Monthly Archives: July 2017

What Trump gave Putin: the only thing he really wanted

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Interesting take on the tete-a-tete from Masha Gessen, who knows more about Putin than is good for anyone:

Mr. Putin has for years — 17 years, to be exact, for this is how long he has been in power — been clear about what he wanted from his relationship with the United States president: He wants to be treated as an equal partner on the world stage and not to be questioned about or pressed on the Russian government’s actions inside Russia or in what he considers his sphere of influence. Despite the friendly tenor of Mr. Putin’s relationship with George W. Bush and the offer of a “reset” made by Barack Obama’s administration, Mr. Putin never achieved his objective — until now. His fourth American president has given him exactly what he wanted: respect, camaraderie and freedom from criticism.

The one accomplishment of the meeting — a limited cease-fire in Syria — is exactly what Mr. Putin wanted. Not the cease-fire, that is: He wanted an acknowledgment that the United States and Russia are equal negotiating parties in the Syrian conflict. He spent years cajoling and then blackmailing the Obama administration into accepting Russia’s decisive role in the Middle East. Now, Mr. Trump has handed him much more than that. He has demonstrated that Russia and the United States can negotiate Syrian life and death without involving any Syrians.

Links for 9/7/2017

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  1. “Emmanuel Macron’s official portrait is a symbolic celebration of centrism”. Clever analysis of the semiotics of Macron’s official portrait — which hangs in every office of the French state. That’s a lot of offices. Very interesting in the way it demonstrates Macron’s astonishing attention to symbolic detail.

  2. By me: “Challenges to Silicon Valley won’t just come from Brussels”. Why the Reality Distortion Field centred on Palo Alto doesn’t get what’s happening in the rest of the world.

  3. Diane Coyle’s Reading List

  4. Memo to Board: spend money on cybersecurity or pay the price. New York Times report on what a cyber attack can do to your profits — and your share price.

  5. Katie Hope, BBC: “Inside the secret and lucrative world of ‘the super tutor'”. Or how to earn between £150 and £1,000 an hour tutoring rich kids so that they can get into private schools. The gig economy on steroids.

DeepMind or DeepMine?

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This morning’s Observer column:

In July 2015, consultants working at the Royal Free hospital trust in London approached DeepMind, a Google-owned artificial intelligence firm that had no previous experience in healthcare, about developing software based on patient data from the trust. Four months later, the health records of 1.6 million identifiable patients were transferred to servers contracted by Google to process the data on behalf of DeepMind. The basic idea was that the company would create an app, called Streams, to help clinicians manage acute kidney injury (AKI), a serious disease that is linked to 40,000 deaths a year in the UK.

The first most people knew about this exciting new partnership was when DeepMind announced the launch of DeepMind Health on 24 February 2016…

Read on

Advice from the Supreme Supreme

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John Roberts, Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, has a kid at Cardigan Mountain School, a post boarding school in New Hampshire. Last month, Roberts have the Commencement Address at his son’s ‘graduation’ from this establishment. His speech is interesting — intriguing, even, because it’s hard to figure out if he’s being ironic or just cynical. Anyway, below is a representative sample. “Other commencement speakers”, he said,

will typically also wish you good luck and extend good wishes to you. I will not do that, and I’ll tell you why. From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. Sorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time so that you don’t take friends for granted. I wish you bad luck, again, from time to time so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either. And when you lose, as you will from time to time, I hope every now and then, your opponent will gloat over your failure. It is a way for you to understand the importance of sportsmanship. I hope you’ll be ignored so you know the importance of listening to others, and I hope you will have just enough pain to learn compassion. Whether I wish these things or not, they’re going to happen. And whether you benefit from them or not will depend upon your ability to see the message in your misfortunes.

Good advice? Maybe.

So why did Trump fawn on Putin in Hamburg?

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Lovely column by Jack Shafer. Sample:

If the mark of a great diplomat is the ability to speak craziness with a straight face, Tillerson earned admittance to the Dips Hall of Fame. A “framework” for cybersecurity cooperation would be set up between the two countries, he promised. This would be like going into the fencing business with the guy who burgled your house. Sounding more like a therapist than the secretary of state, Tillerson said, “We’re unhappy. They’re unhappy,” and explained that salvaging this “really important relationship” meant blotting out the recent unpleasantness. (Take a shot of amnesia and call me in the morning.) Then Tillerson produced a laugh line that topped his previous ones. “The Russians have asked for proof and evidence” of the meddling, he said. Perhaps he should buy Putin a subscription to the Washington Post.

And remember, Tillerson was the smart one representing the United States in the room.

The meeting was a giant exercise in “Don’t Think About Russian Meddling,” restoking speculation on what Putin might have on Trump. Back in the U.S.A., heavy sobbing sounded in the corridors of the deep state, where hankies and terry cloths were filled with tears. The gnashing commenced Thursday when Trump gave one of his rambling, having-it-both-ways speeches in which he concluded that the Russians meddled in our election but also that “nobody really knows” whether they did and besides it could have been “others.” This conflicts with the findings by every tier in the U.S. intelligence establishment, which insists the Russians—and the Russians alone—did it.

The biggest puzzle, of course, is why Trump fawned on Putin at the G-20. In the old days, when he was just a property developer, it might have made sense for him to suck up to Vlad when he was staging a beauty ‘pageant’ in Moscow and looking for Russian cooperation in his business ventures. And, Shafer writes,

As many have noted, he has a natural affinity for strong men bound by nothing more than their own appetites. But the display in Hamburg defies reason. Instead of acting like the leader of the first world, Trump is acting like a job applicant, beveling his words so as not to offend Putin. The same goes for his secretary of state. As the G-20 talks slip into the rear-view mirror, Trump has positioned himself in Putin’s garden as a piece of statuary, perhaps a toad, locked into a perpetual smile in the direction of his master.

Image source

Links for 8/7/2017

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Links for 8/7/2017

  1. Jonathan Penney: “Whose Speech Is Chilled by Surveillance?”. Answer: more people than most of us thought. And women and young people more than most. Intriguing and important research.
  2. New York Times:“As Elites Switch to Texting, Watchdogs Fear Loss of Transparency”. This is interesting, not just because some of those self-same elites want to switch off encryption for the rest of us, but also because it means that financial and other regulation — which depends on being able to subpoena records of corporate correspondence — may be undermined.
  3. Andrew Adonis: “I put up tuition fees. It’s now clear they have to be scrapped.”. Buyer’s remorse from the inventor of the idea.
  4. “Corporate Surveillance in everyday Life”. Useful insight into surveillance capitalism.
  5. Sue Halpern: “How He Used Facebook to Win”. ‘He’ being Trump, of course.

Silicon Valley’s ‘progressives’

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Well, well. The days when the tech guys avoided politics are well and truly over. See, for example, this from Recode:

With the entire House on next year’s ballot — and about one-third of the U.S. Senate up for a vote, too — the stakes are high for those in the Bay Area who seek to erode the GOP’s control of Congress and erect a new bulwark against Trump’s agenda in areas like immigration and climate change.

But some of the region’s most politically active executives — including Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet; and Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX — have contributed generously to Republicans in recent months in a bid to maintain steady relationships with both parties.

At the end of March, for example, Musk chipped in $50,000 to an organization run by House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy that’s meant to boost his GOP allies. Musk also donated roughly $34,000 to the Republican Party’s official arm for electing lawmakers to the chamber, federal records show.

Yet Musk’s support comes despite his public rift with the president.

Initially, the SpaceX and Tesla founder tried to maintain a positive working relationship with Trump, even serving as an adviser to the White House on economic issues. But Musk severed those ties in June, citing Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement — a pact to reduce carbon emissions around the world that Musk and other business leaders had supported. A spokesman for Musk did not immediately respond to emailed questions on Thursday.

Links for 7/7/2017

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  1. Martin Kettle: “Here is Britain’s new place in the world – on the sidelines”

  2. Eric Posner:“Twenty Theses about Twitter”. Spot on.

  3. Reuters:“EU considers record fine as panel checks Google Android case”

  4. “Transparent, explainable, and accountable AI for robotics”. In Science Robotics.

  5. New York Times: “Lasting Damage and a Search for Clues in Cyberattack”

  6. Julia Powles: “Why are we giving away our most sensitive health data to Google?”. Why indeed.

An essential anti-hype kit

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From a terrific LSE blog post by Martin Walker.

He proposes seven ways to identify Fintech technologies that do not deserve the hype. It seems to me that most of his questions apply to information technology generally.

  1. The technology claims to solve a problem that did not exist before and was actually created by the nature of the new technology.
  2. A small part of the functionality of an existing system is implemented using the new technology and is claimed as a great success.
  3. No thought has been given to the costs and complexities of integrating the new technology with existing infrastructure.
  4. The technology is new and original but the creators are incapable of explaining how it would be any better at solving real world problems than existing technology.
  5. The technology would fail to meet legal and regulatory requirements if treated on the same basis as existing technologies.
  6. The advocates of the technology claim you “do not need to understand how it works, you just have to believe that it will change the world”.
  7. Criticism or even just questions are dismissed by referring to adoption/hype cycles that show you are going through a period of negativity before ultimate success.

Great stuff.

Corporate candour and public sector cant

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The UK Information Commissioner has completed her investigation into the deal between Google DeepMind and the Royal Free Hospital Trust which gave the company access to the health records of 1.6m NHS patients. The Commissioner concluded that:

Royal Free NHS Foundation Trust failed to comply with the Data Protection Act when it provided patient details to Google DeepMind.

The Trust provided personal data of around 1.6 million patients as part of a trial to test an alert, diagnosis and detection system for acute kidney injury.

But an ICO investigation found several shortcomings in how the data was handled, including that patients were not adequately informed that their data would be used as part of the test.

The Trust has been asked to commit to changes ensuring it is acting in line with the law by signing an undertaking.

My Cambridge colleague Julia Powles (now at Cornell) and Hal Hodgson of the Economist did a long and thorough investigation of this secret deal (using conventional investigative tools like Freedom of Information requests). This led to the publication of an excellent, peer-reviewed article on “Google DeepMind and healthcare in an age of algorithms”, published in the Springer journal Health and Technology in March. In the period up to and following publication, the authors were subjected to pretty fierce pushback from DeepMind. It was asserted, for example, that their article contained significant factual errors. But requests for information about these supposed ‘errors’ were not granted. As an observer of this corporate behaviour I was struck — and puzzled — by the divergence between DeepMind’s high-minded, holier-than-thou, corporate self-image and its aggressiveness in public controversy. And I wondered if this was a sign that Google iron had entered DeepMind’s soul. (The company was acquired by the search giant in 2014.)

But now all is sweetness and light, apparently. At any rate, DeepMind’s co-founder, Mustafa Suleyman and Dominic King, the Clinical Lead in DeepMind Health, have this morning published a contrite post on the company Blog. “We welcome the ICO’s thoughtful resolution of this case”, they write, “which we hope will guarantee the ongoing safe and legal handling of patient data for Streams [the codename for the collaboration between the company and the NHS Trust]”.

Although today’s findings are about the Royal Free, we need to reflect on our own actions too. In our determination to achieve quick impact when this work started in 2015, we underestimated the complexity of the NHS and of the rules around patient data, as well as the potential fears about a well-known tech company working in health. We were almost exclusively focused on building tools that nurses and doctors wanted, and thought of our work as technology for clinicians rather than something that needed to be accountable to and shaped by patients, the public and the NHS as a whole. We got that wrong, and we need to do better.

This is an intelligent and welcome response. Admitting to mistakes is the surest way to learn. But it’s amazing how few corporations and other organisations do it.

When I first read the draft of Julia’s and Hal’s paper my first thought was that the record of errors they had uncovered was not the product of malign intent, but rather a symptom of what happens when two groups of enthusiasts (consultants in the Royal Free; AI geeks in DeepMind) who were excited by the potential of machine learning in detecting and treating particular diseases. Each group was unduly overawed by the other, and in their determination to get this exciting partnership rolling they ignored (or perhaps were unaware of) the tedious hurdles that one (rightly) has to surmount if one seeks to use patient data for research. And once they had been caught out, defensive corporate instincts took over, preventing an intelligent response to the researchers’ challenge.

Interestingly, there are intimations of this in today’s DeepMind blog post. For example:

“Our initial legal agreement with the Royal Free in 2015 could have been much more detailed about the specific project underway, as well as the rules we had agreed to follow in handling patient information. We and the Royal Free replaced it in 2016 with a far more comprehensive contract … and we’ve signed similarly strong agreements with other NHS Trusts using Streams.”

“We made a mistake in not publicising our work when it first began in 2015, so we’ve proactively announced and published the contracts for our subsequent NHS partnerships.”

“In our initial rush to collaborate with nurses and doctors to create products that addressed clinical need, we didn’t do enough to make patients and the public aware of our work or invite them to challenge and shape our priorities.”

All good stuff. Now let’s see if they deliver on it.

Their NHS partners, however, are much less contrite — even though they are the focus of the Information Commissioner’s report. The Trust’s mealymouthed response says, in part:

“We have co-operated fully with the ICO’s investigation which began in May 2016 and it is helpful to receive some guidance on the issue about how patient information can be processed to test new technology. We also welcome the decision of the Department of Health to publish updated guidance for the wider NHS in the near future.”

This is pure cant. The Trust broke the law. So to say that “we have co-operated fully” and “it is helpful to receive some guidance on the issue about how patient information can be processed” is like a burglar claiming credit for co-operating with the cops and expressing gratitude for their advice on how to break-and-enter legally next time.