Mapping the Berkeley Boom: Social Media and Mapping Help Unravel a Mystery

Last night we heard the Berkeley Boom again.  We’ve been hearing this thunderous boom quite frequently in the last month here in Berkeley, but this one sounded bigger than most.  Car alarms went off on the street.  The dog jumped.  “What IS that?” I wondered aloud.  With a quick search on the internet I found that that the Berkeley Boom is a phenomena whose Twitter reports are being actively mapped.  While Berkeley police and residents still have no idea what the mystery boom is, through the combined powers of social media and mapping we are gathering an understanding of where it is happening.  As Berkeley residents continue reporting the boom (#BerkeleyBoom), perhaps we’ll get to the bottom of this, the newest of Berkeley’s many mysteries. 

For more on the Berkeley Boom see the Berkeleyside article: http://www.berkeleyside.com/2015/03/31/the-unsolved-mystery-of-the-berkeley-boom/

Map from Berkeleyside Article:

Conference at UCB on Digital Privacy and Surveillance - March 6

Pan-Optics: Perspectives on Digital Privacy and Surveillance

March 6, 10:30 a.m.-4 p.m. 310 Sutardja Dai Hall, Banatao Auditorium

bit.ly/pan-optics2014

Featured Speakers: Rebecca MacKinnon, Senior Research Fellow, New America Foundation; Trevor Paglen, Artist, Social Scientist, and Author

Advances in drone aircraft, networked cameras, and recent disclosures about the NSA’s international and domestic surveillance activities have stimulated public protests, outrage from activists, and new policy discussions among elected leaders. This symposium will highlight emerging perspectives on visual privacy and consider the state of the art from a variety of disciplines and professions, including technology, journalism, filmmaking and the arts.

Though traditionally considered separate domains, visual and digital surveillance practices are being combined as machine vision, facial recognition and other technologies become more sophisticated and interoperable. Institutional surveillance by semi-autonomous drones and remote cameras, citizen video monitoring, and incessant photo-sharing and tagging on social networks enable perpetual documentation. The same tools can be used for both transparency and repression.

This symposium will bring together scholars and practitioners from a range of disciplines to discuss privacy protections, surveillance methods, and modes of resistance in a digital age. The program will feature two keynote addresses and two panel discussions that will explore emerging surveillance technologies and applications across a range of contexts, and then turn to resistant strategies employed by individuals and organizations in response.

Registration required: $20 General Admission,  $10 Faculty or Staff,  $5 Students

Berkeley privacy expert and linguist analyze implications of NSA surveillance

Stolen from Berkeley Online (where we read about the bold choice of U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano as the 20th president of the UC), but worth the echo. The massive scale of domestic surveillance conducted by the National Security Administration has stunned many Americans. But Berkeley Law’s Chris Hoofnagle saw it coming. Nearly a decade ago, the lecturer in residence warned of increasingly broad and unchecked monitoring. Meanwhile, Geoffrey Nunberg, linguistics researcher and faculty member at Berkeley’s School of Information, discussed NSA surveillance of Americans’ phone records and Internet activity on National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air with Terry Gross.”

Conference wrap up: DataEdge 2013

The 2nd DataEdge Conference, organized by UC Berkeley’s I School, has wrapped, and it was a doozy. The GIF was a sponsor, and Kevin Koy from the Geospatial Innovation Facility gave a workshop Understanding the Natural World Through Spatial Data. Here are some of my highlights from what was a solid and fascinating 1.5 days. (All presentations are now available online.)

Michael Manoochehri, from Google, gave the workshop Data Just Right: A Practical Introduction to Data Science Skills. This was a terrific and useful interactive talk discussing/asking: who/what is a data scientist? One early definition he offered was a person with 3 groups of skills: statistics, coding or an engineering approach to solving a problem, and communication. He further refined this definition with a list of practical skills for the modern data scientist:

• Short-term skills: Have a working knowledge of R; be proficient in python and JavaScript, for analysis and web interaction; understand SQL; know your way around a unix shell; be familiar with distributed data platforms like Hadoop; understand the Data Pipeline: collection, processing, analysis, visualization, communication.
• Long-term skills: Statistics: understand what k-means clustering is, multiple regression, Baysien inference; and Visualization: both the technical and communication aspects of good viz.
• Finally: Dive into a real data set; and focus on real use cases.

Many other great points were brought up in the discussion: the data storage conundrum in science was one. We are required to make our public data available: where will we store datasets, how will we share them and pay for access of public scientific data in the future?

Kate Crawford, Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research New England gave the keynote address entitled The Raw and the Cooked: The Mythologies of Big Data. She wove together an extremely thoughtful and informative talk about some of our misconceptions about Big Data: the “myths” of her title. She framed the talk by introducing Claude Levi-Strauss’ influential anthropological work “The Raw and the Cooked” - a study of Amerindian mythology that presents myths as a type of speech through which a language and culture could be discovered and learned. You know you are in for a provocative talk in a Big Data conference when the keynote leads with CLS. She then presented a series of 6 myths about Big Data, illustrated simply with a few slides each. Here is a quick summary of the myths:

1. Big Data is new: the term was first used in 1997, but the “pre-history” of Big Data originates much earlier, in 1950s climate science for example, or even earlier. What we have is new tools driving new foci.
2. Big Data is objective: she used the example of post-Sandy tweets, and makes the point that while widespread, these data are a subset of a subset. Muki Haklay makes the same point with his cautionary: “you are mining the outliers” comment (see previous post). She also pointed out that 2013 marks the point in the history of the internet when 51% of web traffic is non-human. Who are you listening to?
3. Big Data won't discriminate: does BD avoid group level prejudice? We all know this, people not only have different access to the internet, but given that your user experience has been framed by your previous use and interaction with the web, the rich and the poor see different internets.
4. Big Data makes cities smart: there are numerous terrific examples of smart cities (even many in the recent news) but resource allocation is not even. When smart phones are used for example to map potholes needing repair, repairs are concentrated in areas where cell phone use is higher: the device becomes a proxy for the need.
5. Big Data is anonymous: Big Data has a Big Privacy problem. We all know this, especially in the health fields. I learned the new term “Health Surrogate Data” which is information about your health that results from your interaction with the Internet. Great stuff for Google Flu Tracker for example, but still worrying. The standard law for protection in the public health field, HIPAA, is similar to “bringing a knife to a gunfight” as she quoted Nicholas Terry.
6. You can opt out: there are currently no clear ways to opt out. She asks: how much would you pay for privacy? And if the technological means to do so were created and made widespread, we would likely see the development of privacy as a luxury good, further differentiating internet experience based on income.

The panel discussion Digital Afterlife: What Happens to Your Data When You Die? moderated by Jess Hemerly from Google, and including Jed Brubaker from UC Irvine and Stephen Wu, a technology and intellectual property attorney was eye-opening and engaging. Each speaker gave a presentation from their expertise: Stephen Wu gave us a primer on digital identity estate planning and Jed Brubaker shared his research on the spaces left in social media when someone dies. Both talks were utterly fascinating, thought provoking and unique.

And finally, Jeffrey Heer from Stanford University gave a stunning and fun talk entitled Visualization and Interactive Data Analysis showcased his Viz work, and introduced to many of us Data Wrangler, which is awesome.

Great conference!

Google is fined for collecting private info with Street View

We're not just taking pictures any more... All over the channels this morning is the $7B fine paid by Google to multiple states for violating public privacy.

From the NYTimes: Google on Tuesday acknowledged to state officials that it had violated people’s privacy during its Street View mapping project when it casually scooped up passwords, e-mail and other personal information from unsuspecting computer users.

Google says "we work hard to get privacy right at Google, but in this case we didn’t, which is why we quickly tightened up our systems to address the issue.” A more sceptical view is found here: Scott Cleland's blog: http://www.precursorblog.com/ (including a Google Privacy Rap Sheet).

The new settlement, which requires Google to set up a privacy program within six months, that includes an annual privacy week event for employees, and training for the public on how to protect themselves.

A great week for radio

What a great week for radio and matters geospatial+web. On Wednesday last week we finished out our GIS class with a talk about the geoweb and issues of access, bias, motivation, control, and of course privacy. I used alot of William Gibson's previous writings about Google (posted here earlier) in that lecture. Yesterday TTBOOK re-aired a great interview with Gibson, on the topic of writing, but also about the internet. I recommend it. Additionally, last week Talk of the Nation had a interesting interview with Jerry Brotton about his new book "A History of the World in Twelve Maps"; the interview touched on Google Earth and representation, why north is up, and many other fantastic questions raised through the history of cartography. Check them out!

Follow up on Supreme Court gps+privacy case

From the NYTimes. Police Are Using Phone Tracking as a Routine Tool. By ERIC LICHTBLAU, Published: March 31, 2012.

Law enforcement tracking of cellphones, once the province mainly of federal agents, has become a powerful and widely used surveillance tool for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight, documents show.

A GPS tracker. The Supreme Court recently ruled that such a device placed on a suspect's car was an unreasonable search.

The Supreme Court recently ruled that such a device placed on a suspect's car was an unreasonable search (but sidestepepd the question of how to treat information gathered from devices installed by the manufacturer and how to treat information held by third parties like cellphone companies). The practice has become big business for cellphone companies, too, with a handful of carriers marketing a catalog of “surveillance fees” to police departments to determine a suspect’s location, trace phone calls and texts or provide other services. Some departments log dozens of traces a month for both emergencies and routine investigations.

With cellphones ubiquitous, the police call phone tracing a valuable weapon in emergencies like child abductions and suicide calls and investigations in drug cases and murders. One police training manual describes cellphones as “the virtual biographer of our daily activities,” providing a hunting ground for learning contacts and travels.

Farm surveillance for subsidy checking: the case in Europe

Europe's farmers receive payments for maintaining basic standards on the environment, food safety, plant health and animal welfare. In this BBC article "spying on Europe’s farms with satellites and drones" Lawrence Peter discusses the use of UAVs in conjunction with satellite imagery to validate and verify farmers' subsidies without having to send inspectors in person. They are not used everywhere: Austria does not use them, on the grounds that the shadows cast by very mountainous terrain sometimes make satellite images inaccurate. And Scotland, unlike the rest of the UK, decided against satellites because of the difficulty of getting enough clear weather for flyovers.

Notes: 

• Agriculture accounted for 42% of the EU's budget in 2011 - about three-quarters of that went on direct payments to farmers, totalling 44bn euros (£37bn; $58bn)
• In each EU country, at least 5% of farms must be inspected every year - and many check more than 5%
• Satellites carried out about 70% of all inspections in 2010
• Growth of satellite monitoring has cut number of infringements
• EU officials say fraud accounts for only a small fraction of the irregularities - in most cases farmers overclaim because of a miscalculation

That was fast! Supreme Court rules on GPS & privacy

From the NYTimes today. The Supreme Court on Monday unanimously ruled that the police violated the Constitution when they placed a Global Positioning System tracking device on a suspect’s car and monitored its movements for 28 days.

But the justices divided 5-to-4 on the rationale for the decision, with the majority saying that the problem was the placement of the device on private property. That ruling avoided many difficult questions, including how to treat information gathered from devices installed by the manufacturer and how to treat information held by third parties like cellphone companies.

Walter Dellinger, a lawyer for the defendant in the case and a former acting United States solicitor general, said the decision “is a signal event in Fourth Amendment history.” “Law enforcement is now on notice,” he said, “that almost any use of G.P.S. electronic surveillance of a citizen’s movement will be legally questionable unless a warrant is obtained in advance.”

Previous wrap-up post on the case.

The evolving privacy debate: Jeffrey Rosen on Fresh Air

Last month in GIS class we had a lively discussion about GIS and privacy. We discussed the idea that while privacy is defined differently in social and legal domains, usually with legal frameworks being a more reactive than prescriptive, at least in the US. But legal and social norms are increasingly shaped by technology: facebook and the like might be pushing the bounds on what is socially acceptable to reveal about yourself, lowering our tolerance for invasions of privacy; smaller GPS make it easier for the police to surveil suspects. Anyway, in a Fresh Air great show, George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen, the co-editor of the new book Constitution 3.0: Freedom and Technological Change, details how technological changes that were unimaginable at the time of the Founding Fathers are challenging our notions of things like personal vs. private space, freedom of speech and our own individual autonomy. It is a fascinating interview:

http://www.npr.org/2011/11/30/142714568/interpreting-the-constitution-in-the-digital-era