the multi-billion-dollar data industry, revealing to the public how companies are getting richer using our personal information and exposing how Cambridge Analytica exploited weaknesses in privacy laws to help elect Donald Trump—and how this could easily happen again in the 2020 presidential election.When Brittany Kaiser joined Cambridge Analytica—the UK-based political consulting firm funded by conservative billionaire and Donald Trump patron Robert Mercer—she was an idealistic young professional working on her fourth degree in human rights law and international relations. A veteran of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, Kaiser’s goal was to utilise data for humanitarian purposes, most notably to prevent genocide and human rights abuses. But her experience inside Cambridge Analytica opened her eyes to the tremendous risks that this unregulated industry poses to privacy and democracy. Targeted is Kaiser’s eyewitness chronicle of the dramatic and disturbing story of the rise and fall of Cambridge Analytica. She reveals to the public how Facebook’s lax policies and lack of sufficient national laws allowed voters to be manipulated in both Britain and the United States, where personal data was weaponized to spread fake news and racist messaging during the Brexit vote and the 2016 election. But the damage isn’t done Kaiser warns; the 2020 election can be compromised as well if we continue to do nothing. In the aftermath of the U.S. election, as she became aware of the horrifying reality of what Cambridge Analytica had done in support of Donald Trump, Kaiser made the difficult choice to expose the truth. Risking her career, relationships, and personal safety, she told authorities about the […]

America can change direction

What a puzzling place America is. Full of great talent in the arts, music and creative in the world of technology and innovation. And yet, they are run by a man who does not inspire and is rapidly leading his country into disrepair. With an election due it is outrageous that Donald Trump can be re-elected. Will all the people who voted for him last time vote for him again? Can Americans be so disillusioned that this is the man for four more years in office? The world and America does not deserve this result. However, when you consider the Democratic alternative in Joe Biden you really wonder where the Obama, the Kennedy appeal is hiding? When the Democratic Party were choosing, searching for their candidate they had some with genuine potential…and yet they have ended up with a 70 year old, conservative white man without charisma. Maybe it is that America has never been truly and greatly led by only a few…the likes of Obama and Eisenhower. However it goes in November, we may well be experiencing the demise of the land of the free. There are so many complexities in their way of life, that cause inequality and bafflement. The biggest one is the irrational thinking of voters who elected Trump to office. If you are reading this in the USA, it seems that you can only vote for Joe Biden as the best of the two options. Good luck to you all! Next time choose a forty-something, charismatic leader who will inspire and lead with policies for a free and equal society, not one based on priviledge for a few, at the cost of the many.

Why Free Will is Real – Book Review

Free will should be considered a ‘higher-level’ psychological phenomenon. Why Free Will Is Real. Christian List. The universe may very well be deterministic. According to many physicists, there are natural laws that govern the universe. On most specifications, these laws are deterministic, meaning that they pair with the initial conditions set at the Big Bang to determine every future state of the universe. If determinism is true, all physical facts of the universe are decided and unchanging. Determinism poses a substantial problem for free will. Say I am choosing between moving my coffee cup or leaving it be. If determinism is true, the physical states of my body, my brain and the coffee cup are all already decided. How then can I choose to move the cup? It seems instead that the choice has been made for me. My brain and body will move following the natural laws’ current. I will move the cup if the laws of the universe require me to do so. While the movement feels voluntary, instead it may simply be a function of deterministic physics, rather than personal choice or free will. This is a frightening possibility. We may feel that our lives are up to us, that we can choose our profession or outfit or partner. However, this challenge from determinism presents the possibility that none of these seeming choices is ours to make. Instead, they were decided at the Big Bang, before we ever existed. Determinism presents a fundamental challenge to the existence of free will. In Why Free Will Is Real, Christian List argues that free will is real despite the possibility of deterministic physics. In fact, determinism is merely one of three challenges that List confronts against free will. Radical materialism, determinism and epiphenomenalism are the three primary objections in the philosophical literature to the existence of […]

Another savage blow to regional media spells disaster for the communities they serve

Kristy Hess Associate Professor (Communication), Deakin University With swift and savage force, the COVID-19 pandemic has inadvertently attacked Australia’s local news media ecology, which was already battling a weakened immune system. As a researcher working on Australia’s largest academic study into the future of local newspapers, the phones have been running hot in recent weeks. We’ve had calls from everyday people, journalists made redundant, cadets surviving on JobKeeper, and independent news proprietors, all navigating their way through the crisis. News Corp has announced plans to close or suspend printing operations of more than 100 suburban and small community titles. Its more successful publications, such as the Geelong Advertiser, Gold Coast Bulletin, Hobart Mercury and the iconic Northern Territory News, will remain with print and digital editions. Other independently-owned newspapers across rural and regional Australia are still breathing: they are gasping for air, but they are breathing. They’ve either temporarily suspended operations, cut back the number of print editions or shifted to a digital-only model to “see how it goes”. Since the COVID-19 crisis emerged, there have been two key funding schemes introduced (or re-introduced) to support news providers – the government’s $50 million Public Interest News Gathering Program and a $5 million Regional and Small Publishers Innovation Fund. The federal government has also announced plans to force Google and Facebook to share advertising revenue with producers of quality journalism in Australia. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is now seeking views on its new draft mandatory code that will address bargaining power imbalances between Australia’s news media businesses, and Google and Facebook. This has been met with some initial concern from the Country Press Association of Australia amid fears the modelling may only benefit big companies and not the little players that serve small towns and cities. The Victorian government has waded in to provide more than $4 million in additional advertising […]

Rebuilding fairly will be a global challenge

Since the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, disaster recovery plans are almost always framed with aspirational plans to “build back better”. It’s a fine sentiment – we all want to build better societies and economies. But, as the Cheshire Cat tells Alice when she is lost, where we ought to go depends very much on where we want to get to. The ambition to build back better therefore needs to be made explicit and transparent as countries slowly re-emerge from their COVID-19 cocoons. The Asian Development Bank attempted last year to define build-back-better aspirations more precisely and concretely. The bank described four criteria: build back safer, build back faster, build back potential and build back fairer. The first three are obvious. We clearly want our economies to recover fast, be safer and be more sustainable into the future. It’s the last objective – fairness – that will inevitably be the most challenging long-term goal at both the national and international level. Economic fallout from the pandemic is already being experienced disproportionately among poorer households, in poorer regions within countries, and in poorer countries in general. Some governments are aware of this and are trying to ameliorate this brewing inequality. At the same time, it is seen as politically unpalatable to engage in redistribution during a global crisis. Most governments are opting for broad-brush policies aimed at everyone, lest they appear to be encouraging class warfare and division or, in the case of New Zealand, electioneering. In fact, politicians’ typical focus on the next election aligns well with the public appetite for a fast recovery. We know that speedier recoveries are more complete, as delays dampen investment and people move away from economically depressed places. Speed is also linked to safety. As we know from other disasters, this recovery cannot be completed as long as the […]

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