16-12-2020 The Asian Independent

12 16-12-2020 to 31-12-2020 NEWS
www.theasianindependent.co.uk
How caste-based labour still
thrives in Indian prisons, plus
nine more weekend reads
In Indian prisons, castebased
labour is not just still
prevalent – it even finds
mention in official manuals,
reports Sukanya Shantha in
The Wire.
“Every Indian is affected,”
writes P Sainath about
the new farm laws that have
sparked protests.
“Translated into English,
the legal-lingo of these laws
also convert the (low-level)
executive into a judiciary.
Into, in fact, judge, jury and
executioner. It also magnifies
the already most unjust
imbalance of power
between farmers and the
giant corporations they will
be dealing with.”
Parth MN speaks to R
Ramakumar in First Post
about the impact that large
corporations might have on small and
marginal farmers.
Abid Hussain and Shruti Menon
break down the report of a European
non-governmental organisation that
claimed to have exposed an Indian
disinformation effort spanning 15
years.
“In India, people can be accused of
being terror operatives on the flimsiest
of charges,” writes Amit Kumar in
Article 14. “A disproportionate number
are Muslim, with many cases built
on paper-thin evidence and police
confessions that are legally inadmissible.”
Also in Article 14, Samrat
Choudhury speaks to journalist
Kishorchandra Wangkhe, who has
been “jailed thrice in the last two
years, charged with sedition twice,
and spent 133 days in prison in preventive
detention under the National
Security Act, all for Facebook posts
critical of the current Manipur government”.
“In the last two years, the
Bharatiya Janata Party government
has liberally used the harsh anti-terror
law, the Unlawful Activities
Prevention Act, against students, academics,
lawyers, writers, and activists
whose only crime seems to be that
they are vocal dissenters of the ruling
dispensation,” writes Priya Ramani in
Bloomberg Quint. “As families wait
endlessly for their loved ones to be
released, they must keep their stories
alive in the public imagination. In
addition to tackling rejected bail
applications, delayed trials, endless
paperwork, and tighter prison rules in
the pandemic, they must also be the
gladiators who ensure that nobody
will forget their loved ones.”
Joel Gunter and Vikas Pandey tell
the story of Waldemar Haffkine who,
working in Paris and India, created
the world’s first vaccines for the
plague and cholera, before an accidental
mass poisoning changed his
life.
“More than just a buzzword, dual
circulation describes the deeply pessimistic
worldview that has settled
over Beijing,” writes James Crabtree.
“Once China’s leaders saw opportunity
in globalization. Now, they expect
the U.S. and its allies to deny China
the technology it needs to build “a
modern socialist country” by midcentury,
meaning a wealthy superpower
fit to rival the U.S.”
An Israeli professor who was head
of the country’s space programme for
30 years has claimed that Israel and
the US have both been dealing with
interplanetary aliens for decades.
Courtesy : Scroll.in
Indian-origin scientist discovers
new way to filter fake news
New York : Using
machine learning
(ML), a team of US
researchers led by
Indian-American
computer scientist
A n s h u m a l i
Shrivastava at Rice
University has discovered
an efficient way
for social media companies
to keep misinformation
from
spreading online.
Their method
applies machine learning in a smarter
way to improve the performance of
Bloom filters, a widely used technique
devised a half-century ago.
Using test databases of fake news
stories and computer viruses,
Shrivastava and statistics graduate student
Zhenwei Dai showed their
Adaptive Learned Bloom Filter (Ada-
BF) required 50 per cent less memory
to achieve the same level of performance
as learned Bloom filters.
To explain their filtering approach,
Shrivastava and Dai cited some data
from Twitter. The social media giant
recently revealed that its users added
about 500 million tweets a day, and
tweets typically appeared online one
second after a user hit send.
"Around the time of the election
they were getting about 10,000 tweets
a second, and with a one-second latency
that's about six tweets per millisecond,"
Shrivastava said.
"If you want to apply a filter that
reads every tweet and flags the ones
with information that's known to be
fake, your flagging mechanism cannot
be slower than six milliseconds or you
will fall behind and never catch up."
If flagged tweets are sent for an
additional, manual review, it's also
vitally important to have a low falsepositive
rate. In other words, you need
to minimize how many genuine tweets
are flagged by mistake. "If your falsepositive
rate is as low as 0.1%, even
then you are mistakenly flagging 10
tweets per second, or more than
800,000 per day, for manual review,"
Shrivastava said. "This is precisely
why most of the traditional AI-only
approaches are prohibitive for controlling
the misinformation."
The new approach to scanning
social media is outlined in a study presented
at the online-only 2020
Conference on Neural Information
Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2020).
Shrivastava said Twitter doesn't
disclose its methods for filtering
tweets, but they are believed to employ
a Bloom filter, a low-memory technique
invented in 1970 for checking to
see if a specific data element, like a
piece of computer code, is part of a
known set of elements, like a database
of known computer viruses.
A Bloom filter is guaranteed to find
all code that matches the database, but
it records some false positives too.
"A Bloom filter allows to you check
tweets very quickly, in a millionth of a
second or less. If it says a tweet is
clean, that it does not match anything
in your database of misinformation,
that's 100% guaranteed," Shrivastava
noted. Within the past three years,
researchers have offered various
schemes for using machine learning to
augment Bloom filters and improve
their efficiency.
"When people use machine learning
models today, they waste a lot of useful
information that's coming from the
machine learning model," Dai said.
Hunger Index Among Poor in 11 States Continues
to Be Dire Post-Lockdown : Survey
As per the report’s findings, 64% of
people said that their consumption of
lentils had gone down and 73% said
their consumption of green vegetables
had reduced in the last two months.
New Delhi: More than five months
after the nationwide COVID-19-
induced lockdown came to an end, the
hunger index among the poor and the
marginalised section of society continues
to be grave in as many as eleven
states, according to a ‘Hunger Watch’
report published this week.
The report, collated by the Right to
Food Campaign along with a number
of similar non-governmental networks,
was based on a survey carried
out on 3,994 persons between
September and October 2020. A
majority of those included in the survey
earned less than Rs 7,000 per
month. The states included in the survey
were Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat,
Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Delhi,
Telangana, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal,
Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh and
Tamil Nadu. While 2,186 persons
were interviewed in rural areas, the
rest were surveyed in urban areas.
Those interviewed mainly belonged to
the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled
Tribes and religious minority communities
including Muslims.
“About 77 per cent of the PVTG
(particularly vulnerable tribal groups)
families, 76 per cent of Dalits, and 54
per cent of the adivasis reported that
their quantity of food consumption
decreased in September-October as
compared to pre-lockdown period,”
the New Indian Express said, quoting
from the report.
“When it came to consumption of
cereals, pulses and vegetables, 53 per
cent reported that their consumption
of rice/wheat had decreased in
September-October and for about one
in four, it has “decreased a lot.”,” the
report said. As per the findings, while
64% people said that their consumption
of lentils had gone down, 73%
said their consumption of green vegetables
had reduced in the last two
months. Protests Rage, Talks Fail, But
Narendra Modi Insists New Laws Will
‘Benefit Farmers’
“About 56 per cent of the respondents
never had to skip meals before
lockdown. In September and October,
27 per cent respondents went to bed
without eating. About one in 20 households
often went to bed without eating,”
the news report said. In Gujarat,
the survey conducted by Anna
Suraksha Adhikar Abhiyan stated that
while 20.6% households sometimes
skipped meals due to lack of food at
home, 28% said that they went to bed
without a meal. According to a report
in the Indian Express, the survey, conducted
in nine districts of the state –
Ahmedabad, Anand, Bharuch,
Bhavnagar, Dahod, Morbi, Narmada,
Panchmahals and Vadodara – also
found that that in Gujarat, many ration
cards have been made “silent”.
“The government has not given
accurate information to the families,
many of whom are from very deprived
communities, as to why their ration
cards cannot be used anymore to claim
their basic entitlements. This process
of making ration cards ‘silent’ has
happened at the local taluka and/or
district level. Additionally, in many
areas, taluka level committee meetings
are not being held due to Covid-19
effectively depriving families their
right to food security.” the report said,
quoting from the findings.
A news report in The Hindu based
on the findings said, “About 71% of
those who were non-vegetarians could
not afford eggs or meat. When quizzed
about their perception of drop in quantity
of food as compared to pre-
COVID 19, nearly 66% or 2/3rd of
people said they were having less than
the quantity they used to eat.” The
report also highlighted discrimination
reported by Dalit and Muslim families
while accessing food.
Based on its survey, the Right to
Food Campaign has demanded a universal
public distribution system that
supplies every household with at least
10 kg grain, 1.5 kg pulses and 800
gram cooking oil till June 2021.
The news report stated the survey
results called “into question the government’s
decision to withdraw free
grains under the Pradhan Mantri Garib
Kalyan Yojana (PMGKY) after
November.” Courtesy : The Wire