13-10-2018

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SCIENCE & TECH SATUrDAY, OcTOBer 13, 2018 5 Tech’s gender bias nothing new Marie Hicks A recent report revealed Amazon's AI recruiting technology developed a bias against women because it was trained predominantly on men's resumes. Although Amazon shut the project down, this kind of mechanized sexism is common and growing - and the problem isn't limited to AI mishaps. Facebook allows the targeting of job ads by gender, resulting in discrimination in online job advertisements for traditionally male-dominated jobs from construction to policing. The practice has long been illegal in traditional print media - but Facebook's targeting tools encourage it. Not only can this affect whether women and non-binary people can see ads; it also affects male job-seekers who are older and therefore viewed as less desirable by many employers. Facebook has come under fire for illegal advertising practices in the past: notably, it scrapped thousands of microtargeting categories after a 2016 ProPublica report showed how it allowed racial discrimination in housing ads. The platform has repeatedly refused to take responsibility for what people do on it, echoing the behavior of other Silicon Valley companies. Gendered and racialized harassment online goes largely unchecked. Likewise, Google's YouTube has come under fire for algorithms that appear to push radicalizing far-right content onto casual viewers, while Google itself has faced accusations that its image search and autocomplete features rely on and strengthen racist and sexist stereotypes. As online platforms strip away civil rights protections intended to correct biases in earlier forms of communication, it serves as an example of the dangerous tendency of our current, and supposedly progressive, technologies to re-create discriminatory patterns of the past. Indeed, these problems fit a pattern in the long trajectory of the history of technology. Today, jobs in computing, if advertised on Facebook, would likely be targeted to men because these jobs are located in an already male-dominated field. In the early days of electronic computing, however, the work was strongly associated with women. It was feminized because it was seen as deskilled and unimportant. This quickly began to change as computers became indispensable in all areas of government and industry. Once it became clear that those who knew how to use them would have great power and influence, female programmers lost out despite having all the requisite skills. Britain's computerization is a cautionary tale: women were repeatedly and progressively denied promotions or boxed out of their jobs, particularly when they married or had children. Top executives of Facebook, Amazon and Alphabets Inc during a meeting at Trump Tower. Photo: Shannon Stapleton When they left, they were replaced by men. This created disastrous labor shortages that ultimately forced Britain's decline as a computing superpower. Women continued to program, but they had to do it without the support of major institutions. One example was the entrepreneur Stephanie "Steve" Shirley, who used a masculine nickname to sidestep sexism. Shirley started a freelance programming company with an explicitly feminist business model after finding herself unable to advance in government and industry. She employed hundreds of other women who had similarly had to leave the workforce. Shirley gave these women an opportunity to use their skills in the service of the nation's economy by giving them the option to work from home, filling some of the gaps left by this exodus of trained computer professionals from full-time computing work. Shirley's business, built on women's labor and expertise, went on to become a multimillion-dollar corporation that did mission-critical programming for government and private industry. As the government scrambled for male computing talent, for instance, a team of her female programmers, led by Ann Moffatt, programmed the black box for the Concorde jet. As Shirley's business flourished, many other companies and even the British government itself suffered for lack of programming talent. The irony is that this shortage had been intentionally engineered by the refusal to continue to employ female technologists in these newly prestigious jobs. Throughout history, when jobs are seen as more important, or are better paid, women are squeezed out - hence the need for protective legislation that ensures equality of opportunity in hiring and job advertisements. In computing today, a field that claims to value diversity, engineers at Facebook and other companies are building tools that rollback the advances of women in the workforce, as the industry undoes the civil rights protections enacted to ensure that what happened in early computing does not happen again. When industries ignore their pasts, they tend not only to repeat previous mistakes, but also to worsen current problems. Silicon Valley's gender problems are well known, and despite companies' claims that they are trying to address the problem, progress has been slow and uneven. This is not surprising when we consider the context. Although the industry is facing a reckoning today, for decades the stories that we told about computing technology focused on inexorable success, rather than taking seriously the possibility that our new technologies were failing us. High technology became virtually synonymous with progress and the greater application of computing to all manner of social problems was seen as a good in and of itself. As a result, we are largely blind to the errors of the past. We fail to see the problems in our present and the reasons behind them because we are too accustomed to seeing computing as a success story. The refusal to talk about computing's failures in the past has not served us, or present-day computing, well. Rather, it has hidden problems that have plagued the field since its inception. Facebook's discriminatory practices towards female users in everything from job advertisements to harassment can be traced back to its predecessor, the beta site set up by Mark Zuckerberg while at Harvard that stole female undergrads' pictures from internal Harvard servers. The site, known as Facemash, objectified the women for an audience invited to rate their relative attractiveness. When we consider Facebook's current problems in this light, they not only seem less surprising but also potentially more solvable. Lessons like this are critical today because high technology has an outsize effect on every aspect of our daily lives, and it is also, in many ways, steadily moving us back towards a past that we thought we had forgotten. Much of the anti-racist and anti-sexist legislation of the 20th century has been invisibly rolled back by tech infrastructures that invite users to see their online actions as unmoored from real life - whether in the realm of hate speech or job advertisements. Strong representation of women in the labor market is key, historically and today, for women to be able to assert their rights in all aspects of their lives. Companies like Facebook cannot be allowed to divide and conquer by gender, race, sexuality, age, disability, or any other number of categories people have fought to protect by law as deserving of equal rights. Weaponized AI enabling perpetual wars A technician checks a server in a data centre. Do DWeb programs use as much energy as cloud-based services? Jack Schofield The main aim of the decentralised web (DWeb) is to remove the power of centralised "gatekeepers" such as Facebook and Google, who hoover up the world's data and monetise it by selling advertising. It reminds me of the original concept of the web, where every computer would be both a client and a server, sharing information on a more or less equal basis. Of course, that is not how real life works. What actually happens is that you get a power law distribution with a few large entities and a long tail of small ones. As Clay Shirky wrote in 2003: "In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution." The web still has plenty of variety, but almost everyone is familiar with one giant search engine, one giant retailer, one giant auction site, one giant social network, one giant encyclopaedia, and so on. Indeed, there is only one giant internet where there used to be dozens of competing networks using many different protocols. Obviously, it would be better if we all agreed these things in advance, based on open standards. However, people vote with their wallets, and competition results in de facto standards instead of de jure ones. Examples include Microsoft Windows, Google Search and Facebook. Each triumphed in a competitive marketplace. I am not saying this is the ideal solution, just that, in most cases, it's inevitable. One of the problems with returning to a decentralised web is that the internet is no longer decentralised. It has been redesigned around giant server farms, high-speed pipes and content delivery networks. It looks increasingly like a broadband television network because that is what it actually does most of the time. Today's web is being optimised for the delivery of Netflix movies, BBC programmes on iPlayer, Spotify music, live streams of every major sporting event, and so on. You can upload your own live streams but communications are asynchronous: your downloads are much faster, and much more reliable, than your uploads. It's really easy to watch 1TB of movies but an exercise in frustration trying to upload a 1TB harddrive backup. If you really want to save energy and internet resources, stop streaming stuff. Broadcast TV and radio can reach tens of millions of people, and adding another million adds relatively little in the way of extra power consumption. There is school of thought that it is better for the environment to use CDs or DVDs for albums or films you go back to again and again, or you could at least use digital files stored on your PC or smartphone. Photo: Juice Images And rather than using Graphite to replace Google Docs or Microsoft Office, just use a word processor offline. If you run Windows, you already have a text editor (Notepad) and a simple word processor (WordPad), and there are plenty of free alternatives. That will reduce global energy use and increase your privacy. It's really simple. If you don't want Google to read your documents, don't write your documents on Google's computers. And if you don't want cloud servers using energy, don't use the cloud. Companies such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft and Google are covering the world with server farms to make information more easily available. That's harder to do with real distributed systems because the thousands or millions of separate computers may be turned off or otherwise unavailable when you need the data they are storing. Worse, unless it's replicated, you could lose data. It's true that server farms consume an ever-growing amount of electricity, much of it used for cooling purposes. However, the cost is a powerful incentive for operators to use cheaper renewables, such as solar panels, and to reduce their power consumption in other ways. For example, Facebook has built a data centre in the north of Sweden where the air is freezing cold, while Microsoft is experimenting with underwater data centres that are easier to cool. Microsoft is also sponsoring tree planting in Ireland as part of its commitment to becoming carbon neutral. Ben Tarnoff Last month marked the 17th anniversary of 9/11. With it came a new milestone: we've been in Afghanistan for so long that someone born after the attacks is now old enough to go fight there. They can also serve in the six other places where we're officially at war, not to mention the 133 countries where special operations forces have conducted missions in just the first half of 2018. The wars of 9/11 continue, with no end in sight. Now, the Pentagon is investing heavily in technologies that will intensify them. By embracing the latest tools that the tech industry has to offer, the US military is creating a more automated form of warfare - one that will greatly increase its capacity to wage war everywhere forever. On Friday, the defense department closes the bidding period for one of the biggest technology contracts in its history: the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (Jedi). Jedi is an ambitious project to build a cloud computing system that serves US forces all over the world, from analysts behind a desk in Virginia to soldiers on patrol in Niger. The contract is worth as much as $10bn over 10 years, which is why big tech companies are fighting hard to win it. (Not Google, however, where a pressure campaign by workers forced management to drop out of the running.) At first glance, Jedi might look like just another IT modernization project. Government IT tends to run a fair distance behind Silicon Valley, even in a place as lavishly funded as the Pentagon. With some 3.4 million users and 4 million devices, the defense department's digital footprint is immense. Moving even a portion of its workloads to a cloud provider such as Amazon will no doubt improve efficiency. But the real force driving Jedi is the desire to weaponize AI - what the defense department has begun calling "algorithmic warfare". By pooling the military's data into a modern cloud platform, and using the machinelearning services that such platforms provide to analyze that data, Jedi will help the Pentagon realize its AI ambitions. The scale of those ambitions has grown increasingly clear in recent months. In June, the Pentagon established the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), which will oversee the roughly 600 AI projects currently under way across the department at a planned cost of $1.7bn. And in September, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), the Pentagon's storied R&D wing, announced it would be investing up to $2bn over the next five years into AI weapons research. So far, the reporting on the Pentagon's AI spending spree has largely focused on the prospect of autonomous weapons - Terminator-style killer robots that mow people down without any input from a human operator. This is indeed a frightening near-future scenario, and a global ban on autonomous weaponry of the kind sought by the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is absolutely essential. But AI has already begun rewiring warfare, even if it hasn't (yet) taken the form of literal Terminators. There are less cinematic but equally scary ways to weaponize AI. You don't need algorithms pulling the trigger for algorithms to play an extremely dangerous role. To understand that role, it helps to understand the particular difficulties posed by the forever war. The killing itself isn't particularly difficult. With a military budget larger than that of China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, France, Britain and Japan combined, and some 800 bases around the world, the US has an abundance of firepower and an unparalleled ability to deploy that firepower anywhere on the planet. The US military knows how to kill. The harder part is figuring out whom to kill. In a more traditional war, you simply kill the enemy. But who is the enemy in a conflict with no national boundaries, no fixed battlefields, and no conventional adversaries? This is the perennial question of the forever war. It is also a key feature of its design. The vagueness of the enemy is what has enabled the conflict to continue for nearly two decades and to expand to more than 70 countries - a boon to the contractors, bureaucrats and politicians who make their living from US militarism. If war is a racket, in the words of marine legend Smedley Butler, the forever war is one the longest cons yet. Automation has greatly increased US Military's capacity to wage war everywhere forever. Photo: Getty
NATIONAL SATURDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2018 6 Narsingdi Police Super Saifullah Al Mamun (BPM, PPM) as the chief guest addressed a discussion and a view exchange meeting regarding law and order during the upcoming Durga puja at Madhabdi Ramani community center on Thursday. Photo: Md Selim Miah Meeting on security during Durga puja held in Madhabdi Police Super assure security for 173 puja mandaps in Jhalakathi MANIK ROY, JHALAKATHI CORRESPONDENT: Jhalakathi Police Super Md Jubayedur Rahman assured to take sufficient security measures to avert any untoward incident during the Durga Puja, the largest religious festival of Hindu community. He gave the assurance while chairing a view exchange meeting with the district Puja Udjapan Committee at his office on Thursday. At the meeting, District Police Additional SP Circle MM Mahmud Hasan, Rajapur SP Circle Mofazzel Hossain Reza, Sadar SP Circle Officer-in-charge of 4 Upazilas including Hafizur Rahman, General Secretary of District Puja Udjapan Committee Tarun Karmakar and President of Upazila Puja Udjapan Committee Dilip Kumar Haldar were also present. The Police Super provided advisory instructions to Puja Committee members to celebrate Puja in collaboration with everyone in peaceful environment. He said that police and Ansar VDP members will be deployed in large numbers in every mandaps. Preparation taken to celebrate Durga puja in Netrakona NETRAKONA: Local administration has taken various steps here so that the Hindu community can celebrate Durga puja, their largest religious festival, with due religious fervor and festivity, reports BSS. A total of 486 puja mandaps have been set up in 10 upazilas of the district, said leaders of district puja celebration committee (DPCC). While visiting different areas of the district, this correspondent found that artisans are passing their busy times in the puja mandaps to erect the images of the Goddess Durga and give final touches to make the images beautiful and eye-catching. Executive committee member of Bangladesh Puja Celebration Committee Kashob Ranjan Sarker said they are taking all-out arrangement to ensure proper facilities for the devotees across the district during the Durga puja festival. Durga puja will begin on October 15 and will end on October 19 with emersion of the idols of Goddess Durga in different water-bodies. Superintendent of police of Netrakona Joydeb Chowdhory said a three-tire security measure will be taken in and around all the puja mandaps here for ensuring peaceful celebration of Durga puja. MD SELIM MIAH, NARSINGDI CORRESPONDENT: Narsingdi district police organized a discussion and a view exchange meeting regarding law and order during the upcoming Durga puja at Madhabdi Ramani community center on Thursday. Narsingdi Sadar Circle Additional Police Super Md Shahriar Alam presided over the function while Narsingdi Police Super Saifullah Al Mamun (BPM, PPM) was present as the chief guest at the occasion. Among others, Narsingdi Additional Police Super (Administration) Zakir Hasan, Mayor of Madhabdi Municipality Haji Mohammad Mosharraf Hossain Prodhan Manik, Narsingdi Sadar Upazila Awami League President Alhaj Sofor Ali Bhuiyan, General Secretary Alhaj Aftab Uddin Bhuiyan, Madhabdi City Awami League President Alhaj Salahuddin Ahmed, president and general secretary of various puja mandaps of Madhabdi thana area, Awami League activists, social workers, businessmen and prominent people of the area were also present at the occasion. Police in a drive arrested a terrorist along with arms and ammunition during from the deep forest in Maheshkhali on Wednesday. Photo: Sarwar Kamal Terrorist held with arms, ammo in Maheshkhali SARWAR KAMAL, MAHESHKHALI CORRESPONDENT: Terrorist Yunus was arrested along with arms and ammunition during an operation in the deep forest in Maheshkhali. On 10 October, according to a secret information police conducted raids in the forest area of the village of Puyichara under Hoanak union. Yunus was arrested along with two acne local guns, 1 localized LG and 10 rounds of fresh cartridge. Md. Yunus is the son of Lal Mohammad Fakir of Purv Puichchhra area. The operation was conducted under the leadership of SI Raju Ahmad Gazi. Police fired 20 rounds of bullets to prevent counter attack from the terrorist who also open fired at the police. Jhalakathi Police Super Md Jubayedur Rahman addressed a view exchange meeting with the district Puja Udjapan Committee at his office on Thursday. Photo: Manik Roy Treatment support for mentally sick people stressed RAJSHAHI: Optimum treatment and necessary healthcare facilities for the mentally sick people are very vital to facilitate them to get back their normal life, reports BSS. Collective effort is urgently needed as all the mental diseases excepting the schizophrenia are curable. Social awareness alongside a positive attitude toward the patients is very crucial for their early recovery from mental sickness. The observation came at a discussion titled "Mental Health for Youth in Changing World" at the conference hall of Civil Surgeon Office in Rajshahi city on Wednesday. Civil Surgeon Office organized the discussion in association with Non-communicable Disease Control Programme of Directorate of Health Services to mark the World Mental Health 2018. Civil Surgeon Dr Sanjit Kumar Shaha, Deputy Civil Surgeon Dr Enamul Haque and BRAC district representative Jahedul Islam addressed the discussion disseminating their expertise on the issue. During his keynote presentation, Dr Sheikh Abu Hena Mostofa Alim, Associate Professor of Department of Psychiatry in Rajshahi Medical College Hospital, said mental illnesses are an under-recognized public health problem in Bangladesh. "Awareness about mental illness and acceptance of treatment are very low due to social stigma and superstition," he said adding psychosocial care of mentally sick and disaster affected people constitute a major challenge for the health and the social welfare systems of the country. Taking advantages of the situation, Dr Mostofa Alim said some quacks and opportunist groups have been working as money-makers through exploiting the patients. Rajbari District Motor Workers Union holds human chain AKTERUZZAMAN MRIDHA, GOALANDA CORRESPONDENT: Members of Rajbari District Motor Workers Union (Reg. No. 1727) on Thursday formed a human chain demanding revision of the Transport Act-2018 in bus stand area of Goalanda on Daulatdia-Khulna highway. Rajbari District Motor Workers Union president Md. Shahid Mollah presided over the human chain as part of the program announced by the central committee of Bangladesh Road Transport Workers Federation demanded amendment of some of the laws of the Road Transport Act-2011 as part of the program announced by the central committee of Bangladesh Road Transport Workers Federation. Among others, general secretary Md. Islam Mollah, Vice-president of the organization Md. Halim Sheikh, Shahin Mia, co-general secretary Mubarak Munshi, Sahidul Islam, organizing secretary Shaheed Sekh, publicity secretary Habibur Rahman, Road Transport Secretary Babul Bepari, Ershad Mollah, Pramanik and Bablu Sheikh were also present at the occasion. Kishoreganj District Motor Workers Union on Thursday arranged a human chain in front of Kali Bari demanding revision of the Transport Act-2018. Kishoreganj District Motor Workers Union President Md Habibur Rahman and General Secretary ABM Sirajul Islam were present at the occasion. Photo: SM Sarowar Jahan Efficient banking necessary for boosting rural economy RAJSHAHI: The Senior bankers of Rajshahi Krishi Unnayan Bank (RAKUB) have asked their branch level subordinates to perform honestly to turn the institution into a hub for helping farmers in the north and enable it to contribute to the national economy, reports BSS. They asked the branch managers and other field workers to infuse dynamism into its farmers-level lending activities for boosting agricultural production to meet up the gradually increasing food demand. They added the credit programmes of the bank should be need-oriented and emphasis should be given on reaching banking services to the doorstep of the farmers. They were addressing a daylong performance review meeting of 58 branch managers under Bogra North and South Zones and Sirajgonj district of the bank held at conference hall of Rural Development Academy yesterday, a RUKUB press release here said today. RAKUB Chairman Nazrul Islam and Managing Director Kazi Alamgir addressed the meeting as chief and special guests with General Manager Khazamuddin Talukder in the chair. Zonal Managers Abdul Khaleque, Abdus Salam and Mahmudul Alam and Zonal Audit Officers Abdul Alim, Rafiqul Islam and Helal Uddin also spoke. The speakers underscored on bringing all the existing potential sectors and sub-sectors of agriculture and its processing under qualitative and quantitative financing for making the country's northwest region economically vibrant. They termed the branch managers and field staffs as the vital force for transforming the bank into a profitable organisation and asked them to perform their duties with utmost sincerity and honesty to attain the cherished goal. Rajbari District Motor Workers Union on Thursday formed a human chain demanding revision of the Transport Act-2018 in bus stand area of Goalanda on Daulatdia-Khulna highway. Photo: Akteruzzaman Mridha
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