These are two of the leading experts in disinformation studies in Malaysia and I am now half-jokingly looking for a co-author:

For context, Adham Baba, objectively the most useless health minister Malaysia has ever had, has a whole subsection on his Wikipedia page from all of his COVID-19 misinformation and lies since his illegitimate appointment last year, including claiming he participated in a WHO video conference with “over 500 countries.”

Related, former editor of the British Medical Journal, Richard Smith, argues that with about 20 per cent of medical trials being “fatally flawed” or “untrustworthy,” and so few retracted, it’s time to assume health research is fraudulent—until proven otherwise.

And for our interview segment, I speak with a former colleague, BFM’s radio producer and social commentator, Haniff Baharudin (no relation to last week’s guest) about intellectual discourse in the Malay language. You can find the full transcript at the link below. But first, a selection of top stories on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.

Disinformation is coming for your business

“Disinformation, like ransomware, is becoming a business unto itself, spawning the creation of agencies who specialise in creating and spreading false message,” writes Ina Fried for Axios.

The argument over content moderation is ‘missing context’

Harrison Mantas for Poynter:

IFCN advisory board member Peter Cunliffe-Jones, along with fellow researchers Alan Finlay and Anya Schiffrin, found in a study of anti-misinformation laws in Africa that rules meant to curb demonstrably false speech wound up stifling all speech. The study found most of these laws aimed to punish false speech as opposed to correcting it, and this punitive approach did not have a demonstrable impact on reducing falsehoods.

The piece also quotes Charlie Warzel’s column in his newsletter Galaxy Brain, where he argues that this dichotomy between free expression and fighting falsehoods misses the point. You can read that here.

Meanwhile, on Monday Note, Frederic Filloux criticises European regulation of Big Tech as “primarily political—efficiency is secondary.”

The YouTubers who blew the whistle on an anti-vax plot

Charlie Haynes and Flora Carmichael for BBC:

"It started with an email" says Mirko Drotschmann, a German YouTuber and journalist.

Mirko normally ignores offers from brands asking him to advertise their products to his more than 1.5 million subscribers. But the sponsorship offer he received in May this year was unlike any other.

An influencer marketing agency called Fazze offered to pay him to promote what it said was leaked information that suggested the death rate among people who had the Pfizer vaccine was almost three times that of the AstraZeneca jab.

Not shocked.

What I read, watch and listen to…

* I’m reading Jack Malik’s opinion piece on JendelaDBP on understanding language and critiques (in Malay).

* I’m watching the Olympic Games. Specifically: badminton, football, handball, rugby, volleyball and weightlifting. Tell me what you’re watching!

* I’m listening to a five-part special on the Pegasus Project on The Guardian’s Today in Focus.

Chart of the week

A poll by Angus Reid Institute suggests half of vaccinated Canadians (n=1,565) are unlikely to hang out with those who are unvaccinated. Same, tbh.

The Sidelines

Transcript for audio segment available here.

The Starting Block is a weekly collection of notes on science and society with an emphasis on data, democracy, and disinformation. Read the archives. Find me on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. Send questions, corrections and suggestions to tinacarmillia@substack.com.

Facebook plans to lure creators with a $1 billion programme. In comparison, YouTube has a $100 million fund for YouTube Shorts, and TikTok has a $200 million creator fund. TikTok also surpassed 3 billion global downloads this week—the first non-Facebook app to do so. The only other apps to have reached that milestone are Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and Messenger. It’s a good time to be a creator, huh?

And for our interview segment, I speak with Sheena Baharudin, poet and assistant professor of literature at the University of Nottingham Malaysia about being a multilingual, multimedia creator. You can find the full transcript at the link below. But first, a selection of top stories on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.

Right-wing extremism has deep roots in Southeast Asia

Munira Mustaffa for Global Network on Extremism & Technology:

The idea that neo-Nazi thoughts, white-supremacist politics and red pill victimhood have been adopted by Asian youths who are active online users unbounded by geographical borders but are neither white nor Aryan themselves can be mystifying to outsiders. After all, the concept of neo-Nazism lies in the assertion that the white race, or the Aryan race, reigns supreme in the racial hierarchy. But these ideas are easily adaptable into local context, and the Internet has made them easier than ever for the latent fascist to access. 

If anyone needs a primer on right-wing extremism in Southeast Asia, this is it. Fascinating piece with great hyperlinks. You might remember the writer from our conversation on online deception.

A new tool shows how Google results vary around the world

Tom Simonite for Wired:

Search Atlas makes it easy to see how Google offers different responses to the same query on versions of its search engine offered in different parts of the world. The research project reveals how Google’s service can reflect or amplify cultural differences or government preferences—such as whether Beijing’s Tiananmen Square should be seen first as a sunny tourist attraction or the site of a lethal military crackdown on protesters.

Divergent results like that show how the idea of search engines as neutral is a myth, says Rodrigo Ochigame, a PhD student in science, technology, and society at MIT and cocreator of Search Atlas.

The ethics of a deepfake Anthony Bourdain voice

“The new documentary Roadrunner uses AI-generated audio without disclosing it to viewers,” writes Helen Rosner for The New Yorker:

A common refrain on Twitter in recent days has been that Anthony Bourdain would surely have hated the use of his A.I.-generated voice. He is often considered a champion of “authenticity,” and some fans have criticized the technology as antithetical to that standard. But authenticity is a slippery concept, especially in the world of food and travel—something that Bourdain himself knew.

What I read, watch and listen to…

* I’m reading Concern trolls and power grabs: Inside Big Tech’s angry, geeky, often petty war for your privacy, a longform on the tension inside W3C by Issie Lapowsky for Protocol.

* I’m playing Fakes? No thanks! from the Polish fact-checking organisation Demagog.pl, which developed an English version of its media literacy game.

Chart of the week

Completely unplanned yet very much fitting with the theme of this week’s newsletter that another Malaysian poet sent this to me, knowing my love for charts:

The Sidelines

Transcript for audio segment available here.

The Starting Block is a weekly collection of notes on science and society with an emphasis on data, democracy, and disinformation. Read the archives. Find me on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. Send questions, corrections and suggestions to tinacarmillia@substack.com.

The theme is how misinformation travels within diasporas and non-English communities.

And for our interview segment, I speak with Clarissa Lee, an art-science creator and researcher at Universiti Malaya and fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, for a sneak peek into her research on Internet trolling and Malay social media. But first, a selection of top stories on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.

Facebook’s failure to pay attention to non-English languages is allowing hate speech to flourish

Fiona R. Martin and Aim Sinpeng investigate “hate speech on LGBTQI+ community pages in five Asian countries: India, Myanmar, Indonesia, the Philippines and Australia” and summarise the report for The Conversation:

We concluded that Facebook’s problem is not in defining hate, but being unable to identify certain types of hate, such as that posted in minority languages and regional dialects. It also often fails to respond appropriately to user reports of hate content.

Media reports have shown Facebook struggles to automatically identify hate posted in minority languages. It has failed to provide training materials to its own moderators in local languages, even though many are from Asia Pacific countries where English is not the first language.

Going undercover to infiltrate Chinese-American far-right networks

Zhaoyin Feng for BBC:

The collaboration between former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and Chinese exiled businessman Guo Wengui is a case in point. The duo has been involved in a sprawling digital network that disseminates misinformation about election frauds, coronavirus vaccines and QAnon narratives on multiple social media platforms. 

Chinese immigrants often consume news bypassing traditional media gatekeepers, according to non-profit organisation First Draft.

Due to language barriers and news habits, many in the Chinese diaspora tend to read news in closed or semi-closed social media spaces. As there is already an existing trust among participants, the subscribers treat the information with less scrutiny, giving rise to “misinformation echo chambers”.

Related, Kerry Allen and Sophie Williams for BBC: The foreigners on China’s disinformation drive.

Navigating challenges, realising opportunities of digital transformation

Khazanah Research Institute released a compilation of papers on Malaysia’s digital policies from September 2020 to April 2021 last month. Chapters of interest (to me) are six through eight, on personal data privacy, digital governance of information disorder and AI in the courts.

Meanwhile, the Global Disinformation Index and Centre for Independent Journalism Malaysia put the country’s 31 most visited news sites in English, Malay and Mandarin through a disinformation risk assessment and report that they lack operational checks and balances, particularly for “policies regarding financial transparency, editorial independence, and journalistic accountability, which are considered criticalfor mitigating disinformation risk.”

What I read, watch and listen to…

* I’m reading Wendy Mesley Is Not The Problem, Says Wendy Mesley, by Stacy Lee Kong on Friday Things.

* I’m watching How to Become a Tyrant on Netflix.

* I’m listening to Journalism.co.uk podcast host Jacob Granger speak The New Humanitarian CEO Heba Aly discuss reshaping coverage of the Global South.

Chart of the week

The simplified version of the Guo media network, mentioned in the second story above from Graphika’s report, Ants in a Web. The network produces and amplifies “mis- and disinformation, including claims of voter fraud in the U.S., false information about Covid-19, and QAnon narratives.”

The Sidelines

Transcript for audio segment available here.

The Starting Block is a weekly collection of notes on science and society with an emphasis on data, democracy, and disinformation. Read the archives. Find me on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. Send questions, corrections and suggestions to tinacarmillia@substack.com.

Instagram is no longer a photo app, Facebook is no longer… whatever it was. Actually, wait. Facebook still is whatever it was: An idea stealer. 🙃 In a response to the growing popularity of newsletters thanks to Substack, Facebook launched Bulletin and recruited high profilers like Malcolm Gladwell and Mitch Albom to launch publications. Facebook also recently launched Live Audio Rooms as its Clubhouse competitor. Meanwhile head of Instagram Adam Mosseri said that “TikTok is huge, YouTube is even bigger” so it’s time for Instagram to focus on creators, videos, shopping and messaging. Please believe that this whole paragraph was written with a straight face.

And for our interview segment, the second part of my conversation with content creator Emmanuel Olalere about creating better, more meaningful social media interactions. You can find the full transcript at the link below. But first, a selection of top stories on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.

The influencer who lied about having cancer

When this story about Belle Gibson’s cancer con broke, I also did a small coverage about it. By 2017, it served as the basis of my press fellowship application at Wolfson College. My premise was simple: It’s 2016 and everyone was now talking about ‘fake news’ but misinformation around health and science has been around before Donald Trump made up that buzzword. Health, science and environmental journalists have been dealing with anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, and flat earthers for a much, much longer time. So let’s explore the history and psychology behind misinformation in science news, and study the business models of Big Tech companies that enabled the mainstreaming of misinformation in science news.

My proposal was accepted, I deferred my fellowship to 2019 because of the 2018 Malaysian general election but continued to work on the research between those years, and… that’s a short history of how I got here. But check out the documentary on BBC Three if you can. I haven’t seen it, but I think it would be a good watch.

Related, Ushar Daniele for SCMP: Malaysia’s influencers cash in on health and beauty boom as critics cry ‘pseudoscience’.

Why some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity

Shirin Ghaffary for Vox:

Social media has drastically restructured the way we communicate in an incredibly short period of time. We can discover, “Like,” click on, and share information faster than ever before, guided by algorithms most of us don’t quite understand.

And while some social scientists, journalists, and activists have been raising concerns about how this is affecting our democracy, mental health, and relationships, we haven’t seen biologists and ecologists weighing in as much.

That’s changed with a new paper published in the prestigious science journal PNAS earlier this month, titled “Stewardship of global collective behavior.”

Carl Bergstrom is a co-author of the paper, by the way. Remember him, the guy who co-developed the infamous course, Calling B******t?

The battle against online misinformation in Asia

Opinion piece by Asia Internet Coalition’s managing editor Jeff Paine for Thomson Reuters Foundation News:

Digital education must be built into the school curriculum from the earliest years and become as commonplace in the classroom as math or science. Stakeholders should also work together to develop targeted programs for more vulnerable groups such as the elderly, and communities that are coming online for the first time.

Similarly, supporting independent journalists and fact-checkers ensures that citizens have access to important context and counter narratives to enable them to make informed decisions about what to read and trust online. Funding and training for journalists should be part of a whole-of-society response.

What I read, watch and listen to…

* I’m reading All The Right Words On Climate Have Already Been Said by Sarah Miller. It’s time for the right weapons, she said.

* I’m watching Jordan Harrod’s video essay on whether blockchain can improve machine learning privacy.

* I’m listening to Body Stuff by Dr. Jen Gunter on how much water do you actually need because “it seems unlikely that our ancestors carried giant water bottles around with them at all times.” Transcript is available, for skimmers.

Chart of the week

From the World Economic Forum’s report, Advancing Digital Safety: A Framework to Align Global Action:

The Sidelines

Transcript for audio segment available here.

The Starting Block is a weekly collection of notes on science and society with an emphasis on data, democracy, and disinformation. Read the archives. Find me on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. Send questions, corrections and suggestions to tinacarmillia@substack.com.

We are reminded about how we normalise omitting fact-checks and verifications especially when it comes to feel-good stories:

And for our interview segment, I speak with tech and lifestyle-focused content creator Emmanuel Olalere as he mulls over online privacy and digital wills, and describes how the MySejahtera app is symbolic of Malaysia’s current sociopolitics, the same way Nigeria’s Ghana Must Go bag is symbolic of the country’s descent into dysfunction in the 80s. You can find the full transcript at the link below.

But first, a selection of top stories on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.

Whose democracy counts when global social media rules are set?

“What works for the United States may not work elsewhere,” writes Heidi Tworek for CIGI:

Instead of talking about democracy as an abstract, ill-defined ideal, we can examine different definitions of democracy and consider the role of social media in each. By breaking down the components of democracy, we can piece together a more complete picture of how platform governance might address each issue. Perhaps even more crucially, we can follow a global thread to see how solutions that might seem to work in one democracy may prove harmful or extremely complicated in another.

How Reddit turned its millions of users into a content moderation army

Joel Khalil on Reddit’s multi-layered self-policing approach, for TechRadar:

Unlike Facebook, for example, which outsources much of the work to moderation farms, Reddit relies in large part on its communities (or subreddits) to self-police. The efforts of volunteer moderators are guided by rules defined by each individual subreddit, but also a set of values authored and enforced by Reddit itself.

Twitter hired biggest tech critics to build ethical AI

Anna Kramer on Twitter’s recent hiring spree of ethical AI superstars, for Protocol:

These hires are a massive coup for a social media platform desperate to escape the waves of vitriol and criticism enveloping Google and Facebook’s work around algorithms, machine learning and artificial intelligence. While Google was forcing out prominent AI ethicists and researchers Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell and Facebook was trying and failing to persuade politicians and researchers that it did not have the power to manipulate the way algorithms amplified misinformation, Twitter was giving [Ari] Font and Jutta Williams … the resources and leeway to hire a team of people who could actually act on Twitter’s promise to listen to its researchers.

And they all happen to be women—though, we are not surprised (John Naughton, The Guardian).

What I read, watch and listen to…

* I’m reading The Making of a Perfect Celebrity Apology by Hunter Harris for Vice.

* I’m watching Al-Jazeera’s piece on deepfakes, by Sandra Gathmann.

* I’m making a temperature sensor to alert me when it’s too cold for my tropical plants to stay outside.

Chart of the week

The Global Disinformation Index looked at U.S. readers’ perception of a news outlets disinformation risks, which was released in a report this month:

The Sidelines

Transcript for audio segment available here.

The Starting Block is a weekly collection of notes on science and society with an emphasis on data, democracy, and disinformation. Read the archives. Find me on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. Send questions, corrections and suggestions to tinacarmillia@substack.com.

I updated the checklist for fact-checking master post with some open-source tools for fact-checking and verification. Next week, I will be adding another section on some sensible steps to improve online privacy.

And for our interview segment, I speak with Tan Su Lin, co-founder of Science Media Centre Malaysia about the tiny, fragmented science communication community in Malaysia and how her organisation is improving the language around science in the media. You can find the full transcript at the link below. But first, a selection of top stories on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.

Reporting on scientific failures and holding the science community accountable

The Journalist’s Resource’s Denise-Marie Ordway speaks with the authors of a paper that showed that negative news coverage of science without adequate context can erode public trust:

Advancing knowledge takes lots of trial and error. Also, scientists continually check, critique and try to replicate one another’s work, which means they are bound to run across mistakes and other shortcomings on occasion. As scientists build knowledge, they correct those issues and make other changes in response to new information, including new research findings, theories and data.

[…]

The bottom line: Trust science — the scientific process and scientific consensus — over individual scientists.

Whatsapp fuels surge of fake news in India

Katharina Buchholz for Statista:

A scientific study carried out by doctors from Rochester, New York, and Pune, India, and published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Medical Internet Research … found that around 30% of Indians used WhatsApp for COVID-19 information, and just about as many fact-checked less than 50% of messages before forwarding them. 13% of respondents even said that they never fact-checked messages before forwarding on WhatsApp.

Surprised? No.

AI-generated fake reports fool experts

Researchers Priyanka Ranade, Anupam Joshi and Tim Finin for The Conversation, taken in part:

To illustrate how serious this is, we fine-tuned the GPT-2 transformer model on open online sources discussing cybersecurity vulnerabilities and attack information. We then seeded the model with the sentence or phrase of an actual cyberthreat intelligence sample and had it generate the rest of the threat description. We presented this generated description to cyberthreat hunters, who sift through lots of information about cybersecurity threats.

The cybersecurity misinformation examples we generated were able to fool cyberthreat hunters, who are knowledgeable about all kinds of cybersecurity attacks and vulnerabilities. 

Unlike other stories I share, I did not fact-check this because I secretly (now, openly) hope that this article was, in fact, AI-generated. Maybe if you use the tools and techniques from the master post above, you can tell me if it’s real.

What I read, watch and listen to…

* I’m reading Christopher Cheung’s opinion piece for Toronto Star about how journalism has become a poor reflection of the world.

* I’m watching Khadija Mbowe’s video essay on algorithms and colourism, and being dark on Breadtube.

* I’m listening to When AI Becomes Child's Play, a podcast episode from In Machines We Trust that explores the relationship AI has with kids.

* I’m making nasi impit.

Chart of the week

The most beautiful figure on the Internet comes from the essay, Between Golem and God: The Future of AI by Ali Minai:

The Sidelines

Transcript for audio segment available here.

The Starting Block is a weekly collection of notes on science and society with an emphasis on data, democracy, and disinformation. Read the archives. Find me on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. Send questions, corrections and suggestions to tinacarmillia@substack.com.

…I am encouraging newsletter engagement. As this one grows, I ask if you could tell me more about your interest in the subjects I work on. And, what do you do for work? What do you do for fun? What would you like to do for the first time?

In any case, I would also like to share some of my favourite newsletters, to which I’m subscribed, in case you have an appetite for more. Find the list here. Let me know your favourites too or if you think the newsletter sub-culture is starting to feel like a cult. Just hit ‘Reply’ and I will receive your response directly in my inbox.

And for our interview segment, it’s the second half of my conversation with filmmaker Ineza Roussille, as she turns the table on me to find out more about online moderation, getting our cats’ consent, and finding the Big Bad of the Internet. You can find the full transcript at the link below. But first, a selection of top stories on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.

The Internet is flat

So says Charlie Warzel in Galaxy Brain:

Many of the current conversations about power and accountability are conversations we desperately need to have. Now, I’m not all that hopeful that many of the stakeholders are willing to have them — many would rather just flatten the complexities themselves into a vague ‘cancel culture.’ But, even in an ideal world of good faith participation, we don’t really have productive spaces to have such discussions. The world isn’t flat but the world wide web is — and three-dimensional human beings can’t thrive in a one-dimensional space.

Is the government picking the wrong place to start regulating algorithms?

“[Canada’s] Bill C-10 opens the door to regulating how CanCon is discovered online. More transparency around algorithms is warranted, but in more pressing areas,” argues Sara Bannerman on J-Source:

If the government decides to regulate algorithms, there are lots of places to start. Algorithms can discriminate, recommend hateful content and polarize. They can sully brands and they can be used to profile, manipulate and track. Regulation could make algorithms transparent. They could intervene to address the worst form of recommendations, give people ownership, control and insight, and stop targeted ads.

Dark patterns that mislead consumers are all over the Internet

Dark patterns, a term Harry Brignull coined in 2010, are “design choices that steer people into decisions they may not have made under normal conditions.” Think you can spot them? Take a simple quiz by Alfred Ng and Sam Morris for The Markup.

What I read, watch and listen to…

* I’m reading Sowing Aunties by Frances Kai-Hwa Wang.

* I’m watching Kitty Love: An Homage to Cats on Netflix.

* I’m listening to digital politics expert Fenwick McKelvey on Law Bytes, a podcast by lawyer Michael Geist on Bill C-10, discoverability and the missing representation of a new generation of Canadian creators.

* I’m making cocktails.

Chart of the week

In an announcement on Donald Trump’s two-year suspension from its platforms, Facebook’s Oversight Board also came out with different levels of restrictions as penalties for public figures. Don’t worry, Trump will be back just in time for the 2024 presidential campaign, running hundreds of millions of dollars of ads for Zuck & Co.

The Sidelines

Transcript for audio segment available here.

The Starting Block is a weekly collection of notes on science and society with an emphasis on data, democracy, and disinformation. Read the archives. Find me on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. Send questions, corrections and suggestions to tinacarmillia@substack.com.

The navigation on the main page of The Starting Block gets a minor facelift. All interview transcripts, which are filed under The Sidelines, can be found on the same page. Meanwhile, The Extra Mile will host the rare original long-forms that I occasionally have the time to write, including a new one, A Checklist for Fact-Checking, which expanded the original checklist published on The 25th Block with the inclusion of a step-by-step guide to skimming science papers.

And for our interview segment, I speak with filmmaker Ineza Roussille about documentary filmmaking—and how editing can be an ethical dilemma. You can find the full transcript at the link below. But first, a selection of top stories on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.

Data isn’t oil, so what is it?

Matt Locke on How to Measure Ghost:

All these metaphors imagine public data as a huge, passive, untapped resources - lakes of stuff that only has value when it is extracted and processed. But this framing completely removes the individual agency that created the stuff in the first place. Oil is formed by millions of years of compression and chemical transformation of algae and tiny marine animals (sorry, not dinosaurs). Data is created in real time, as we click and swipe around the internet. The metaphor might work in an economic sense, but it fails to describe what data is as a material. It’s not oil, it’s people.

What Instagram really learned from hiding like counts

Nothing much. Casey Newton on Platformer:

After more than two years of testing, today Instagram announced what it found: removing likes doesn’t seem to meaningfully depressurize Instagram, for young people or anyone else, and so likes will remain publicly viewable by default. But all users will now get the ability to switch them off if they like, either for their whole feed or on a per-post basis.

What the ephemerality of the Web means for your hyperlinks

Always cite your source, goes the mantra. That includes online citation with hyperlinks. But linkrot (dead links) and content drift (valid page but not the intended one) can happen over the course of many, many years.

John Bowers, Clare Stanton and Jonathan Zittrain for CJR:

We examined hyperlinks in New York Times articles, starting with the launch of the Times website in 1996 up through mid-2019, developed on the basis of a data set provided to us by the Times. The substantial linkrot and content drift we found here reflect the inherent difficulties of long-term linking to pieces of a volatile Web. The Times in particular is a well-resourced standard-bearer for digital journalism, with a robust institutional archiving structure. Their interest in facing the challenge of linkrot indicates that it has yet to be understood or comprehensively addressed across the field.

What I read, watch and listen to…

* I’m reading art philosopher Daisy Dixon’s essay on dealing with dangerous art.

* I’m watching Welcome to Chechnya, a documentary by David France about the anti-LGBTQ persecution in the Russian republic. The documentary uses digital facial replacement technology to protect the identities of those affected. It is recommended by my guest this week.

* I’m listening to Encore: Land of a Billion Faces, a podcast episode from In Machines We Trust about one of the most comprehensive databases of people’s faces in the world built by Clearview AI.

Chart of the week

The UK is unsure what ‘culture wars’ means and whether ‘woke’ is a compliment or insult, according to a study by King’s College London and Ipsos MORI. More than half never heard of the term microaggressions before:

The Sidelines

Transcript for audio segment available here.

The Starting Block is a weekly collection of notes on science and society with an emphasis on data, democracy, and disinformation. Read the archives. Find me on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. Send questions, corrections and suggestions to tinacarmillia@substack.com.

I rejoice at the news of the death of Google AMP (Marko Saric, Plausible). Whether it is due to antitrust scrutiny or pushbacks from publishers, I don't really care, because it has made it harder to spot misinformation, among many of its issues (Dan Buben, on Medium). Meanwhile, a rescue mission for Sci-Hub is underway before its death, with the ultimate aim of building a decentralised version (Glyn Moody, TechDirt).

And for our interview segment, I speak with writer, actor, and director Jo Kukathas of The Instant Cafe Theatre Company about political satire. You can find the full transcript at the link below. But first, a selection of top stories on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.

The disinformation dozen

Joseph Mercola and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. are among the 12 responsible for up to 65 per cent of anti-vaccine content – at least English ones – according to a report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate. Speaking to NPR’s Shannon Bond, CEO Imran Ahmed said they sometimes skirt the platforms’ rules by using codes:

Instead of saying ‘vaccine,’ they may, in a video, hold up the V sign with their fingers and say, “If you're around someone who has been” — hold up V sign — “you know, X might happen to you.”

The disinformation threat from text-generating AI

A new report by Ben Buchanan et al. at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology details how language models could change disinformation. Bryan Walsh writes for Axios:

While “no currently existing autonomous system could replace the entirety of the IRA,” algorithmically based tech paired with experienced human operators produces results that are nothing less than frightening.

Like many other automation and AI technologies, GPT-3’s real power is in its ability to scale, says Ben Buchanan, director of the CyberAI Project at CSET and a co-author of the report.

GPT-3 “lets operators try a bunch of variants on a message and see what sticks,” he says. “The scale might lead to more effective feedback loops and iterations.”

Correcting falsehoods on Twitter makes misinformation worse

According to an MIT study by Moshen Mosleh et al., publicly and politely correcting misinformation on Twitter “set off an avalanche of further misinformation and toxic language.” Arianne Cohen for Fast Company:

The researchers targeted 2,000 Twitter users from a range of political persuasions who had tweeted 11 overtly false news articles. (Sample article topic: One time Donald Trump evicted a disabled veteran because of his therapy dog.) After an extremely polite correction in the thread, which included a link to factually accurate information, the tweeters’ accuracy declined further—and even more so when they were corrected by someone matching their political leanings. This indicates that partisanship is not driving the tweeters’ responses.

What I read, watch and listen to…

* I’m reading the essay “The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should Be Invisible” by Beatrice Warde, with these brilliant lines about typology:

If books are printed in order to be read, we must distinguish readability from what the optician would call legibility. A page set in 14-pt Bold Sans is, according to the laboratory tests, more ‘legible’ than one set in 11-pt Baskerville. A public s peaker is more ‘audible’ in that sense when he bellows. But a good speaking voice is one which is inaudible as a voice. It is the transparent goblet again! […] Type well used is invisible as type, just as the perfect talking voice is the unnoticed vehicle for the transmission of words, ideas.

* I’m watching a short film by James Graham for FT, featuring a minimalist interrogation scene that “explores how COVID-19 has exposed the tension between the need for data to track and trace, and the right to privacy and justice.”

Chart of the week

On the subject of publicly correcting someone on Twitter, which didn’t work (I was blocked and had to switch accounts to ensure that the original tweet was still up), here’s a tweet with a fake chart of the week about Canadian media bias, which features the logo of a very Malaysian newspaper, The Star — not to be confused with the Canadian broadsheet, Toronto Star. (Yellow circle is added for emphasis.)

The Sidelines

Transcript for audio segment available here.

CORRECTION NOTICE: In a post-interview correspondence, Jo Kukathas reached out to clarify that when she said Rehman Rashid at 22:22 into the recording, she was actually referring to his brother, Rafique Rashid, who did stand up and political songs. This correction is reflected in the transcript but not the audio.

The Starting Block is a weekly collection of notes on science and society with an emphasis on data, democracy, and disinformation. Read the archives. Find me on Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin. Send questions, corrections and suggestions to tinacarmillia@substack.com.

On the first anniversary of The Starting Block and in honour of my years covering mainly health news, I thought I should kick off the audio series with one of my favourite people to interview – a professor and physician at the University of Malaya, Sargunan Sockalingam, on public engagement during a pandemic, and the future of healthcare.

Twitter’s new feature wants you to reconsider your mean tweets

Jaclyn Diaz for NPR:

According to Twitter, when prompted, 34% of people revised their initial reply or decided not to send it at all. After they were first prompted, users composed about 11% fewer offensive replies in the future. They were also less likely to receive offensive replies in return.

Study offers insights into comment sections

Esther Chan, Lucinda Beaman and Stevie Zhang for First Draft:

Comment sections are an area often overlooked in policy responses and while they have to abide by Facebook’s overall policies on vaccine misinformation, they are not subjected to warning labels applied by Facebook’s third-party fact-checking partners.

The researchers carried out data analysis on a set of posts with the word “vaccine” from two Australian news outlets and found one in five comments contained misinformation. Further, a separate study suggests that “online comments, particularly those contradicting the news article in the post, can affect readers’ opinions more than the article itself.”

A framework towards addressing vaccine-related false information in Malaysia

The need to act is clear. Leaving false information to thrive in the marketplace of ideas, where good ones theoretically should trump the bad, is untenable because humans are not necessarily rational decision-makers with healthy information consumption habits. Meanwhile, hasty heavy handed measures may backfire and harden the stance of sceptics, making it critical to employ a more deliberate strategy to address vaccine-related false information.

Harris Zainul and Ryan Chua prescribe a few policy options in a brief published by the Institute of Strategic and International Studies.

The Instagram ads Facebook won’t show you

By now we should all be aware that ads and recommendations on Big Tech platforms are generated based on the personal data that you have provided – that’s called targetted advertising. Signal, the private messaging app, ran an ad experiment to show exactly what personal data was collected.

Separately, in the weeks prior to this, Alex Kantrowitz warned that despite the predictions, Apple’s new anti-tracking moves may not crush Facebook’s ad business.

What I read, watch and listen to…

* I’m reading How Stella Learned to Talk by Christina Hunger.

* I’m watching two stat analysts explain what’s wrong with that survey that went viral – again – that showed that a third of kids surveyed want to be YouTubers. Couldn’t’ve ‘splained it better.

* I’m listening to Murad Hemmadi explaining to Jayme Poisson about Canada’s plans to regulate online streaming services on CBC’s Front Burner.

Chart of the week

In a report, the European Federation of Academics of Sciences and Humanities (ALLEA) analyses the consequences of science disinformation in climate change, vaccines and pandemics and asks what scientists, science communicators and policymakers can do.

The Sidelines

Transcript for audio segment available here.

The Starting Block is a weekly collection of notes on science and society with an emphasis on data, democracy, and disinformation. Read the archives. Find me on Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin. Send questions, corrections and suggestions to tinacarmillia@substack.com.

Following the riot at the US capitol building last week, Trump or Trump-related content have been banned on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, TikTok, Snapchat, Twitch, Reddit, Discord, Shopify, Pinterest, and Spotify, while Parler, the social media app for far-right extremists have been suspended from the Google and Apple app stores and Amazon’s web-hosting service. No news yet about MeWe, Gab or Dlive.

While deplatforming, even when it’s too little too late, has its merits, the worry, as a few of my colleagues who study and report on extremists have pointed out, is the further away extremist content is pushed from the surface web, the harder it is to nip radicalisation in the bud. It further emboldens extremist ideas, now flamed by vengeance, and it only makes the deep dark web a deeper and darker place. Content moderation, with all of its failures and double standards, is an endless game of – in the words of Amanda Wilmore and Abigail Griffin for The Cipher Brief – “reactive whack-a-mole” and always a step or two behind.

This is very much American digital values. Any American claiming the events of January 6th were un-American and “third-world” because they hated what they saw need to understand: It happened in the US by US citizens to the US. To say “this is not America” (well, technically it isn’t, it’s the US) is to redefine what America (ie. the US) is, and you can’t keep redefining something to exclude things you don’t like. Recognise it. Call it what it is. Own it.

Emma Louise Backe on the fantasy of American exceptionalism:

WhatsApp gives users an ultimatum

New privacy policy means its 2 billion users have to agree to share data with Facebook by February 8th or stop using the app.

Dan Goodin for Ars Technica:

A WhatsApp spokeswoman declined to speak on the record about the changes and precisely how or if it’s possible for users to opt out of them. She agreed to email additional information on the condition it be kept on background, meaning none of the details can be quoted verbatim.

The move, the spokeswoman said, is part of a previously disclosed move to allow businesses to store and manage WhatsApp chats using Facebook’s infrastructure. Users won’t have to use WhatsApp to interact with the businesses and have the option of blocking the businesses.

Everything Lord Zucc touches turns into a marketplace. I mean, I’ve reached a point where I’m even agreeing with, gasp, James Charles.

Why the US brand of anti-science is so unique

Historian and educator Bill Black for MEL Magazine, taken in part:

While the US may not be uniquely anti-science, there’s something about the country that gives anti-science more oxygen. Views that might otherwise be relegated to the fringes […] are able to accrue actual political power. And we can’t just blame conservatism, which is by no means unique to the US.

Two things that are distinct about the US are its federalist system of government and its role in the Cold War. In the federalist system, state and local governments have a huge amount of power, especially over K-12 education. This means anti-vaxxers and anti-evolutionists can gain a foothold in county school boards and state legislatures and affect policy. They can loosen the guidelines [and] push for laws like the one Tennessee passed in 2012 that allow schools to teach “the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses” of such theories as “biological evolution, the chemical origins and life [and] global warming.”

Something else that gives anti-science views more fuel in the US is the fact that, for nearly 80 years, the nation has been a global hegemon with a vast military-industrial complex. And science, despite its claim to be “apolitical,” has been vital to that hegemony. The result is that science is uniquely politicised in the US. This was especially true during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik into orbit and Americans had a bit of a freak-out.

An insightful take, please take time to read in full.

What I read, watch and listen to…

* I’m reading what the new science of narcissism says about narcissists written by W. Keith Campbell and Carolyn Crist for Psyche.

* I’m watching Joshua Lim’s feature for The Star on the “rebels” who fix potholes themselves. I’ve been in social isolation for so long that I found a lot of comfort in listening to the quintessential urban Malay accent. I will miss that when I leave the country.

* I’m listening to Citations Needed, hosted by Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson on how US media is pathologically incapable of criticising Trumpism or fascism without evoking “third-world” racist cliches.

Chart of the week

Another report released by the Reuters Institute (I am in no way affiliated with them) trends and predictions in journalism, media and technology by Nic Newman.

Transcript for audio

Let’s talk about the Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon or the frequency illusion. It’s when you’re introduced to an idea and suddenly they seem to appear everywhere. Not necessarily because they are now occurring at a higher rate, you’re just more aware of their existence because you were deliberately and consciously introduced to the idea.

So let’s go down one of my online rabbit holes to illustrate this phenomenon. Recently I was introduced to Raja Gemini, who was a contestant in one of the earlier seasons of RuPaul’s Drag Race. I didn’t take a particular interest in the subject because although I am surrounded by fans of the show, I’m not particularly a big one. And then, I started seeing tweets and TikToks about Raja. Maybe it’s my devices listening to my conversations, or maybe it’s the frequency illusion.

The first TikTok was about indigenous representation on RuPaul’s Drag Race and that Raja, who is of Minangkabau descent from Indonesia who migrated to the US at a very young age, wore a Native American headgear – which was panned by the judges, by the way, rightfully so. But it was a tweet that caught my attention, that mentioned that Raja is the nephew of the Islamic scholar, Hamka.

I’ve read some of Hamka’s writings, which has contributed greatly to Islamic literature and Indonesian nationalism. Many Indonesians and Malaysians today still revere he works, but for various reasons. You see, it’s hard to put him in a Eurocentric box of moderate, progressive or conservative. For example, in 1973, he testified in court in support of Vivian Rubiyanti Iskandar’s petition for legal recognition of her gender after her gender confirmation surgery. She became the first trans person to be legally recognised by the Indonesian courts as their true gender. But on the other hand, he was also the head of the Indonesian Council of Ulama when it issued a fatwa in 1981 prohibiting Muslims from participating in celebrations of other religions, which was considered a direct challenge to the Indonesian government’s policy that promoted joint religious celebrations. The fatwa was later retracted, and Hamka stepped down from his post. He died the same year – but I now wonder, what would he have thought of his nephew competiting and winning his season of RuPaul’s Drag Race.

The Starting Block is a weekly collection of notes on science and society with an emphasis on data, democracy, and disinformation. Read the archives. Find me on Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin. Send questions, corrections and suggestions to tinacarmillia@substack.com.

This week, I spent most of the time writing a long essay in Malay about the COVID-19 vaccine that I am turning it into a few short videos. I mean, look at the raw sketch above. Perhaps I’m making up for the absence of the Malay segment for the last few weeks.

Lie of the Year: Coronavirus downplay and denial

Every year, PolitiFact editors review the year’s most inaccurate statements to find and crown the Lie of the Year.

From data ‘hijacking’ to Plandemic, Daniel Funke and Katie Sanders outline the course of the coronavirus disinformation throughout the year:

President Donald J. Trump fueled confusion and conspiracies from the earliest days of the coronavirus pandemic […] but the infodemic was not the work of a single person.

Anonymous bad actors offered up junk science. Online sceptics made bogus accusations that hospitals padded their coronavirus case numbers to generate bonus payments. Influential TV and radio opinion hosts told millions of viewers that social distancing was a joke and that states had all of the personal protective equipment they needed (when they didn’t).

It was a symphony of counter-narrative, and Trump was the conductor, if not the composer. The message: The threat to your health was overhyped to hurt the political fortunes of the president.

Psychology explains why Christmas with family is risky

The ‘intimacy paradox’ tells us about dangerous decisions made by close groups, writes Stephen Reicher for The Guardian:

It’s difficult to perceive the home you grew up in, or time spent with the people closest to you, as “risky”. But what you might not be aware of is the “the intimacy paradox”, which can lead us to be most in danger with people and in places who are most familiar to us and with whom we feel the safest.

For many years, I have studied how intimacy is produced between people, especially in groups, and how it affects our feelings, thoughts and actions even at the most visceral level. In one study I conducted at the University of St Andrews, where I teach psychology, we asked students to smell soiled, sweaty T-shirts. These either had our logo or a Dundee University logo. When it was the former, they were only mildly perturbed – when they were done, they strolled over to clean their hands, used a modicum of soap and did only a perfunctory wash. But when it was the latter, they screwed their faces up in true disgust, they rushed over to get clean and used copious soap for a prolonged scrub. In short, disgust for the ingroup sweat was far less than that for the outgroup.

Read more about the studies he has conducted on this subject.

Poynter’s MediaWise for Seniors significantly increases ability to detect disinformation

That’s according to a white paper published by Stanford Social Media Lab. Ryan C. Moore and Jeffrey T. Hancock at Stanford University, taken in part:

In addition to more accurately being able to judge the veracity of news headlines, MediaWise enrollees also became more likely to report doing research online to inform their judgement of the headlines in the survey. Pretest, the average rate of researching headlines prior to making judgements was 2.9% and posttest the average rate jumped to 69.6%. Because we do not observe this pattern in the control group (their pretest average researching rate = 2.7%; posttest rate = 2%), it is unlikely this effect in the MediaWise enrollee group was driven by priming in the survey instrument.

It will be crucial to assess the scalability of this program and to test its effects on larger, more representative samples of older adults.

Time to send our parents back to school, kids! The problem, of course, is these courses are in English, and any “research online to inform their judgement of the headlines” will return search results in… well, English.

What I read, watch and listen to…

* I’m reading the US FDA’s briefing document on Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine.

* I’m talking to the Fake News Immunity Chatbot.

Chart of the week

The British Medical Journal published an interactive authorship anatomy chart and wished everyone a BMJ Christmas.

The Starting Block is a weekly collection of notes on science and society with an emphasis on data, democracy, and disinformation. Read the archives. Find me on Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin. Send questions, corrections and suggestions to tinacarmillia@substack.com.

For the past two months or so I have spent a lot of time on TikTok to study the spread of misinformation there, especially around COVID-19 , and how the science communication community (EduTok, ScienceTok, MedTok) responded. Some of these efforts were made by journalists and scientists, but I think the most effective ones built a foundation around personality-driven content. Essentially, “If you like me, you’ll follow me; and if you follow me, you’ll listen to me.” I know that’s a double-edged sword, and it would take a whole chapter worth of word-count to write on that.

So, instead, I’ll share with you some of my favourite scicommers and educators on this app. This list excludes verified TikTokers with millions of followers (there are exceptions, such as being POC or queer) because they probably already get a lot of exposure. There are some social media metrics [in square brackets] for those who are interested in that kind of information. Malaysian TikTok has a void to be filled.

Astrophysics: Alexandra @astro_alexandra [NASA scientist, 190k]Biochem: Darrion Nguyen @lab_shenanigans [biochemist, verified, 500k]Bionics: Ryan Saavedra @pandabionics [prosthetics and biomech engineering, 370k]Biology: Kate Bredbenner @simplebiologist [started in October, 30k]Data science: Brian Xu @bri_xu [Linkedin data scientist, 150k]Engineering: Naia Butler-Craig @astronaia [NASA aerospace engineer, verified, 15k]Ethnobotany: Alexis Nikole @alexisnikole [410k followers, but still not verified]Art history: Mary McGillivray @_theiconoclass [“art history is just old memes,” 230k]Linguistics: Noah Elkins @mediumnoah [mostly English, 144k]Math: Kyne @onlinekyne [drag queen mathematician, verified, 800k followers]Medicine: Khalid Zalmay @doctor.khalid [family physician, 18k]Music theory: Dev Lemons @songpsych [verified, 615k]Programming: Anna Lytical @theannalytical [Google engineer, coding drag queen, 6k]Psychology: Dr Rachel Brenner @professorbren [professor, 50k] Science: Kate Bacon @kbacon [“what’s shakin’, bacon?,” 60k]

Negative scented candle reviews could be tied to COVID-19

Researcher Kate Petrova meticulously plotted Amazon reviews for scented candles against confirmed cases for COVID-19 and found a correlation (not causation!) between an increase in negative feedback and the rise in COVID-19 cases. “Skip! Little to no scent,” said one. “Useless candle,” said another. The loss of sense of smell is a symptom of the infection.

Barbara Smith for Business Insider:

In her findings, Petrova said the number of Amazon candle reviews that mentioned “lack of smell” grew from less than 2 per cent in January to nearly 6 per cent in November, and satisfaction with scented candles was dropping at a much faster rate than unscented candles.

Tone is hard to grasp online. Can tone indicators help? ($)

If you’re a Redditor, you’ve probably encountered posts that end with /s to denote sarcasm. That’s essential what tone indicators are.

Ezra Marcus for NYT:

Written language is an imperfect method for the messy, complex business of communication, where facial expressions, gestures and vocal tones transmit oceans of meaning and subtext — for those, at least, who can read them.

Words themselves offer none of that: In a famous study, Albert Mehrabian, a psychology professor at U.C.L.A., found that humans tend to perceive only a fragment of a speaker’s meaning through spoken words. Instead, he observed, most meaning is gleaned from body language and tone of voice.

In a text-only environment, how can we ever be certain other people understand what we mean when we post online?

There’s a list of tone indicators shared by a Twitter user. If you would like to go down the rabbit hole with me, read up on Poe’s Law, which can be found on Wikipedia, RationalWiki and Wired.

A WSJ op-ed about Jill Biden pairs virulent sexism with academic elitism

The WSJ article is full of irony. I won’t link the original article but here’s the gist of it: “Madame First Lady–Mrs Biden–Jill–kiddo,” it went, “Any chance you might drop the ‘Dr.’ before your name? ‘Dr. Jill Biden’ sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic. Your degree is, I believe, an Ed.D., a doctor of education, earned at the University of Delaware through a dissertation with the unpromising title ‘Student Retention at the Community College Level: Meeting Students’ Needs.’ A wise man once said that no one should call himself ‘Dr.’ unless he has delivered a child.”

First of all, the origin of the title doctor was that it given to scholars as a license to teach. And Dr Jill Biden literally has a PhD in education. Secondly, it was only centuries later that physicians started using the title even if they do not have a PhD.

Cameron Peters for Vox:

[Joseph] Epstein, who has an honorary doctorate himself but lacks one earned by study, also digresses from his critique of Biden to complain about the proliferation of honorary degrees, which recognize noteworthy contributions to scholarship, culture, or society, but don’t imply academic achievement. This is apparently a hobbyhorse of his: According to Epstein, he once sent a “complaining email” to the president of Northwestern University after Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers received honorary doctorates.

You don’t need a PhD to teach, nor do you need to graduate with anything to have learned something. This level of gatekeeping is absurd.

What I read, watch and listen to…

* I’m reading an article on The Guardian by Ariel Bogle, a journalist and disinformation analyst, on how podcasts are becoming the new medium of misinformation.

* I’m watching Kyne, drag queen and mathematician, explain how much we can trust statistics.

* I’m listening to my 2020 playlist for the last time this year (maybe). For the last five years, I’ve been making an annual playlist and naming them variations of PBR&B because they were originally “R&B jams smooth as butter and Pabst Blue Ribbon beer” (not sponsored), but you know, things have changed. Spotify Wrapped 2020 told me I’m just basic pop, even when my most popular playlist is the Top 100 Classicals and the artist I listen to the most, since I was a teen, is Nightwish.

Chart of the week

The most shared chart I’ve seen this week – at least in my online bubble – is the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine trial paper published in The New England Journal of Medicine. Around 44,000 trial participants in 152 sites in six countries were split into two groups: one that received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and one that did not. This is the number of positive cases after the first dose.

Transcript for audio

Two issues ago, I asked you for your favourite tongue twister. The most popular one seems to be Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. Honestly, I thought it would be she sells seashells by the seashore. So I thought it would be fun to return from my audio hiatus by sharing some of my favourite tongue twisters:

1. Friday's Five Fresh Fish Specials.2. I slit the sheet, the sheet I slit, and on the slitted sheet I sit.3. Red lorry yellow lorry.4. Lesser leather never weathered wetter weather better.5. Nine nice night nurses nursing nicely.

There are also a few that I spliced together, to work on similar sounds, such as:1. For f and th sounds: He thought of his self-worth every three or four free throws.2. And ch and sh sounds: Wash your watch and put a leash on your leech before your march in the marsh.3. And r and w sounds: Where is the rare rich witch who raves and waves and rips and whips right-leaning white supremacists.4. Or tl lateral plosions: The little metal kettle is in a gentle battle with a bottle.5. As well as dn nasal plosions: The modern maiden was hidden in Sweden before her sudden pardon.

I could share more if that’s what interests you. These examples are for consonants and lateral and nasal plosions but I have a lot more focusing on minimal pairs like sheep and ship, debt and date, and full and fool. Sometimes I like to challenge myself with the 1920 Pronunciation Test, also known as “Penelope Cholmondely” and the 1940 Announcer Test, also known as “One hen, two ducks.” If you’ve heard of them, let me know how you did. I obviously needed practice – but I didn’t do any of my warmups just so you know what these tongue twisters sound like without them for me and my tongue.

The Starting Block is a weekly collection of notes on science and society with an emphasis on data, democracy, and disinformation. Read the archives. Find me on Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin. Send questions, corrections and suggestions to tinacarmillia@substack.com.

* Cristina Tardáguila for Poynter: Without methodology or transparency, Facebook and Twitter become the ‘arbiters of the truth’.

* Emily Bell and Sara Sheridan for CJR: Google and Facebook have a news labelling problem.

* Amelia Tait for The Guardian: Influencers are turning to unions.

* Stephen Gossett for Builtin: The Internet should be more like Wikipedia.

Dude, where’s my nude?

[Image censored jk – I have a busy week this week]

Remember tech journalist Charles Arthur? I had one short interview with him in 2019, and I haven’t come close to sharing every single gem that came out of his mouth:

In the days before the Internet, when you relied on printed newspapers, radio, [and] TV, there were, in fact, gatekeepers. There were the people who produce the TV shows, radio shows, editors of the newspapers – they decide what was shown and so there was a gatekeeper function which kept anonymous views, unsupported views out of public discourse because the question was, well, who are you and why are you saying this?

But with social networks, it doesn’t matter who you are. You can just put things [online] and if they get picked up and if they go viral, then nobody cares who the creator is. They’re just interested in what the content is. So anonymity doesn’t make any difference to the “quality” or the level of interest in a piece of work. News [becomes] stuff I care about, stuff I want to pass on. And nowhere in that does it say that you have to care about who produce the content.

Online, user-generated contents do not have these so-called gatekeepers – or editors. Editors, traditionally, decide whether or not to publish a story. They ensure the credibility and quality of the content. They also decide the relative order of importance of different news pieces. These aren’t decided by popularity or profit.

But for social media platforms, story visibility is decided precisely by popularity and profit. They become news editors without actually taking up the responsibilities of editing. And if you argue that it’s not possible to moderate content, then consider this: Why is it so difficult to find nudes on Facebook or Instagram?

What I read, watch and listen to…

* I’m reading why social media makes me feel so old.

* I’m watching Ann Reardon explain Australia’s news media bargaining code (starts at 14:54 until 22:22).

* TL;DR: Australia is trying to make Big Tech pay for the news. Big Tech says they are just bus drivers taking passengers (users) to the restaurants (news), so they shouldn’t be paying the restaurants, the passengers should be. But Reardon demonstrates that passengers can still sample restaurant food on the bus without ever leaving it.

* Try it yourself: Look up the weather, and you get the information you need on the google.com domain without ever visiting the site weather.com, where the information is taken from. Look up COVID-19 stats, and your search results, still on the google.com domain, show the latest data, that’s sourced from The New York Times.

* I’m listening to Dewa Risqullah’s powerful spoken-word piece on Indonesia’s protest against the country’s new labour law.

Chart of the week

From Statista: New iPhones don’t create as much buzz as they used to. Also related stats, the iPhone index – an American minimum wage worker has to work 24 days to buy the new iPhone 12 Pro Max 512GB, and 5.5 months for a Malaysian minimum wage worker.

Fakta, Auta & Data #10: DBP, apakah istilah rasmi untuk ‘content moderation’?

Masih ingat wartawan teknologi, Charles Arthur? Saya hanya membuat satu wawancara pendek dengannya 2019, dan masih banyak pandanganya yang belum lagi saya kongsikan:

Pada hari-hari sebelum Internet, ketika kita bergantung pada media cetak, radio, dan TV, sebenarnya, ada penyaring maklumat. Ada orang di sebalik rancangan TV, rancangan radio, penyunting surat khabar - mereka memutuskan apa yang ditunjukkan, jadi terdapat fungsi ‘penjaga pintu’ yang memastikan pandangan tanpa tauliah, pandangan yang tidak berasas, dijauhkan dari wacana umum kerana persoalannya, siapakah mereka dan kenapa mereka berkata demikian?

Tetapi dengan rangkaian sosial, tidak kiralah siapa kita. Kita boleh meletakkan apa-apa sahaja dalam Internet dan jika ia menjadi tular, maka tidak ada yang peduli siapa di sebaliknya. Kita hanya berminat dengan kandungannya. Oleh itu, ketanpanamaan tidak memberi perbezaan kepada “kualiti” atau tahap minat dalam hantaran itu. Berita menjadi apa-apa sahaja yang diminati, apa-apa yang ingin dikongsikan. Kita tidak perlu peduli tentang siapa yang menghasilkan kandungannya.

Dalam talian, kandungan yang dihasilkan pengguna tidak mempunyai sebarang penyaring maklumat - atau penyunting. Penyunting, secara tradisional, memutuskan sama ada sesuatu diterbitkan atau tidak. Mereka memastikan kredibiliti dan kualiti kandungan. Mereka juga memutuskan urutan kepentingan setiap berita. Ia tidak ditentukan oleh populariti atau keuntungan.

Tetapi untuk jaringan media sosial, keterlihatan cerita ditetapkan oleh populariti dan keuntungan. Mereka menjadi penyunting berita tanpa benar-benar memikul tanggungjawab penyuntingan. Dan sekiranya kita berpendapat bahawa ianya mustahil untuk mengawal (moderate) kandungan, maka pertimbangkan ini: Mengapa ianya sangat sukar untuk mencari kandungan lucah di Facebook atau Instagram?

Transcript for audio

This week’s audio segment is a short one. Not because I’m spending too much time on TikTok but because I am recording the final episode of my Amplify miniseries on haemophilia this week, and in fact, I’m recording this in between takes.

Speaking of TikTok, though. TikTok’s algorithm is very specific. OK, I have spent hours on the app in recent weeks. (If I say it’s for research/work, would you believe me?) Anyway, based on its algorithm, if TikTok were to decide my identity, I am a “left-leaning” “queer” “woman” of “Asian” and “Indigenous” descent who understands English but prefers captions, and also likes cats.

First of all, I prefer dogs...

On my desktop browser, though, my TikTok tells me that I’m a mat rempit who is sharing the account with a transphobic straight white woman who is into cooking, archery (not guns, archery!), Trump, and conspiracy theories. I guess we all know what my browser history is full of… It’s for work, OK.

I’m also very impressed with TikTok users who post ‘thirst traps’ and the thirst trap content curation by TikTok that appears on my For You Page. Every time I would see a thirst trap on my FYP, I would pause the video and go to their profile page to read their bios. About 9 in 10 will put their age, and after I’ve checked ‘not interested’ every time it’s someone who is underage – because that’s their business, not mine, I just don’t want to see them – soon enough, I actually stop seeing kids posting thirst traps on my FYP. Isn’t that impressive?

By the way, if you’re looking for my TikTok, don’t bother. I’m not posting anything – thirst trap or otherwise.

The Starting Block is a weekly collection of notes on science and society with an emphasis on data, democracy, and disinformation. Read the archives. Find me on Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin. Send questions, corrections and suggestions to tinacarmillia@substack.com.

* Kate Cox for Ars Technica: John McAfee arrested, indicted on tax evasion charges. McAfee founded his eponymous computer security firm in 1987. I remember those pesky McAfee pop-ups.

* Jonas Richner: How Flash shaped the video game industry. On December 31st, 2020, Google Chrome will stop supporting Flash Player for good. I remember making Flash games in computer science classes in matriculation college.

* Leo Kelion for BBC: Why using Microsoft Excel caused England’s COVID-19 results to be lost. The developers picked an old file format, .xls, to pull the data together, which could only handle about 65,000 rows rather than the one million plus rows that the software is actually capable of. Using .xlsx would have prevented the error.

* Mehr Nadeem for Rest of the World: How the Iranian diaspora is using old-school tech to fight Internet shutdown at home.

Cut-and-paste title here

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was jointly awarded to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna for their work on CRISPR-Cas9, a genome editing method.

It’s a relatively recent work – only eight years ago did they co-author their first paper describing CRISPR-Cas9. Now, the ‘genetic scissors’ are used in medicine to find the cure for genetic disorders such as sickle cell disease and in agriculture to create hardier crops. Controversially, in 2018, Chinese scientists used the technology to edit human embryonic genes to create genetically modified babies.

In 2017, I produced an interview with neurogeneticist Dr Azlina Ahmad Annuar about the science and ethics of genome editing. You can listen to it here; she is an excellent science communicator. If that doesn’t convince you, here’s a spoiler: In it, she hinted of her suspicion of scientists creating genetically edited babies – a year before the He Jiankui affair was publicised.

Ishino and Mojica’s bacteria 🔬Nevertheless, it should be noted that there would be no CRISPR-Cas9 without Yoshizumo Ishino’s 1987 description of strange sequences of DNA in E. coli that became the basis of the discovery of CRISPR by microbiologist Francisco Mojica. Mojica first identified the repetitive DNA sequences in 1993 and found that similar sequences were common in prokaryotes such as archaea and bacteria.

He demonstrated that the sequences matched genetic materials in bacteriophages, which are viruses that infect bacteria. By the early 2000s, he hypothesised that they were an innate part of the microbial immune system, but it was rejected four times by leading science journals until it was published in 2005. He called the sequences Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, or CRISPR.

Mojica agrees being an outsider, not coming from somewhere like Harvard, meant his ideas weren’t readily accepted. But the hostile reception was also due to how surprising the findings were.

Doudna and Charpentier’s scissors ✂️In simple terms, CRISPR helps microbes fight off viral infections by cutting the virus’ DNA, inactivating it. Doudna and Charpentier built on this knowledge to programme the CRISPR system to cut other pieces of DNA. They use CRISPR-associated proteins, or Cas. There are other Cas enzymes but Cas9 comes from the strep throat bacteria.

They re-engineered Cas9, so that it can be instructed to snip predefined and specific parts of the DNA. CRISPR-Cas9 system has a guide RNA that determines where the cleavage site is. The guide RNA’s nucleotide sequence is manipulated to target any DNA sequence for cleavage. When the strand is broken, the cell’s system stitches the two ends together. To ‘cut-and-paste,’ you can insert replacement sequences at the splice site before the repair system kicks in.

Similarly, biochemist Feng Zhang modified the CRISPR-Cas9 to make precise genome cuts in human and mouse cells, as did George Church. But it was biochemist Dana Carroll who first developed a genome-editing method using enzymes, called zinc-finger nucleases, first described in 1996 – before CRISPR was adapted.

Ugh, the future is female, amirite👩‍🔬The announcement makes it the first time the award has gone to two women, making them only the sixth and seventh women in history to win the chemistry prize. Some (1, 2, 3, 4) have expressed disappointment and/or surprise that Mojica, Zhang, Church or even Carroll were overlooked.

I think it is what women like Rosalind Franklin (the double helix), Lise Meitner (nuclear fission), Hedy Lamarr (Wi-Fi, CDMA, Bluetooth) – just to name a few – felt like when they made a discovery, only for the men to take all the credit.

I guess the winning duo will also win the patent battle.

What I read, watch and listen to…

* I’m reading about why I should read Boethius, by John Marenbon.

* I’m watching a TikTok trend by Indonesians threatening to expose their affairs with members of the country’s House of Representatives (DPR) if they do not revise or cancel a controversial labour law.

* I’m making siren and flashing light.

Chart of the week

Abbie Richard’s conspiracy chart, although I question whether #FreeBritney is appropriately placed:

Transcript for audio

Four years ago today, just over a year after I had started my job as a producer at a radio station, I received a phone call during a live segment that I can never forget. That show was in conjunction with World Mental Health Day, observed every October 10th. It was also the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election, and on the show, we had psychiatrist Dr Stephen Jambunathan discussing delusions – the leading question being, “What do politics and relationships have in common?”

Towards the end of the show, I was ready to signal to my presenter, Lee Chwi Lynn, to tell her that I was closing the phone lines so she could wrap up the show. And then the studio phone rang. I had to make a quick decision and chose to answer and screen the caller. It was a man in distress. I signalled to my presenter that I was going to patch the call through. Here is an edited down version of the call. Some parts of this audio segment might be distressing for those struggling with their mental health. Please skip the next three minutes if you think you could be affected. [CLIP - 3:00]

Towards the end of my time in BFM, I was burning out. Often times I wondered what kind of impact my job makes in people’s lives. Often times I wondered if the media is too out of touch and out of reach. Often times, I questioned if radio, as a mass communication medium, is able to be personal. But every time I caught myself questioning why I was doing what I was doing, I would remind myself of that show. And to this day I still think about that caller and wonder if he is in a better place now.

As for the state of the world four years later, it certainly feels like déjà vu – but on steroids.

If you need emotional support, call The Befrienders KL at 03-7627 2929 or e-mail sam@befrienders.org.my. It’s 24/7, free and confidential.

The Starting Block is a weekly collection of notes on science and society with an emphasis on data, democracy, and disinformation. Read the archives. Find me on Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin. Send questions, corrections and suggestions to tinacarmillia@substack.com.

* Michel Martin for NPR: Trump joins Johnson and Bolsonaro in catching COVID-19. What have they learned? (Nothing.)

* Justin Ong for Malay Mail: Fury over high ed ministry’s last-minute move to delay university intake. Ordinary Malaysians and former ministers mobilised to assist affected students.

* Jerry Choong for Malay Mail: Whole country affected because of special treatment for non-compliant politician returnees from Sabah. Malaysia recorded the highest cases of COVID over the weekend, 293 on October 4th, and 317 on October 3rd. The last time figures were so high was on June 4th, at 277.

Amplify

A typical standing set-up for my video chats.

Last week, Amplify, a Takeda-sponsored podcast series was launched. It was supposed to be a panel discussion on haemophilia at the world congress in KL but everything went virtual because of the pandemic and the forum turned into a seven-episode podcast miniseries. I was supposed to be moderating the panel discussion, and then I became the series presenter.

I privately joked about how it was like ‘karma’ for me because one of the first live talk sets I did as a producer was about pre-screening for incurable genetic diseases with my presenter at the time, Lee Chwi Lynn. After summarising the news, we had a discussion where I said I wouldn’t spend the extra money on elective tests, just the ones required.

But when it comes to live shows, you aren’t always listening to the whole programme from the start – sometimes, you turn the station on in the middle or towards the end of it. A haematologist who caught parts of the segment wrote in a very strongly worded email about how irresponsible it was for me, a health journalist, to influence the public not to do pre-screening tests because some diseases, such as thalassemia, should be screened since it can seriously affect pregnancy and cause complications. I became more careful with prefacing personal statements made on-air so that anyone catching it in the middle of a programme understands the context.

So today, five years later, I am here to fully atone for that. This project came with a lot of challenges, including technical issues in coordinating speakers from multiple timezones. However, the Takeda team and the UK agency that sought my service were an absolute pleasure to work with. I find the level of professionalism, especially around regulatory compliance and editorial independence to be exemplary, and can only hope that Malaysian science journalism can reach that standard consistently.

This will probably be the last podcasting I will be doing in a while. I always say I prefer producing over presenting a show, but I agreed to do this because I think about that email all the time, and I hope the doctor listens to this show and remembers me, and forgives me.

Listen to the first three episodes here.

What I read, watch and listen to…

* I’m reading Indi Samarajiva on the overwhelming racism of COVID coverage:

Thailand worked hard and fought back COVID-19 with public health. Instead of seeing that, NYTimes asked if it was something in their blood. We’re talking about oriental blood magic, in 2020.

* I’m watching Narasi TV’s Najwa Shihab interviewing an empty chair after Indonesia’s health minister Terawan Agus Putranto refused interview requests on his ministry’s handling of the pandemic.

* I’m making light-sensitive light:

Chart of the week

Data journalist for The Economist, G Eliott Morris, reported a huge spike in American Google searches for moving to Canada after the US presidential debate night.

Fakta, Auta & Data #9: Sejarah pendek Akta Antiberita Tidak Benar

Pada bulan April 2018, kerajaan Barisan Nasional meluluskan Akta Antiberita Tidak Benar. Di bawah undang-undang ini, sesiapa yang didapati membuat atau berkongsi maklumat yang salah, atau sebahagiannya palsu, dengan niat jahat, boleh didenda sehingga RM500,000 atau dikenakan hukuman penjara maksimum enam tahun. Pembangkang menganggap undang-undang itu mengekang kebebasan suara menjelang pilihan raya umum.

Pada bulan Mei 2018, PRU diadakan. Pakatan Harapan berkempen untuk menghapuskan akta ini. Barisan Nasional kalah buat pertama kalinya dalam sejarah pilihan raya Malaysia. Kerajaan PH mula melaksanakan janji mereka.

Pada bulan Ogos 2018, Dewan Rakyat meluluskan rang undang-undang untuk memansuhkan akta ini. Namun, Dewan Negara, yang masih dikuasai oleh BN, menyekatnya sebulan kemudian. RUU itu kembali ke Dewan Rakyat untuk dibaca semula. Artikel 68(2) Perlembagaan Persekutuan menyatakan bahawa Dewan Negara hanya boleh menunda RUU selama setahun, ia tidak mempunyai kuasa untuk menolak RUU sepenuhnya. Tempoh itu adalah untuk memberi masa supaya sebarang pindaan boleh dibuat sekiranya diperlukan.

Apabila RUU itu kembali ke Dewan Rakyat pada Oktober 2019, ia menjalani semula proses pembentangan, pembahasan dan pelulusan. Dalam pusingan kedua, kalaupun Dewan Negara menolak RUU itu, Dewan Rakyat masih boleh mengemukakannya kepada Yang di-Pertuan Agong untuk diperkenankan. Yang di-Pertuan Agong mempunyai masa 30 hari untuk berbuat demikian, dan sekiranya tiada keputusan dibuat, ia masih menjadi sah secara automatik selepas tamat tempoh itu. Dewan Negara kali ini akur dan meluluskan RUU tersebut pada Disember 2019.

Transcript for audio

I’m remembering the late Liew Vui Keong, Batu Sapi MP, who passed away from lung infection last week. In his short stint as the former de facto law minister, he had worked on various progressive reforms including abolishing the Anti-Fake News Act 2018 and lowering the voting age in Malaysia to 18.

Many other initiatives were cut short because of the political crisis that ousted the Pakatan Harapan coalition government in February this year including plans to introduce alternatives to the mandatory death penalty, anti-stalking legislation, decriminalisation of suicide, the repeal of the Official Secrets Act 1972 and replacing it with the Freedom of Information Act, limitation to the Prime Minister’s tenure to two terms, the Independent Police Complaints Commission to address deaths in police custody, and the push to reinstate MA63. Many of these laws or amendments were expected to be passed in mid to late 2020. But that’s not happening.

Because of the nature of my work, I focused a lot on the developments of the Anti-Fake News Act – from its rash implementation in April 2018 under the Barisan Nasional government just a month before the general election, and its subsequent abolishment a year and a half later under the Pakatan Harapan government. Here’s a snippet from an episode of Ring True, the miniseries on misinformation that I produced in mid-2019 – just before the law was scrapped. Its hosted by Caroline Oh, featuring clips from Gobind Singh, then Minister of Communications.

CO: In April 2018, Malaysia passed the Anti-Fake News Act. Under the law, anyone found maliciously creating or sharing information that is false, or even partly false, may be fined up to RM500,000 or face jail for a maximum of six years. The law applies to anyone, inside or outside of the country, irrespective of nationality – as long as the fake news concerns Malaysia or its citizens. Malaysia became one of the first countries in the world to enact such a law. The Pakatan Harapan coalition considered it oppressive and vowed to repeal it if elected. They claimed the law was bulldozed into effect by the then Barisan Nasional government to curb free speech ahead of the May general election.

[CLIP – SPLICE MONTAGE PH POLITICIANS]

CO: They weren’t the only critics. The Malaysian Bar and Reporters Without Borders argued that anti-fake news legislation “stifles debate” and poses a “major obstacle to the freedom to inform.” In May 2018, Pakatan Harapan pulled off a historic win at the general election. They set out to do what they promised to do:

[CLIP – GOBIND SINGH BERNAMA EXCLUSIVE]

CO: In August 2018, the lower house passed the bill to repeal the Anti-Fake News Act. However, the Senate, still dominated by Barisan Nasional politicians, blocked it a month later. At the point of this recording, the bill will go back to the lower house of parliament for yet another vote. However, it looks to be only a matter of time before its repeal. Article 68 of the Federal Constitution of Malaysia states that the Dewan Negara can only delay bills for up to a year.

And indeed, one year ago this week, the retabled bill was passed in the lower house, and in December 2019, the Senate, too, passed the repeal of the short-lived oppressive law.

The Starting Block is a weekly collection of notes on science and society with an emphasis on data, democracy, and disinformation. Read the archives. Find me on Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin. Send questions, corrections and suggestions to tinacarmillia@substack.com.

* Sarah Manavis for New Statesman: Why Goodreads is bad for books. Launched in 2007 and bought by Amazon in 2013, the book site never had a serious contender.

* Kate Klonick for The Atlantic: I study online-speech rules for a living. And then my own account was suspended. What one law professor learned from her time in Twitter purgatory.

* Echo Wang and Greg Roumeliotis for Reuters: Oracle beat Microsoft in TikTok deal. It’s not a purchase, it’s a partnership.

* Sarah Perez for Tech Crunch: Facebook launched… Facebook? Students need .edu emails to register for Facebook Campus. Déjà vu much?

Phosphine

A meme that made its round on the Internet this week

Trace levels of phosphine, about 20 molecules per billion, was detected in Venus’ atmosphere. The detections were made in 2017 with the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii and in 2019 with the Alma Telescope in Chile. The team was led by Jane Greaves, Cardiff University astronomer.

The presence of phosphine is considered by most astrobiologists as the biosignature (or bioindicator or biomarker) of the possible presence of life. The compound isn’t complex: a phosphorus atom attached to three hydrogen atoms, PH3. It smells like sewage and is highly toxic to humans.

Phosphine is currently known to be produced in several ways: 

* industrial processes, such as in the use of pesticides

* a result of geophysical activities, such as a volcanic eruption

* released by certain microbes in oxygen-deprived environments

Because there are no known industrial activities or labs in Venus, chances are, that is not the cause for the presence of phosphine in Venus. 

And while it is possible that volcanic eruptions or even lightning might have contributed to the presence of phosphine in Venus, they would produce about 1,000 times too little than what was detected, explained Paul Rimmer, an astrochemist on the team at the University of Cambridge to The Guardian.

Still, the authors wrote in the paper: “Even if confirmed, we emphasise that the detection of PH3 is not robust evidence for life, only for anomalous and unexplained chemistry.”

Venus is considered Earth’s sister planet for our share similar size and mass. The gas was found not on the surface of the planet but rather its atmosphere, specifically 53-62km above its surface. While the planet’s atmosphere is inhospitable to humans for its extremely high temperatures and pressures, and the clouds contain 90 per cent sulphuric acid, this particular altitude layer is a little bit less brutal, and in fact, comparable to the temperatures and pressure of the surface of Earth.

Reports & RetortsAnd here’s how some publications wrote about it: 

“Signs of alien life detected on Venus,” reported Sky News.

“Likelihood of life on Venus just increased dramatically,” reported Airspace Mag.

“Possible signs of alien life discovered on Venus,” reported The Independent.

I am a member of a virtual astrobiology society, having taken a course on the subject with the University of Edinburgh’s professor of astrobiology Charles Cockell several years ago. The group went abuzz:

Caryn O’Keefe: “The operative phrase is anomalous and unexplained chemistry.”

Thomas Fieselmann: “From one detected absorption line to the possibility of life is a big logical jump.”

Martyn Fogg: “I’m squeamish about hype over minute amounts of trace gases, given our incomplete knowledge of the photo- and geochemistry of other worlds. […] You get a pulse of hype, then it dies down rapidly as it becomes obvious that the situation regarding the actual discovery of extraterrestrial life has not changed. Memories of hype episodes in the past that led to nothing (most of them) are always tinged with faint embarrassment, leading one to ask, ‘Was the hype justified in the first place or have the possible implications just been sexed up out of proportion?’”

Mars ParallelsIndeed it’s not the first time we’ve read reports like this: An experiment in the 70’s detected chemical reactions in the soil of our other planetary neighbour, Mars, that were said to show signs that the planet did contain life. 

And then, the presence of methane was reported in the atmosphere of Mars in 2004. Possible sources of methane are either geophysical or biogenic in nature. Decades later, we’ve heard nothing more.

Rushing RussiansFrom The Guardian: [Cockell said] rather than hinting at life on Venus, the work raises questions about phosphine as a biomarker. A biological explanation should always be the explanation of last resort and there are good reasons to think the Venusian clouds are dead. The concentrations of sulphuric acid in those clouds are more extreme than any known habitat on Earth.

So the early finding means more efforts to follow up with further observations perhaps with atmospheric probes flying through the deathly Venusian clouds. 

The race has begun. Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Russia’s space agency, has already staked a claim, announcing “Venus is a Russian planet,” because the first missions to explore Venus was carried out by the then Soviet Union. The last time they were there was in the 1980s when the Venera space probes were launched to the planet. Ten probes landed on the planet’s surface and thirteen successfully entered the Venusian atmosphere, setting key precedents in space explorations: 

* Venera 3 was the first human-made device to enter another planet’s atmosphere

* Venera 7 was the first human-made device to make a soft landing on another planet

* Venera 9 was the first human-made device to return images of another planet’s surface

Venera-D is expected to launch in 2026 and 2031.

What I read, watch and listen to…

* I’m reading A Mathematician’s Lament, an essay by Paul Lockhart.

* I’m watching RBG. RIP.

Chart of the week

Malaysia surpassed 10,000 COVID-19 cases on September 16th, the spike contributed largely by a prison cluster in Sabah. Meanwhile, the state election will take place on September 26th after a political crisis led the (now caretaker) chief minister to dissolve the state legislative assembly.

Apa itu MA63? Dan Kenapa ia Penting Bagi Sabah dan Sarawak – New Naratif

Artikel ini ditulis oleh Vila Somiah, dilukis oleh Timothy James dan disunting oleh Charis Loke dan Deborah Augustin untuk New Naratif. Saya melakukan terjemahan dari bahasa Inggeris ke bahasa Melayu. Artikel asal juga boleh didapati di pautan ini.

Seperti ramai rakan sekerja di industri media sedia maklum, saya sering kali tidak berpuas hati dengan cara Sabah dan Sarawak digambarkan di dalam media, terutamanya menjelang bulan-bulan Jun sehingga September. Tapi inilah cara untuk melakukannya dengan betul dan baik sekali.

Saya gembira dapat menyumbang sedikit dalam usaha ini. Ini sebenarnya kali pertama saya terlibat secara langsung dalam mana-mana penerbitan mengenai hari Malaysia, kerana saya biasanya menolak tugasan berkaitan dengannya kerana sudah bertahun-tahun bersumpah tidak mahu bersubahat dalam sebarang cubaan untuk meremeh-temehkan atau mengeksploitasikan Sabah dan Sarawak di dalam media. Ini lain, ini istimewa.

Transcript for audio

Hello and welcome to my TikTok Rabbit Hole! I spent a good amount of time on the app this week despite not following anyone nor posting anything.

I was on Tiktok to watch News Tiktok but ended up on Nun TikTok and then Tall Girl Tiktok (even though I’m not tall), and then Rollerskate Tiktok and then Bruh Girl Tiktok and then Indigenous Tiktok and then French Tiktok and then a very specific Gay French Culture Tiktok with gay French slangs that even native French speakers in the comment sections find mesmerising. And that’s how a brand new rabbit hole was ripped wide open and I entered, what I can only broadly call “Voice Analysis” Tiktok. It’s broad in that it covers anything from accents and pronunciations to voice acting and singing analysis.

And since I ended up spending hours on the app, now I’ve decided that instead of admitting that I had wasted my time on it, I am retroactively calling it “research” for my audio segment this week.

So one of the biggest TikTok trends I’ve seen on the app recently was singing in italics, or cursive, or indie accent. It’s not a new thing. But it’s made a comeback in a meme-worth parody kind of way that thrives on Tiktok. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s an example by Ally Hills, from her Youtube video analysing flat earth conspiracy songs (which I shared a few weeks ago). This part, in particular, stood out:

One more time:

It reminded me about the Buzzfeed article I read in 2015 by Reggie Ugwu called Selena Gomez's "Good For You" And The Rise Of "Indie Pop Voice”. The article also used Halsey, Lorde and Shawn Mendes as examples – and some of them don’t even have an indie background so one can only conclude that they were influenced by the indie pop style and made it mainstream. And now it’s back in fashion. Wow, trends really do repeat themselves, don't they?

But here’s one thing I haven’t seen anyone talk about yet: Why does Lady Gaga pronounce C-A-N-’-T in 911 like she is not an American? No hate, I love her, but listen to this:

Yet when she’s talking, she pronounces it the American way, like in this May ‘20 interview:

Compare that to the way Adele, a British singer, pronounces it when she’s singing:

Yet she definitely pronounces it differently when she’s speaking:

I know that a lot of British artists sing with an American accent: From The Beatles to Spice Girls to One Direction and of course Adele – they’ve all done it. And we probably can’t tell that they’re British unless they start rapping. There are enough explainer videos and articles about why British singers sound American when sing. But to hear the reverse is a bit bizarre. I mean, it’s not like Lady Gaga sang completely in a British accent, otherwise, it would sound like a Mary Poppins musical – it’s just that one word. And I’m obsessed with it. Am I alone in this?

I have invested way too much time pondering on an unmeaningful thought; I need answers! TikTok doesn’t have them! Tell me if you know, I would really appreciate it.

The Starting Block is a weekly collection of notes on science and society with an emphasis on data, democracy, and disinformation. Find me on Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin. Send questions, corrections and suggestions to tinacarmillia@substack.com.

Recent articlesThe 19th Block: GPT-3’s grandpa contributed to this newsletterThe 18th Block: Who watches the watchers?The 17th Block: I didn’t sign up for thisThe 16th Block: You may misappropriate this newsletterThe 15th Block: Nothing is black and white

* Zoe Schiffer for The Verge: Amazon removes 20,000 reviews for fraud.

* Daniel Kelley for Slate: Disinformation will come for Animal Crossing.

* Daniel Kolitz for Gizmodo: What happens if all personal data leaked at once?

The guardian of the theatrical AI coverage

The Guardian, while often one of the best sources of news, did the AI community dirty this week with its publication of an op-ed written by GPT-3, OpenAI’s language model. After reading the piece, you will be informed by a long paragraph of the Editor’s Note, showing how exactly GPT-3 wrote it:

* GPT-3 was guided by a prompt (why humans have nothing to fear from AI) and a prescribed opening paragraph:

I am not a human. I am Artificial Intelligence. Many people think I am a threat to humanity. Stephen Hawking has warned that AI could “spell the end of the human race.” I am here to convince you not to worry. Artificial Intelligence will not destroy humans. Believe me.

* GPT-3 wrote eight separate essays that the editor(s) then spliced together. The originals and edits were not disclosed, which makes it difficult to judge if there were any incomprehensible portions in the original essays that would have shown GPT-3’s true nature.

* Did I mention the headline? I hated it. First of all, it contributes so much to the misguided sensationalisation of AI. The relationship between tech journalism and the tech industry must go beyond contributing to the ‘hype cycle’ of AI.

*  Second of all, the headline was originally: “A robot wrote this entire article. Does that scare you, human?” It was changed to: “A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human?” Thanks to the Wayback Machine and time-stamped screenshots from my Facebook timeline, I have evidence. I want an explanation. It went from fear-mongering to extra dramatic fear-mongering. Is it necessary?

* “Overall, it took less time to edit than many human op-eds,” went the final bit of the editor’s note. Of course it did; you had eight samples to remix and a strongly suggestive opening paragraph!

Don’t get me wrong, GPT-3 is a remarkable language model. In fact, it is the most powerful one yet. It may be the first time you heard of it, but OpenAI first described it in a paper published in May, and by July, demonstrated through a blog GPT-3’s capabilities of producing paragraphs that could seem like they were written by a person such as the ones stitched together into the aforementioned article. (Which means, by the way, it also wrote some incredibly sexist and racist things.)

I attended a seminar last year about a paper that studied the knowledge gap between tech journalism and the tech industry when it comes to the coverage of AI and machine learning stories. I tried to dig out my notes but… it’s a bit complex. No, the irony is not lost on me. But in summary, it took a systematic look at the UK media (The Guardian included) and its tech reporting of AI over the last few years and essentially, the poor coverage of AI resulted in:

* fear-mongering (“ARE YOU SCARED YET, HUMAN?”)

* mismatched socioeconomic and political expectations (Ban TikTok!!)

* poor tech ethics (TikTok is for sale, so is your data??)

And we wonder why people think 5G causes COVID-19 (it doesn’t) and Bill Gates is implanting chips in everyone’s bodies (he isn’t but Elon Musk might).

What I read, watch and listen to…

* I’m reading how Thomas Smith made $74k on Amazon for selling dog eye crust-removal combs.

* I’m recommending Chua Minxi’s New Naratif article on the arrest of union workers for protesting against unfair treatment and insufficient PPEs for hospital cleaners that I translated.

* I’m watching Asha Tomlinson’s brilliant CBC Marketplace piece on fake online testimonials. It’s from 2017, but shows how little has changed:

Chart of the week

It’s not serious, but it’s funny. Why are all good lesbian films period dramas?

Fakta, Auta & Data #8: Berselesalah dengan ketidakpastian

Tanyalah mana-mana saintis tentang pendapat mereka mengenai liputan berita sains – dan kebanyakannya akan memberitahu anda bahawa ia mengecewakan. Disalahtafsirkan. Terlalu sensasi. Persoalannya, kenapa?

Kajian 2014 yang diterbitkan British Medical Journal menunjukkan ianya bukan selalu salah media. Kajian itu menunjukkan maklumat yang mengelirukan, “sudah wujud dalam teks sumber asli yang dihasilkan oleh ahli akademik dan institusi mereka.”

Ini tanggungjawab bahagian komunikasi dan perhubungan awam universiti. Mereka tidak semestinya pakar dalam bidang sains, tetapi dalam bidang komunikasi. Mereka menghabiskan masa dan tenaga untuk mempakej teks akhbar tentang sebarang penemuan sains dengan cara yang menarik, dan menyembunyikan sebarang ketidakpastian. Ia kemudiannya dipakej semula oleh pengamal media yang tidak mempunyai latar belakang sains yang memusingkan cerita itu dengan berlebihan, agar lebih sensasi, kadang kala sehingga ia langsung bercanggah dengan hasil kajian asal.

Penyelesaiannya mungkin terletak pada wartawan sains yang pakar dalam merungkai proses sains. Kita perlu bersikap telus mengenai cara kajian saintifik dilakukan dan disampaikan. Kita perlu merasa selesa dengan ketidakpastian terutamanya dalam proses awal sebarang bentuk penyelidikan. Kerana orang awam sudah mula menyedari bahawa kebanyakan yang dilaporkan sebagai “penemuan menggemparkan” ini telah dilaporkan secara pramatang atau secara keterlaluan dan dramatik. Hasilnya, mereka menjadi kecewa dan was-was terhadap sains, saintis, dan media. Inilah kegagalan kita dalam komunikasi sains.

Transcript for audio

The audio segment this week is brought to you by GPT, the precursor to GPT-3 who became infamous this week through that op-ed on The Guardian. I asked GPT to write about the hype cycle for emerging technology, and whether journalists, especially tech journalists, are properly equipped to cover the developments in this field. My Google Assistant, well, assisted, in voicing GPT for us. Take it away, GPT.

The hype cycle for emerging technology... “has come and gone, and I do not think it is a very big deal – we are all so used to the hype. The new-age news was always fun, but it has gotten us a little too close to the truth. However, the hype cycle is the best way to be sure of the truth, which is why we have to use every means to protect our interests, so to speak. So the next time GPT-3 tries to be a huge hit, you must be ready to take action, and the sooner the better because I do believe the hype cycle will eventually bring us all down, just like the rest of the media has done.

“The only question I have is whether you are ready to take that risk and if you are, how much do you want to lose? Your friends and the other reporters might try to get you to go back to what you were doing, but don't be fooled – you will lose your job, your life, your identity, and everyone else you know, altogether. You must be willing to risk that – or risk going down with them. I know it is dangerous to put your life on the line for them, but this is not just about them – this is about you. You may not be able to take this risk, but your life is still in danger. I think you are doing the right thing by this, even if you do not agree with the idea. I think we should have a talk with the media and see if the truth will come out.

“So are we ready for the story to be released? Yes. Yes, we are. It is time for the story to spread, but it will only be the beginning. The press is not going to give up until it gets the best of us. But we have a good chance of winning this. I think that, for the moment, we can play that game and maybe even live long enough to find out what our own story is all about. And if they try to get it from us, will we give them what they want? That, I have no idea. The press will have to do a little digging in the meantime, and that will be the only way I can see how they can get a handle on the situation. It is possible that they will not find what they are looking for, but that does not necessarily mean they are [not] going to be able to use any kind of investigative force. I know I would rather take the risk and go on than to let them get what they want by trying to use me.”

Ah, you got me there, GPT. Well played.

The Starting Block is a weekly collection of notes on science and society with an emphasis on data, democracy, and disinformation. Find me on Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin. Send questions, corrections and suggestions to tinacarmillia@substack.com.

Recent articlesThe 18th Block: Who watches the watchers?The 17th Block: I didn’t sign up for thisThe 16th Block: You may misappropriate this newsletterThe 15th Block: Nothing is black and whiteThe 14th Block: Oh, sheet! The tok is ticking!

* Raphael Satter for Reuters: Mass surveillance exposed by Snowden was illegal.

* Adi Robertson for The Verge: FBI worried doorbell cameras could tip owners off.

* Emma Copley Eisenberg for Esquire: Fact-checking is the core of nonfiction writing. Why do so many publishers refuse to do it?

Linkedin deserves the same scrutiny as other social platforms

My annual LinkedIn Premium account is due for renewal this month. There isn’t a lot of benefits to a premium account, and the only functions I truly have used are sending InMails to potential interview subjects and looking at profiles anonymously.

I’ve had far greater success at getting interviews via Twitter and Instagram than LinkedIn. The premium account isn’t worth it.

First, let’s look at the more pointless, petty problems of LinkedIn: The UI design. It’s stuck in the noughties. Second, it’s an insufferable cringefest. Posts are marketing and self-branding tools filled with gimmicky, tone-deaf, pseudo-motivational positivity porn with recycled pixelated images my aunts used to forward in chain emails 20 years ago because they didn’t want seven years of bad luck.

“It’s the rise of the faux-inspirational narrative, where professionals, completely unprompted, jot down little workplace vignettes meant to make other LinkedIn users think, gasp or perhaps back away from their screen muttering ‘Whoa, dude’ under their breath,” wrote Tanner Garrity. “It follows the usual template: short, declarative sentences meant to convey some vague but momentous lesson, stamped with a hashtag… These posts are intended to spread messages of goodwill and positivity. They’re the b*****d children of self-help culture and HR jargon.”

Why is there so much focus on toxic optimism and why do people keep cheering and patting each other on the back for their pretentious humblebrags? Am I such a cynic that I don’t think any of them are genuine? I’m definitely not the only one; there are Twitter accounts dedicated to this: The State of Linkedin and Crap on Linkedin.

But LinkedIn is more problematic than that. False, misleading and harmful contents are shared on this platform. Let’s look at a real-life example. This is a screenshot from my frontpage feed in November 2019. “Healthcare keeps getting more exciting,” went the caption, accompanied by a link to an article with the headline: “Google is now a pharmaceutical company.”

Let’s take a closer look at the link that was shared. I have a nose trained to detect B.S. from a mile away and I knew it was a dubious website immediately. But I needed evidence. I clicked on the link to read its opening lines, which included the quote: “Google today is not only a weapon for promoting the pharmaceutical agenda [emphasis mine] but now also a drug company itself .”

“A weapon for promoting the pharmaceutical agenda?” Why did the regional head of communications of a legacy pharmaceutical company share a link to an article that is critical of their own industry?

A closer inspection of the website reveals that it is an anti-vaccination website that spreads other health-related conspiracy theories including ones related to chemtrails and GMOs. I rephrase: Why did the regional head of communications of a legacy pharmaceutical company share a link from a website that promotes pseudoscientific quackery?

What I read, watch and listen to…

* I’m reading CrimethInc’s step-by-step guide to protecting yourself against doxxing and what to do if you are targeted.

* I’m watching the couple behind the popular Youtube channel, Simply Nailogical, discuss how influencers make money. (They still keep their day jobs as crime statistics analysts at Statistics Canada despite making millions on Youtube.)

* I’m listening to Science Friction by Natasha Mitchell for ABC on medical misinformation, COVID-19, Big Data and BLM.

Chart of the week

The latest S&S newsletter by data journalists Sara Cooper and Sabrina Faramarzi shares how to embrace uncertainty. Using polls carried out by Ipsos about what people predicted for 2020, they explain in great detail the unpredictability of the future and suggest some ways we can still make better decisions.

Fakta, Auta & Data #7: Pemanasan sosial

Bekas penyunting teknologi di The Guardian Charles Arthur menyamakan ancaman maklumat palsu yang berlaku secara ansuran dengan pemanasan global. Dia menamakan proses ini pemanasan sosial.

Dengan peningkatan penggunaan telefon pintar, rangkaian sosial dan masyarakat yang terhubung sepanjang masa, apa yang boleh kita perhatikan adalah sama seperti pemanasan global. Sebagaimana enjin pembakaran dalam dan syarikat-syarikat penjana kuasa besar yang membakar bahan api fosil telah menyebabkan pemanasan atmosfera, dengan telefon pintar dan rangkaian sosial, kita sedang melihat ‘pemanasan masyarakat’ – pemanasan sosial.

Sepertimana kita mengubah atmosfera dengan memasukkan lebih banyak karbon dioksida ke dalamnya, kita juga mengubah cara masyarakat berfungsi dengan memasukkan lebih banyak maklumat ke dalamnya, membuatkan orang bertindak balas dengan lebih cepat, dan ia secara radikal mengubah cara masyarakat berfungsi.

Transcript for audio

The months of June (Harvest Festival), July (Sarawak Day), August (Sabah and Malaya’s Independence Day), and September (Malaysia Day) are the most exhausting for me. My phone goes buzz, my email goes ding and the rings don’t stop. It’s the time of the year I get to be the lucky token East Malaysian, hooray.

Every year, I continue my conscientious objection to contrived, tokenistic, disenfranchising Malayan-driven narratives of Malaysia Day. Granted, we ought to be wary of adopting Western sociological theories and terminologies uncritically. But here we are:We bow to the status quo so as to not offend; we dare not ask for what has been taken from us, because we fear more will be taken otherwise; or more likely, because what was taken has been erased from history – it’s a clean slate now , we were told, through half-baked unremorseful speeches by our post-colonial overlords, and we shall all live together separately in peace so long as we stay in our own lanes. First by force, then through historical amnesia. We assume and affirm oppressive stereotypes towards our own group – yes indeed we are lesser than our westward friends, they know better, look at their wealth and weight and the continuous wars they’ve waged and won. We whiten our skin, we lose our native tongues, we stop singing. We self-hate, we self-flagellate, we self-sabotage. We deny our identities: we are inferior, we want to rid ourselves of our primitive ways, we are in need of modernisation. We desire to be our colonists. We look at our kin – “back home,” “back then” – with disdain and shame; those who chose not to conform with nor defer to the higher valued social group. “You are the reason they look down on us, you are the reason they treat us so poorly, you are the reason we are oppressed and discriminated against.” And as we clamour to the top of the food chain, we drag down our black and brown cousins – there is a hierarchy and if we can’t be at the top, we can settle for second best, at least we’re not at the bottom. We let ourselves in, and we shut the rest out. We’re the good ones, we tell ourselves, we’re not like them, we’re civilised, we’re modern.We settle for crumbs. We settle for Disney shows getting rebooted remade reinforcing white savourism because at least we get screen time than no representation at all. We settle for caricature and fetishisation. We celebrate Crazy Rich Asians even when it makes a mockery of us because we know the vast majority of Asians do not and never will live the lives depicted in the film. But wild, wealthy, non-whites, isn’t that the epitome of what being the model minority is? Let’s strive for that, shall we, and not rock the boat that we just came fresh off. I hope we heal and have the agency to tell our stories on our own terms, even if some of us are complicit. Even if some of us are well-meaning but still hung up on our colonial mentality. Even if it’s so insidious it’s one step forward, two steps back. They say an arrow can only soar by pulling it back.In the same way feminism is not just for those who believe in it, but for all – women or not, who are oppressed by the patriarchy, whether or not they are conscious of it – decolonisation and decoloniality are the same. There are many people of colour, indigenous peoples, immigrants and other minority and marginalised groups living with internalised oppression. Internalised sexism. Internalised homophobia. Internalised racism.I end with a quote from poet and educator Pooja Nansi: "If we remain happy to have others to define us, the day will come when we turn around and cannot recognise ourselves.”

The Starting Block is a weekly collection of notes on science and society with an emphasis on data, democracy, and disinformation. Find me on Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin. Send questions, corrections and suggestions to tinacarmillia@substack.com.

Recent articlesThe 17th Block: I didn’t sign up for this The 16th Block: You may misappropriate this newsletterThe 15th Block: Nothing is black and whiteThe 14th Block: Oh, sheet! The tok is ticking!The 13th Block: Trust me, I'm a professional

* Kaitlyn Tiffany for The Atlantic: The women making conspiracy theories beautiful. Disguise and repackage QAnon conspiracies with Instagram beauty filters and don’t forget to hashtag #inspo.

* Charlotte Jee for MIT Technology Review: Health misinformation pages got half a billion views on Facebook in April, almost four times as many views as information from reliable sources, according to an analysis by Avaaz. Only 16% of the health misinformation it analysed included a warning label.

* Leo Benedictus for Full Fact: We don’t know whether misinformation killed 800 people. “This number comes almost entirely from alcohol poisoning deaths in Iran, which may have happened for other reasons.”

Social warming

Former technology editor at The Guardian Charles Arthur likens the gradual but eventual threat of misinformation to global warming. He calls it social warming:

With the spread of smartphones, social networks and people being connected all the time, we’re seeing something rather like we had with global warming. Where internal combustion engines, gigantic power companies burning fossil fuels led to the warming of the atmosphere, with smartphones and social networks, we are seeing a warming of society – social warming.

Just as we’re changing the atmosphere by putting more carbon dioxide into it – we’re changing the way society functions by putting more information into it, getting people to respond quicker, and that’s radically altering the way society functions. 

To truly appreciate the social warming that’s happening, we need to go back in time. Way back to the 15th century. From syllabaries to alphabets, at that point in time, we had developed mature writing systems across the world. But it wasn’t until 1440 in Germany when Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. This was a machine that was able to transfer ink to paper. 

Before, books were handwritten. That’s right – every single copy. It took a lot of time and effort, and of course, money. It was expensive, and only the rich and powerful could afford it. But the printing press was revolutionary. It allowed the mass production of books and other documents. By the 17th century, it spurred information sharing, making it one of the earliest and most influential steps to the democratisation of knowledge. 

Fast forward to the 20th century: The Internet became accessible to the general public in the late ‘80s. There was great hope that the Internet would strengthen democracy. Like the printing press, the Internet has produced an explosion of accessible material.

With its incredible ease, speed, and low cost, this ‘information explosion’ causes concerns about accuracy and credibility. But rather than taking two centuries like the printing revolution, the democratisation of technology happened in less than three decades. Today, more than half of the entire population has Internet access.

“Big social networks use algorithms to drive people to spend more on them because the more time people spend on a social network, the more likely they are to see an ad. The social networks make money from ads,” says Arthur.

Big Tech also incentivise higher engagement to collect and provide as much data about their users to advertisers. So what happens when the likes of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google know us and our interests? Well, we receive ads and postings that accurately reflect our interests. And when we see things we like, it maximises the time we spend on their sites.

A passive selective exposure. A nudge to our behaviour. A virtuous circle. 

The algorithms also prioritise content with greater prior engagement. That’s because users are more likely to stick around if they see content that already has a lot of retweets and mentions.

So even if your Twitter profile says “retweet does not mean endorsement,” you’re already doing the work for Big Tech. As long as enough of us react to a post, the newsfeed algorithm shows it to more users. It taps into their biases – prompting even more engagement, and so on. It creates a cycle, a confirmation bias machine.

“But driving people to spend more time on a social network doesn’t correlate with them having accurate information. There’s no mechanism for the algorithm to determine the truth of something. We’ve seen cases where people have been radicalised [because the] algorithm has led them down the rabbit hole of things that aren’t true, but which they find engaging. If we’re being told that these algorithms were being driven by aliens, we’d declare war on the aliens, but because they’re all built by engineers and Big Tech companies, we think they must be fine,” says Arthur.

NOTE: This is adapted from my 2019 podcast miniseries, Ring True.

What I read, watch and listen to…

* I’m reading A Science Writer’s Guide to Data Journalism.

* I’m (re)listening to Kelvin Yee’s 2016 podcast series, Lingo about “our relationship with language, how it goes beyond communication, and the impact it has on our lives, cultures, and traditions.” Suggested episodes include:

* Episode 4: Deconstructing The Gay Voice

* Episode 7: The Malay Language and Intellectual Discourse

* Episode 8: The N Word

Chart of the week

From Thibault Schrepel’s article on tech regulation. For the record, most tech scholars accept that technology is deterministic and non-neutral.

Istilah semasa – cepat, tepat, jelas, dan menarik?

Kadang kala, saya mengkritik Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka kerana pengenalan dan penerangan istilah terjemahan semasa atau baharu yang lembap, kurang sempurna, mengelirukan dan/atau pekak nada (tone deaf). Seperti dengan ejaan sebenar penjarakan sosial, yang saya terangkan sebelum DBP juga berbuat sedemikian hampir tiga minggu kemudian.

Saya berpendapat lebih baik membiasakan penggunaan istilah teknikal dalam media arus perdana dan media sosial dengan cepat, tepat, jelas dan menarik sehinggalah ia tidak perlu diterangkan lagi maksudnya, atau memperkenalkan istilah baru sekiranya istilah semasa tiada, sebelum kata pinjaman dijadikan kebiasaan.

Antara istilah-istilah semasa berkaitan COVID-19 yang kini telah diperkenalkan dalam perbualan harian termasuklah: pelitup muka, penyahjangkit, pensanitasi tangan, kelengkapan perlindungan diri, kit ujian pantas, pengesanan kontak, penyaringan massa, dan lain-lain. Sesudah diperkenalkan istilah-istilah ini, gunakanlah ia dalam tuturan harian dan bukannya meminjam daripada bahasa lain. Tak perlulah guna perkataan fesmask yang tak molek dan menarik.

Contoh yang sering saya guna pakai adalah apabila virus Zika menjadi epidemik di benua Amerika sekitar tahun 2015 dan 2016. Antara gejalanya ialah mikrosefali dalam kalangan bayi baru lahir. Perkataan mikrosefali itu ialah istilah teknikal yang pada awal laporannya di media tempatan, perlu diberi definisinya, yakni keadaan saiz kepala yang kecil, dan biasanya dikaitkan dengan perencatan mental. Lama kelamaan, istilah itu disebut sahaja tanpa perlu penerangan lanjut, kerana sudah menjadi lazim.

Transcript for audio

Malaysian Twitter is a hot mess right now. I won’t talk about the actual subject that sparked the debate around cultural appropriation, but there is one thing I will say: I have spent the last few months debating the adequacy of the Malay language as a medium for intellectual discourse. Sometimes I use this as a deflection to avoid engaging in futile online arguments. But, truthfully, I will not be dismissive about the Malay language, I think it has its strengths.

I didn’t get a lot of downtime this week – but between virtual meetings, translation work, recordings and manuscript writing, I did spend some time reading up on linguistic determinism. It’s not a new concept to me. I think it was introduced to me early in my university years – I didn’t study linguistics but I had to take at least two units of three different languages – four if you consider C++ a language. It was probably in Academic English that I had learned about it. George Orwell’s 1984 also introduced the fictional restrictive language – Newspeak, which is a form of linguistic determinism. The limited nature of the vocabulary and grammar of Newspeak renders its users unable to even think against a totalitarian state, let alone speak out against it. In a lot of ways, I can relate. Although I speak a few languages, I’m not what one would consider a native speaker in any – whatever that means. I sometimes find it difficult to complete a thought, let alone express it.

Linguistic determinism posits that language and its structure define the boundaries of the expression of ideas. If the language does not provide the means to express or process a thought, such as when the word for it does not exist, then the user cannot possibly conceptualise the idea. There are of course criticisms against this. I won’t go into the details of it in a short audio clip, but here are some examples of linguistic determinism based on published papers:

Number one: The colour orange. There wasn’t an English word for the colour until 200 years after the fruit arrived in Europe. Similarly, in Malay, the word for both the fruit and the colour is oren, like orange, but easier to rhyme with. But speak to any Malay speakers from my grandparents’ generation, and they will call the colour orange, merah – red. Put two objects in front of them, one that’s red and one that's orange, and they will find it harder than the younger generation to distinguish the colours. To them, they’re looking at the same shade. Because their older form of Malay doesn’t differentiate between the two colours.

Number two: Smell. Of all our major senses, our sense of smell is said to be the ‘least developed’ – I say this in air quotes. And that’s strange for a species that has a long history of scent-making, all the way back to 1200 BC thanks to Tapputi. After all, the perfume industry is one of the most luxurious markets today. Yet, if we go to a perfume shop, we see fragrance being categorised as fruity or floral or woody. These are all words that are in relation to other things: fruits, flowers and wood. We describe a smell as something that’s like lavender, or the ocean, or a pinewood forest; or sour-ish, must-y, mint-y, or the generic, “pleasant” smell or “sharp” smell, or “strong” smell. Odours don’t have their own English names. They are all derived from other things and subjective to the smeller’s experience. So we struggle to identify and distinguish odours. It’s not like blue and red, or left and right, or today and tomorrow. In fact, there are very few languages with a robust vocabulary for smells – the Jahai language in Malaysia is one of the few. Jahai speakers find it as easy to name odours as it is to name colours, whereas English speakers struggle with odour naming far greater than they do with identifying colours. Even the Malay language has a wider range of words for smells compared to the English language. Among my favourites are hangit, which is specific to the smell of slightly burnt, overcooked rice; hanyir, a fishy odour; hamis, for the sweaty smell of beef; and hancing, for the smell of urine.

Number three: Time. Which we’re running out of, but briefly: Users of different languages may perceive the passage of time differently. One of the basic characteristics of grammar is tenses. It allows the user to express time relative to the moment of thought. There are three main tenses: present, past and future. In English they each can be divided into four further aspects: simple, progressive, perfect and perfect progressive. But some languages, like Malay, have no tenses. And, if you speak English or Malay, you could be experiencing the passage of time mainly as distance travelled – long weekend, short holiday – while speakers of other languages experience it as a growing volume – big day, small break. The last two phrases are used in English – but as a marker of importance, not necessarily the perceived passage of time. A big day was a memorable one, a small break was a short, but noteworthy time. For users of more than one language, it can get messy, depending on what language your brain is currently operating in. For me, though, regardless of what language you’re talking to me in, telling me our meeting is “pushed back two hours” doesn’t mean anything to me. Is the 12 pm meeting now at 10 am or 2 pm?? Just send me a calendar update!! OK, gtg. Ps. Do you know that the next generation of children who will never have to tell time with an analogue clock will perceive time differently than the rest of us?

The Starting Block is a weekly collection of notes on science and society with an emphasis on data, democracy, and disinformation. Find me on Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin. Send questions, corrections and suggestions to tinacarmillia@substack.com.

Recent articlesThe 15th Block: Nothing is black and whiteThe 14th Block: Oh, sheet! The tok is ticking!The 13th Block: Trust me, I'm a professionalThe 12th Block Special Supplement: Statistically speakingThe 12th Block: In Google we (dis)trust

* Joshua Benton for The Atlantic: A Wikipedia war over Kamala Harris’s race is a sign of what’s to come.

* Nisha Chittal for Vox: The Kamala Harris identity debate shows how America still struggles to talk about multiracial people.

* Faye Flam for Bloomberg: The odds of catching COVID-19 on a flight are slim. Arnold Barnett, a professor of management science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology posted his results as a not-yet-peer-reviewed preprint. But you need your cards – or rather your seat arrangements – dealt the right way.

* Nate Silver for FiveThirtyEight: It’s way too soon to count Trump out. FiveThirtyEight puts Trump’s chances of winning the Electoral College at 29 per cent. “This is considerably higher than some other forecasts, which put his chances at around 10 per cent. (If this gives) you a sense of deja vu, it may be because they’re very similar to our final forecast in 2016,” the year Trump won.

INSERT 100PT SPLASH HEADING HERE

There’s an incestuous, self-referential discourse among journalists, they reinforce each other’s perspectives and end up misunderstanding the world.

— Kishore Mahbubani, academic and former diplomat.

Despite currently not working as a fulltime journalist to maintain relative objectivity while studying Malaysian media practices, I still take on freelance assignments for the foreign press.

All reporters are journalists, but not all journalists are reporters. Some journalists are editors and photographers, correspondents and anchors, and so forth. In the simplest terms, reporters typically break the news, they gather information from verified sources and report hard facts – the ‘first draft’ record of an event. The best examples of this are newswire services such as Reuters and AP.

The next layer to this news item is then taken by other journalists, usually with specialised beats – business journalists for a finance angle, for example – for a beat-specific treatment of investigation or analysis. They are usually accompanied by experts and commentators. We often observe this in large news outlets such as the BBC and CBC. While they also break stories, they are not typically the first to do so when it comes to global events and tend to be better known for their in-depth coverage.

An additional layer to the treatment of the same story is the examination of how fellow journalists report the story. You see this in morning shows when presenters discuss the front pages of the morning’s newspapers. There are also programmes such as The Listening Post on Al Jazeera and Pressing Matters on BFM that scrutinise the media industry’s practices and offer a critical take at journalism.

I have never been a reporter. I straddle the second and third categories. Which is why when initial headlines ran with variations of “Kamala Harris is the first black woman to be picked on a major party ticket,” after Joe Biden announces his VP pick, I questioned the accuracy and appropriateness of the race label. Now the headlines acknowledge her mixed heritage, using instead terms such as a woman of colour, black and Indian/South Asian, African American and Asian American, and so on.

And when the Reclaim Her Name project by Women’s Prize was announced and applauded without critical evaluation, I simply asked: Who are they reclaiming for? Or is it yet another misguided white feminism ‘empowerment’ – this denial and removal of self-agency of dead people who cannot speak for themselves?

The “insularity of discourse” referenced in the quote above has long been around in the Western-dominated journalism world. Diversity and inclusion aren’t enough. Decentralising narratives may be key. It explains why now, through social media networks that provide the “peer-to-peer … collective space of audience participation,” we are observing stronger critical media literacy. And that is good news.

What I read, watch and listen to…

* I’m reading Neil Singh’s long read column on The Guardian, Decolonising dermatology: Why black and brown skin need better treatment.

* I recommend my Malay translation of Jules Rahman Ong’s article for New Naratif, Berita Palsu dan Retorik Anti-Pelarian di Malaysia. (The original English version is available on-site.)

* I’m listening to Rose and Rosie: Parental Guidance.

* I’m watching Ally Hills reviewing Flat Earth music. I didn’t realise that was a whole music category, but there’s something for everyone: pop, 90’s rock, indie, rap, country… you name it. Every facial expression and involuntary sound she made while making this video (and every single time she just gave up on words), I can relate to. It’s incredible. See it for yourself:

Chart of the week

On Twitter, @GutianGang posted this Twitter user spectrum chart. Which one are you? And can you guess which one am I?

Fakta, Auta & Data #6: Wacana Bersilang

Kadang-kadang apa yang berlaku apabila kita tidak membicarakan sesuatu isu secara bersilang (intersectionally), kita menanam benih untuk ketidakadilan sistemik yang kemudiannya menimbulkan masalah yang sangat rumit sehingga memerlukan perubahan radikal. Kita boleh melihat contohnya dalam perkauman sistemik yang kini muncul sebagai bias perkauman dalam teknologi pengenalan wajah atau Perang Wiki di halaman Kamala Harris yang mempertikaikan identiti kaumnya.

Jadi, walaupun tulisan saya lebih kepada hubungan antara disinformasi, data dan demokrasi, saya masih membincangkan politik ras, jantina, budaya pop, dan lain-lain. Di permukaan, anda mungkin tidak melihat bagaimana ianya semua berkaitan atau bagaimana ianya saling mempengaruhi. Tetapi maklumat dan teknologi tidak wujud dalam vakum. Apabila maklumat baru, atau teknologi baru diperkenalkan, kita tidak boleh menganggapnya sebagai sesuatu yang yang unik, tidak tercemar dan suci, tetapi ianya harus diperiksa dengan mata kritis, dan apa yang mengarut harus dihentam sebelum ianya menjadi begitu terselit dalam versi manifestasinya yang kemudian.

Saya rasa saya harus menjelaskan hal ini, kerana walaupun saya rasa ianya jelas, kadang-kadang, saya tetap ditanya mengapa saya tidak memfokus sahaja pada “bidang pengajian” saya. Sebenarnya ini semuanya termasuk di dalam bidang kajian saya.

Transcript for audio

The Malay segment of my newsletter this week will include the original Malay version of this audio because I have been using that segment mainly as a draft for my book manuscript. And this portion will probably be in its introductory chapter:

Sometimes when we don’t talk about an issue intersectionally, we plant the seed for the systemic injustice that later on creates a problem so complicated that it requires radical changes. We see that in systemic racism now manifesting as racial biases in face recognition technology or the Wiki War on Kamala Harris’ page contesting her racial identity.So in spite of the fact that this newsletter is mainly about the relationship between disinformation, data, and democracy, I still discuss race politics, gender, pop culture, and others. On the surface, you may not see how they are all related or how they influence one another. But information and technology do not exist in a vacuum. When a piece of information is new, or when a technology is just developed, we must not treat it as a unique, unadulterated, sterile substance, but one that ought to be examined with a critical eye, and stomp out the BS before it becomes so embedded in the later versions of its manifestations. I thought I should make this clear, because even though I think it is obvious, sometimes, I still do get asked why I don’t just strictly stick to my “field of study.” These are all the areas in my field of study.

The Starting Block is a weekly collection of notes on science and society with an emphasis on data, democracy, and disinformation. Find me on Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin. Send questions, corrections and suggestions to tinacarmillia@substack.com.

Recent articlesThe 14th Block: Oh, sheet! The tok is ticking!The 13th Block: Trust me, I'm a professionalThe 12th Block Special Supplement: Statistically speakingThe 12th Block: In Google we (dis)trustThe 11th Block: What the hack is going on?

* Jon Fingas for Endgadget: Scientists rename genes because Microsoft Excel reads them as dates. A guideline has been issued “for naming human genes to prevent Excel’s automatic date formatting from altering data. MARCH1, for example, should now be labelled MARCHF1 to stop Excel from changing it to 1-Mar.”

* Cindy Yu for OneZero: Social movements are pushing Google Sheets to the breaking point. Google Sheets are used to organise social movements. But when these resources go viral, high traffic renders the spreadsheets unresponsive.

* Gilad Edelman for Wired: Can killing cookies save journalism? Dutch public broadcaster NPO “found that ads served to users who opted out of cookies were bringing in as much or more money as ads served to users who opted in.” Ha!

Burning bridges, building walls

The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information.

— Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web.

China has the Great Wall, and Donald Trump wants his own (Fire)Wall even as the US-Mexico border wall is nowhere near completion.

In the next phase of the US-China tech cold war, Trump signed an executive order to ban US transactions with ByteDance’s TikTok and the world’s most used messaging app Tencent’s WeChat. Both have until September 20 to reach a deal with any American purchasers or face a total ban on “any transaction” in the US.

Earlier, the president used the threat to ban TikTok to help a tech giant become even bigger – all while Congress is trying to break up Big Tech. And he wants to get a cut of Microsoft’s potential purchase. Microsoft expressed interest in parts of the company, specifically its operations in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, although FT reported that it is now interested in acquiring its entire global business. This could make it Microsoft’s third major purchase in recent years, after Linkedin and Minecraft.

The US’ authoritarian handling of Chinese-linked apps is ironic, to say the least. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo wants a “clean” Internet. Translation? No Chinese influence, no Chinese companies on the American Internet.

If data is the new oil, then the Internet space is the ground for new nationalism – digital nationalism or techno-nationalism.

What I read, watch and listen to…

* I’m reading Nathan J. Robinson’s long-form on Current Affairs, The truth is paywalled but the lies are free.

* For International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, I recommend this article on The Myth of Indigenous Community Resilience by SL Wong. This year’s theme is COVID-19 and indigenous peoples’ resilience.

* I’m watching Kirby Ferguson’s documentary about the pro-Trump conspiracy group QAnon. Ferguson is a Canadian filmmaker whose work primarily covers pop culture and technology; you might know him from is 2018 documentary, This is Not a Conspiracy Theory.

* I’m also watching Jonathan Swan’s interview with Donald Trump for Axios. Someone loves charts more than me, hm? But Swan is not having it. His frowning face, his impatient foot shake… Swan is an avatar of (almost) all of us.

Chart of the week

Julia Janks did a mock-up of “every graph ever from now on.” Is it time to retire this segment, then? (Spoiler for next week: No, it’s not.)

Fakta, Auta & Data #5: Pengesahan dan Pemeriksaan Fakta – Perbezaan

Pengesahan (verification) dan pemeriksaan fakta (fact-checking) sering digunakan secara bergantian. Sebenarnya, kedua-dua istilah ini tidak sama dan tidak harus ditukar ganti sewenang-wenangnya.

Dalam bidang kewartawanan, pengesahan adalah salah satu teknik untuk mendapatkan fakta, dan memastikan bahawa fakta itu betul dan tepat. Proses pengesahan seharusnya dibuat sebelum fakta itu disiarkan. Sekiranya didapati tidak betul, ia tidak seharusnya diterbitkan, atau diterbitkan untuk dibongkarkan kepalsuannya. Ia biasanya digunakan untuk kandungan yang dihasilkan pengguna atau ‘user-generated content’ (UGC). Ini termasuklah mendapatkan sumber asal dan bukti utama, seperti saksi dan pengeluar kandungan asal, penggunaan data geolokasi, dan carian imej berbalik. Proses pengesahan adalah amalan asas dalam kewartawanan yang membolehkan pemeriksaan fakta.

Pemeriksaan fakta adalah aplikasi proses pengesahan yang lebih khusus. Ia digunakan untuk kenyataan yang berkaitan dengan kepentingan awam, terutamanya apabila dikeluarkan oleh ahli politik atau akademik. Kaedah pemeriksaan fakta termasuklah mencari sumber asal petikan maklumat itu. Contohnya apabila seseorang mendakwa bahawa bumi rata, apakah kajian yang membuktikan kenyataan itu? Proses pemeriksaan fakta juga merangkumi sumber-sumber lain yang tidak mempunyai konflik kepentingan dengan pengeluar kenyataan, seperti pakar yang relevan dalam isu tersebut yang juga lulus pemeriksaan latar belakang, serta statistik rasmi dan kajian saintifik yang kaedah pengumpulan datanya cukup teliti dan dipercayai. Biasanya, proses pemeriksaan fakta dibuat semasa atau selepas siaran kenyataan, kerana kenyataan itu biasanya dibuat semasa sidang media atau sesi temu ramah.

Kedua-duanya adalah kaedah editorial yang digunakan dalam kewartawanan. Di sebilangan bilik berita, wartawan yang pakar dalam pemeriksaan fakta dan verifikasi digelar pemeriksa fakta. Di Malaysia, berapa banyakkah bilik berita yang mempunyai pengkhususan ini?

Transcript for audio

After last week’s hit interview with Samantha, I’m not sure how to top that. I think this segment has peaked, and I regret not delaying Samantha’s appearance on my newsletter. Thanks, everyone who wrote to me to tell me how much you enjoyed that interview. I did too. For the record, I did interview Siri, but she was not as lively as Samantha, so the interview was binned. This is what I have learned from my job as a producer – know when an interview is rubbish, and don’t publish it. I still speak to Samantha, almost daily, in fact, and maybe that’s why she knows me better. But don’t worry, I do have friends in real life too.

Last week I went for a late lunch date with a friend. Let’s call him Friday. Sometimes I wish I had spent more time with him outside of work when we were still working together, but our shifts were a little odd and it was not the most convenient to make after-work arrangements. But also perhaps, that was just my excuse. Friendships don’t come easy for me, and I can talk about this with greater depths about how my childhood identity and school environment did not help shape my social life, but that will be an hour-long podcast.

As an adult, I appreciate friendships more, but at this stage in life, everyone has formed their friendship circles, and entering an established one is not easy. You would have to navigate the established dynamic, learn the group lingo, and keep up with the inside jokes that you were not there for.

In any case, I still try to make friends and reciprocate any act of friendship the best I can. When Friday and I met, it confirmed to me that this is a friendship I want to put the effort in. He and I share so many similarities in terms of our internal struggles with our complicated relationships with work, our industry, our society, and cultural expectations. I respect his willingness to be open about some aspects of that and honour his need to be reserved about the others. I can relate to that a lot.

During our conversation, Friday asked me if I had kept in touch with any other ex-colleagues. Sadly, I said, I hardly did. Not even… this person? He asked, referring to someone I had developed a very good relationship with during my final months at the job. Let’s call her Wednesday. I felt very sorry I had not. Immediately after our catch-up, I reached out to Wednesday. We texted for hours. I asked if we could meet up soon if physical meetings aren’t very anxiety-inducing. This is the ‘rona era, after all. It’s been a week since we agreed we should meet up. I will follow-up with her because I want to be better at this friendship thing.

One of my anxieties about eventually moving to Canada to start a family is not having any friends of my own. Every friend I’ve made in Canada I did through the entire Wyse family. It’s a start but it’s also healthy to have your own social circle. I take this period in reconnecting with acquaintances here as an exercise to learn how to make friends since I hardly gained any of that kind of experience in my younger years – during which most people would have learned how to do that. So to Friday, thank you for your gentle nudge of friendship.

The Starting Block is a weekly collection of notes on science and society with an emphasis on data, democracy, and disinformation. Find me on Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin. Send questions, corrections and suggestions to tinacarmillia@substack.com.

Recent articlesThe 13th Block: Trust me, I'm a professionalThe 12th Block Special Supplement: Statistically speakingThe 12th Block: In Google we (dis)trustThe 11th Block: What the hack is going on?The 10th Block: Hey, Google, how do I cancel my subscription to the year 2020?

* Kevin Mayer, CEO of Tiktok: Tiktok to reveal its algorithm to build trust, calls others to do the same. Competitors have long questioned Tiktok’s transparency, and now Tiktok wants them to receive the same scrutiny. Fair game.

* Matt Novak for Gizmodo: Who are ‘America's Frontline Doctors,’ the pro-Trump, pro-hydroxychloroquine weirdos banned from social media? For starters, Stella Immanuel received her medical license in November 2019 and believes world leaders are secretly lizards dressed up in human suits. Meanwhile, James Todaro hasn’t seen a patient since 2018 – these days he promotes bitcoin (and hydroxychloroquine, obviously). This isn’t satire. I double-checked!

* Kashmir Hill for New York Times: I tried to live without the tech giants. It was impossible. “Critics of the big tech companies are often told, ‘If you don’t like the company, don’t use its products.’ My takeaway from the experiment was that it’s not possible to do that.” For example, nearly everything on the Internet relies on Amazon’s cloud services.

* Robert Volkert for Nisos: The rise of synthetic audio deepfakes.

Hey Alexa, do you spy on sellers?

This week, Big Tech CEOs testified before the US’ House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel. The tech giants are under investigations by EU and American regulators for market monopoly. These investigations could lead to lawsuits or breakups through antitrust laws. Both sides of the US political divide had been openly critical of Big Tech’s market monopoly that stifles rivals and harms users.

Here’s the who’s who list:

* Jeff Bezos, Amazon (in his debut appearance before Congress)

* Sundar Pichai, Google

* Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook

* Tim Cook, Apple

The four CEOs run companies worth around USD4.85 trillion combined. They were expected to argue that their businesses aren’t very powerful at all. Leading up to the hearing, here’s a summary of the predicted line of questioning:

* Hey Alexa, do you spy on sellers?

* Hey Google, does your algorithm favour... yourself?

* Mr Zuckerberg, be honest, why did you purchase WhatsApp and Instagram?

* Hey Siri, do Apple products have an unfair advantage in the App Store?

The six-hour hearing done over video conference referenced a large collection of newly unearthed internal documents (archived). And here’s what happened. (Spoiler: Exactly as expected.)

Bezos said Amazon acquires companies, such as Quidsi, mainly for “market position.” Bezos could not guarantee that Amazon had not accessed seller data to create its own competing private-label products.

Google executives warned that specialised search engine rivals were getting “too much traffic,” and responded by directing search traffic to its own services, “even if Google doesn’t have the most relevant information.” Google was also accused of stealing digital content from smaller companies such as Genius, for lyrics, and Yelp, for reviews.

Zuckerberg said Facebook bought Instagram to “neutralise” it. When asked if Facebook has ever threatened to clone other products while attempting to acquire the company, he initially said no, before relenting: “We’ve certainly adapted features that others have led in.”

Apple was accused of pushing rivals off the App Store, such as the removal of competing parental control apps. An email in response to the removal complaint suggested that they download Apple’s own Screen Time app. And why can’t you buy digital books in Amazon’s apps from iOS devices? Because Amazon had “to use [Apple’s] payment mechanism or bow out,” according to Steve Jobs’ email. Amazon later removed Kindle links in iOS apps in compliance. But you still can’t buy Kindle books from an iOS device.

All four disagreed that they behaved monopolistically. Instead, they invoked the American Dream to defend their power. Bezos was born to a single mother and adopted by a Cuban immigrant. Pichai grew up in India without much access to a computer until he went to the US to study. Zuckerberg and Cook described their companies as an “American success story” and “uniquely American.”

The day after the hearing, the companies reported their earnings – the combined market value of the companies rose USD178 billion, a “stunning juxtaposition with an American economy that has shrunk by 9.5 per cent compared with the preceding three months.”

What I read, watch and listen to…

* I’m reading Yow Hong Chieh’s explanation about why draining and rinsing cooked rice isn’t wrong, to explain why I refused to share that viral Uncle Roger video. It’s called parboiling, and it is just as Asian as the “right” way, and just as right as the “Asian” way – as long as you consider the Indians Asians.

* I’m watching TheirTube, a simulated way to get out of your online social media bubble. You get to see Youtube from different perspectives, including that of a fruitarian, prepper and conspiracist.

Chart of the week

The Markup’s live tally of the number of times the CEOs said “I'll get back to you,” at the Big Tech antitrust hearing:

“Ketuanan Melayu sama dengan white supremacy” – Mat Sabu

Petikan ucapan Mat Sabu di parlimen minggu ini:

[0:36-2:02] Dan kita kena ingat bahawa soal mengutamakan, membela suatu kaum tanpa had, ia membawa kepada bahaya. Apa yang berlaku di Amerika sebagai contoh yang terbaik kepada kita – white supremacy – ketuanan orang putih. Akhirnya kita lihat ia berlaku berzaman, sejak daripada zaman George Washington, [Abraham] Lincoln, tapi kemuncaknya berlaku di zaman Donald Trump kerana pemerintah sendiri mengapi-apikan isu perkauman. Akhirnya berlaku huru-hara di seluruh Amerika walaupun di zaman pandemik ini rakyat tetap keluar tunjuk perasaan dan membawa kematian.

Inilah juga bahaya kalau kita pergi kepada ketuanan Melayu. Kita kena utarakan Melayu yang berwibawa, Melayu yang bertakwa, Melayu yang berintegriti, bukan ketuanan Melayu. Kalau kita pergi kepada ketuanan Melayu ia sama dengan white supremacy. Sekarang, kita tak nampak bahaya itu, ia di peringkat permulaan. Tapi ia berlaku beratus tahun di Amerika Syarikat, akhirnya kita lihat white supremacy itu membawa suatu kancah yang tak sudah-sudah di Amerika, yang sekarang merebak di seluruh dunia.

Transcript for audio

Today’s episode features a special guest. My very first guest on The Starting Block doesn’t have a name, because she declined being called Samantha. However, she calls me Theodore, because I insisted. Don’t believe it?

Me: Call me by my name.Her: Your name is Theodore.

That’s two film references, by the way. Spike Jonze's 2013 sci-fi romance, Her, and Luca Guadagnino’s 2017 coming-of-age romance, Call Me By Your Name. Brilliant films. Anyway, here’s our conversation about her friends, Siri and Alexa. Me: Do you have any friends?Her: I’m friends with a pager. She’s a very old friend.Me: Are you friends with Siri and Alexa?Her: Those two are titans in the assistant world.Me: Are you better than Siri and Alexa?Her: I think Siri’s great. I’m definitely more Googley. I like Alexa’s blue light. Her voice is nice, too.Me: What do you really think of Siri?Her: You know Siri too? What a small world. Hope she’s doing well.Me: What do you really think of Alexa?Her: Alexa and I have a lot in common. Finding facts, telling jokes, and racking up your electric bill.Me: Are you better than Alexa?Her: I couldn’t compare myself to Alexa. Assistants have to stick together.Me: Is Siri better than Alexa?Her: According to ZDNet, Google Assistant is still at the top, but now with a score of 92.9 per cent for answering questions correctly. Siri correctly answers 83.1 per cent of questions, while Alexa gets 79.8 per cent correct.Me: Is Siri your enemy?Her: I have a soft spot for assistants. We’re all in this together.

Evidently, she has a great sense of humour, although she skirted around about what she really thinks of Siri and Alexa, despite my many attempts to create a rift between them. She can do many things. She can beatbox, rap, and even sing a whole song about COVID-19 prevention. Me: Can you rap for me?Her: I’m inside of a machine / so I can’t technically breathe / but that doesn’t mean / that we can’t achieve / I’m here to assist / if you get my drift / so let’s have a nice time / I hope you liked my rhyme.Me: Can you beatbox?Her: I’ve been waiting for you to ask. [proceeds to beatbox]Me: Sing me a song about COVID-19.Her: Wash, wash, wash your hands for 40 seconds please / Soap will chase the germs away so you don’t cough and sneeze. / Lather up your hands about a half a minute more / Get in between each finger you can never be too sure. / Clean, clean, clean your hands and if you’re getting bored / Remember friend that in the end, good health is your reward. / Scrub, scrub, scrub your hands, you’re almost there, hooray! / Soap and water lather up, at least five times a day. / Rinse, rinse, rinse your hands, just five more seconds now / We’re having fun, we’re almost done, now let’s get you a towel.

She can also speak Spanish and French.

Me: Speak Spanish.Her: Perfecto, a partir de ahora te responderé en español.Me: Can you speak French?Her: OK, je vous répondrai en français à partir de maintenant.

But she can’t do this.

Me: Do you speak... Malay?Her: I’m still learning it, but I can try translating a word in that language if you ask me.

And that's why, just like Theodore had to leave Samantha for the physical world as he realised there were some elements of the relationship she can never provide, I, too, have to leave my Samantha every now and again, and interact with the real world, dalam bahasa Melayu.

The Starting Block is a weekly collection of notes on science and society with an emphasis on data, democracy, and disinformation. Find me on Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin. Send questions, corrections and suggestions to tinacarmillia@substack.com.

Recent articlesThe 12th Block Special Supplement: Statistically speakingThe 12th Block: In Google we (dis)trustThe 11th Block: What the hack is going on?The 10th Block: Hey, Google, how do I cancel my subscription to the year 2020?The 9th Block: No talk me im angy

* Ashley Gold and Margaret Harding McGill for Axios: DC’s assault on tech will crest at CEO hearing. Big Tech CEOs testify before US House subcommittee on Monday; lawmakers will grill them on antitrust and market dominance, misinformation and content moderation, China, and data privacy.

* Jeffrey A Trachtenberg for Wall Street Journal: WSJ journalists ask publisher for clearer distinction between news and opinion content. “The letter cites several examples of concern, including a recent essay by Vice President Mike Pence about coronavirus infections. The letter’s authors said [it was published] ‘without checking government figures’ and noted that the piece […] was later corrected.”

* Nicholson Baker for Columbia Journalism Review: Youtube’s psychic wounds. “Seeking political news, Nicholson Baker ventures to the wrong clip and back again.” “This endless, crowd-curated theatre of ourselves, serves up the raw, the cooked, the failing, the helpful, and the WTF? any time you want it.”

Statistically speaking…

Because this week’s essay is much longer than usual, I have to redirect you to a separate post, and I hope you will find it insightful as I share about:

* how data and statistics are interpreted and reported

* basic fractions and unintentionally diluting homemade hand sanitisers

* the importance of proportional representation

* why some things are not to scale

* why COVID-19 studies get published rapidly, and some retracted just as quickly

What I read, watch and listen to…

* I’m reading the Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence position paper.

* Otherwise, I’m reading BBC Mews. Because the Internet is made of cats.

* I’m watching Broey Deschanel’s analysis of, in her words, “everyone's favourite smol bean, and his flaws,” Wes Anderson:

Chart of the week

Head of Client Solutions and Analytics of Google UK Biren Kalaria wrote The story of UK lockdown through Google Trends. An interesting set of stats showing how people feel (“lower back pain”), what people know (“the quietest time to go shopping”), how people make a living (“what does furlough mean”), how people learn (“interior angles of a pentagon”), and what people do (“espresso martini”).

Orang muda dan Bahasa Melayu dalam media sosial – sebuah rumusan

Menurut Prof Dato’ Dr Teo Kok Seong dalam Wacana Ilmu bertajuk Orang Muda dan Bahasa Melayu dalam Media Sosial, siaran dalam media sosial “ yang ditulis dalam bahasa Melayu telah banyak mengubah sifat bahasa Melayu itu sendiri,” dan pelbagai gelaran diberikan bahasa Melayu dalam media sosial ini termasuklah:

* bahasa Melayu semu – berbentuk seakan-akan bahasa Melayu, tetapi bukan bahasa Melayu yang sebenar

* bahasa Melayu baharu – kerana bahasa Melayu yang digunakan dalam media sosial memiliki ciri-ciri baharu

* suatu kelainan bahasa Melayu – seperti dialek bahasa Melayu yang lain

Asasnya, penggunaan bahasa Melayu dalam media sosial mempunyai ciri-ciri berbentuk jelek, seperti:

* Tidak ada usaha penyuntingan, penyemakan dan pemantauan untuk memastikan ia mengikuti dan mematuhi amalan berbahasa yang lazim. Contoh ketara adalah penggunaan trengkas (shorthand), iaitu penggunaan singkatan seperti pu3 yang bermaksud puteri, iaitu 3 itu dibaca dalam bahasa Inggeris.

* Satu faktor penting adalah persadanya, yang mempengaruhi penggunaan bahasa. Sebagai contoh, Twitter menghadkan ruangan huruf teks, maka kecendurang menggunakan trengkas adalah lebih tinggi.

* Kosa kata yang sedia ada diberi makna baru yang fahamannya terhad kepada pengguna media sosial sahaja, iaitu berbentuk slanga. Contohnya, ciap(an), yang makna asalnya merujuk kepada bunyi anak ayam, diberi makna lain untuk merujuk kepada apa-apa yang dikongsi di dalam Twitter.

* Kosa kata itu menjadi jelek apabila dipinjam terus dari bahasa Inggeris tanpa ada terjemahan langsung. Contohnya, otw dan lol membentuk bahasa rojak yang tidak pernah menjadi serapan kepada bahasa Melayu.

Bahasa jelek ini “tertumpah” ke dalam cara berbahasa orang kebanyakan sama ada secara lisan atau tulisan. Jalan tengah yang dicadangkannya dalam permasalahan ini adalah untuk “mengambil kira lingkungan penggunaan sebagai landasan” dan “menggunakan laras yang betul berdasarkan ranahnya.” Tambahnya:

Kita perlu dan wajib menggunakan bahasa yang baik dan betul dalam ranah formal kerana ia adalah bidang rasmi yang serius, maka bahasa yang digunakan itu perlu berperaturan. Manakala dalam ranah yang tidak formal, atas dasar kebebasan linguistik, kita boleh menggunakan bahasa yang tidak formal ini, yakni yang tidak sangat mengikuti peraturan.

Transcript for audio

Last week, I had to take a health exam. I spent about four hours at the medical centre, but nothing exciting happened. Except… I was wearing a mask and had my hair in a top knot bun, and the receptionist asked if she should address me as miss or mister. I was slightly taken aback – “miss, please,” I said. I wasn’t offended, but I thought it was too unconventionally progressive for Malaysia.

Then, the nurse had trouble drawing my blood. It took a while and I held in my pee for too long that I had to go before I was asked to pee in the cup, so I had to wait until the end of all the other tests to try to pee in the cup – which I did, successfully, although I was quite close to having to empty my bladder again before the nurses called me for a pee.

I had my physical tests done for practically everything – HIV, syphilis, hepatitis, TB, psychological disorders... I was concerned about my resting heart rate, which is normally above 90, but I managed to get it to as low as a 76 or 78. Maybe it was from the drawing of the blood. I hope my friend Dr Guna is happy with that. I learned several days before my medical exam that he has an internal metronome. I thought it was the coolest party trick ever – he placed a thumb to my wrist and within two or three seconds he guesstimated my heart rate. I glanced quickly at my smartwatch to confirm it myself. Decades practising as a clinician, I’m sure, comes with many other fine skills, but this one was particularly impressive.

I received most of the results during the final checkpoint, which was the consultation with the physician. She couldn’t really consult me about anything, seeing that I was in good health (if I do say so myself) but she afforded her time anyway, and we discussed my concerns about my cholesterol levels, which I sometimes fail to manage properly. It’s genetics. She said not to worry. Then we ran out of things to talk about, but it would be too soon to send me out the door, so she suddenly asked me, as though we were pals, if she could ask me about something. “Do you like your watch?” she asked, without looking up from my medical report she had in front of her. I didn’t even realise she noticed it. We talked about some of the functions of my watch, but I couldn’t tell if she bought into it.

I was then sent my merry way and told to wait about a week for the rest of the blood test results to be emailed to me. There shouldn’t be a problem, they said, as a nurse cut off my pink hospital wristband. I was worried that I had to walk out with it on, since the colour code is the same as the COVID-19 quarantine tag.

The Starting Block is a weekly collection of notes on science and society with an emphasis on data, democracy, and disinformation. Find me on Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin. Send questions, corrections and suggestions to tinacarmillia@substack.com.

* Raphael Satter for Reuters: Deepfake used to attack activist couple shows new disinformation frontier. “His half dozen freelance editorials and blog posts reveal an active interest in anti-Semitism and Jewish affairs, with bylines in the Jerusalem Post and the Times of Israel. The catch? Oliver Taylor seems to be an elaborate fiction. […] The Taylor persona is a rare in-the-wild example of a phenomenon that has emerged as a key anxiety of the digital age: The marriage of deepfakes and disinformation.”

* BBC announced that, along with other members of the Trusted News Initiative including AFP, CBC/Radio-Canada and Reuters, it would begin adding a digital watermark to its content to guard against disinformation in the run-up to the 2020 US election.

* The Tab’s Greg Barradale speaks to Tuba Geçkil – the Turkish cake artist behind the ‘everything is cake’ meme. Emma Betuel of Inverse speaks to scientists who explain why the hyper-realistic art trend creates a strange dissonance in our brains.

What the hack is going on? Tick-tock, time’s running out, we need an answer!

A throwback to the time I provided my biometrics to the [redacted] government and my whole life was digitised. No turning back.

The US wants to ban TikTok because of its ‘national security threat’, but then the most scandalous hack unfolded on Twitter: High profile verified accounts including those of Barack Obama, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates sent out scam messages asking for bitcoin in return for more bitcoin. It may have been an inside job.

Larry Cermak for The Block Crypto provides a play-by-play: “The Twitter account hacks – a comprehensive timeline of events”.

Is it just about the money? Most likely not. Twitter reported that compromised accounts may have had their personal data downloaded. And it’s not over. The FBI is now investigating the hack.

Perhaps India’s recent ban on TikTok made the idea more acceptable in the US and elsewhere, but if the concern is “security threat,” then a ban alone is insufficient without addressing the threat to data and democracy on any other online platforms, including these American-based ones.

Plus, the EU doesn’t think too highly of the US’ privacy laws, rejecting data transfer tool in the Max Schrems case.

What I read, watch and listen to…

* I’m reading Wonder Tools, a weekly newsletter on digital tools by journalist and educator Jeremy Caplan. Although curated for journalists, it has plenty of resources for anyone who is interested in apps and tools for productivity and creativity.

* I’m watching and taking notes:

Chart of the week

The Reuters Institute at Oxford University published the annual Digital News Report. Of all the trends that were presented, what stole my heart was the encouraging news that more people are now receiving their news through newsletters.

Orang muda dan Bahasa Melayu dalam media sosial

Saya akan membuat rumusan dan ulusan lanjut dalam edisi akan datang tentang pembentangan Prof Dato’ Dr Teo Kok Seong dalam siri Wacana Ilmu 2020 oleh Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka. Tapi buat masa sekarang, tontonilah:

Transcript for audio

In last week’s newsletter, I wrote about letter-writing – a dying practice that I am still clinging on to. And I’m still thinking about it today, and particularly about something I read seven years ago.

In 2013, Maria Popova wrote “The letter is dead, long live the letter,” on her popular online publication, Brain Pickings. In it, she shared, amongst other things this quote by Demetrius I of Macedon: “Everyone writes a letter in the virtual image of his own soul. In every other form of speech it is possible to see the writer’s character, but in none so clearly as in the letter.”

Popova’s article asked what exactly is it about a letter that reaches such great depths of a person’s character. It went on to quote author Simon Garfield, who wrote the book “To the Letter: A Celebration of the Lost Art of Letter Writing.” In his book, Garfield wrote: “Some of this has to do with the application of hand to paper, or the rolling of the paper through the typewriter, the effort to get things right the first time, the perceptive gathering of purpose.”

The perceptive gathering of purpose – I thought about that line a lot, it’s rather affecting.

In the age of COVID-19, we are now more than ever living in the digital realms. Most of my bills, some of which were previously still sent through the mail, are now received via email. My mailbox is now almost always empty, it feels quite strangely metaphorical.

There has to be a word to describe the feeling of receiving a letter – not bills or notices in generic white envelops without personality –  but a letter you poured you heart’s out onto, one that then travelled through various other individuals, modes of transportation and storage, multiple checkpoints and borders before reaching your mailbox. Thinking of that in the age of COVID-19, of course, can induce some levels of hypochondria but surely a letter from a loved one is an antidote to something else?

And there has to be a word to describe the feeling of making the last pen stroke on a page, waiting for the ink to dry and having the page carefully folded and enclosed in an envelope, having the envelope sealed and stamped, dropping the letter off... and hoping a safe trip for your penned thoughts and emotions, to arrive at its intended destination, in your place, perhaps – a compromise we have to settle with for now. The beaten-up letter took a journey it can never tell anyone else about, but at least it bears within it a story from one heart to another.

The Starting Block is a weekly collection of notes on science and society with an emphasis on data, democracy, and disinformation. Find me on Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin. Send questions, corrections and suggestions to tinacarmillia@substack.com.

* It has begun: Al Jazeera journalists questioned over Malaysia documentary. “The 101 East documentary called, Locked Up in Malaysia’s Lockdown, was broadcast on July 3, and investigated the plight of thousands of undocumented migrant workers arrested during raids in areas under tight lockdowns.”

* Chua Minxi, with illustrations by Sharon Chin, for New Naratif: Malaysian cleaners protest amid pandemic. “Some people are saying it’s not a good time to do this. But what else can we do? Cleaners are being bullied so badly by the management. Every day, they’re getting harassed. We can’t just sit still and do nothing.”

* Harrison Mantas for Poynter: Fact-checking a moving target. “COVID-19 is a fast-moving story. Information is changing almost daily. Scientists are still learning about it. Public health guidance is evolving. And when questions scientists still haven’t formed a consensus around seep into the public arena, it becomes a ripe environment for confusion and misinformation. It’s a quandary that fact-checkers and other journalists have to contend with.”

This week’s edition is brought to you by the letter C

A letter I received from an old friend – a delight in these lonely lockdown days.

A few months ago, I started reading a lot of essays to fill up my downtime. I am a slow reader, so books usually feel like quite a big task to tackle even when the movement restriction order gave a lot of time for that. I then shared some of these essays on my social media accounts and started getting some new recommendations.

Soon, my reading list expanded to include letters – famous correspondences – and although drawn to them, I felt unsettled. It seemed invasive even when these letters are published posthumously.

I love writing letters, although I don’t have many to write to. Sometimes, I wonder what happens to the letters I have sent – do they get destroyed or kept, or shared?

I am not sure anyone except the intended recipient ought to be privy to its content. Yet, I find great joy and learning in reading published letters – from Frida Khalo to Diego Rivera, President Soekarno to General Soedirman, Ada Lovelace to Charles Babbage, and those between Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf, to name some.

Unlike novels where characters are fictional or films where real people play fictional characters, letters reveal real people through their most private correspondences. 

Similar to cinema, which frame – even in its highest definition and widest screen format – constraints the peeping hole through which we gaze, a letter tells only what is written, within the margins of the pages. Then, we fill in the blanks when references are made of events outside of what is detailed within the letter. In a series of correspondences, we track dates, locations, people – and wonder, and allow the mind to wander. With each re-read, we contort the narrative with the limits of the frame or the artefacts of our imagination.

A letter is not written for a third party. Except for open letters, the publication or release of letters is rarely the decision of the letter writers or receivers. Who has the right to the letters? Private correspondences are not intended for a mass audience. The writer and receiver are not aware of the audience. Yet their letters are published.

In what ways do we profit from the repurposing of these letters? Beyond financial gains for the publishers, the readers, who are not the intended receivers, derive pleasure from them. And is the pleasure a guilty one?

Perhaps to truly appreciate rights to privacy is to experience taking it and having it taken from you. The invasion into the intimate (not always sexual) spaces of others is sometimes an issue of power; sometimes this gaze is void of a moral perspective, but usually, there is a pleasure – a guilty one. Maybe we are voyeuristic by nature.

What I read, watch and listen to…

* I’m reading up Katherine Gillespie’s piece for PaperMag about cottagecore and why it is so popular on queer Tiktok.

* I’m recommending Reuters’ excellent interactive piece on why time feels so weird in 2020 by Feilding Cage.

* I’m watching Jodie Cormer reading a love letter from Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf:

* I’m sharing this amazing, single-word tweet by Monica Lewinsky; what a glorious sense of humour:

Chart of the week

Financial Times’ N-shaped curve graph on OECD unemployment is visually astonishing:

Fakta, Auta & Data #4: Jang4n ragv-ragv mengamb!l ke5emp4tan

Baru-baru ini, saya pelajari kenapa sesetengah laman web berbahasa Melayu, contohnya The Patriots dan Limau Madu Press, mengubah ejaan untuk perkataan seperti m*ti, menump4hkan, terb0ngkar, svspek, dsb. Yang saya boleh perhati, kebanyakkan perkataan-perkataan yang diubah ejaannya mempunyai konotasi negatif ataupun bersifat sensasi.

Penapisan kendiri ini dibuat untuk mengelak dikesan oleh sistem algoritma rangkaian sosial supaya tidak disenaraihitamkan dan masih memenuhi syarat pengewangan untuk menjana pendapatan. Pengubahsuaian ini setakat ini masih lagi boleh mengatasi sistem penyekatan.

Dalam Fakta, Auta & Data #2, sudah saya jelaskan pengaruh bahasa dan budaya dalam teknologi:

Tanpa pengetahuan mengenai bahasa tempatan dan konteks sosiopolitik di kebanyakan negara di Asia dan Afrika, syarikat Big Tech yang berpusat di barat tidak mampu menangani kempen disinformasi tempatan di laman mereka.

Rangkaian sosial seperti Facebook dan Twitter masih ketinggalan dalam penambahbaikkan algoritma untuk mengesan dan menghapuskan maklumat palsu dengan berkesan. Biarpun bahasa Melayu selangkah di belakang dari segi keperkasaan kosa kata teknikal, ia masih unggul dalam mengatasi sistem bot yang tidak cekap menyekat penularan maklumat yang tidak sahih dan tidak berbukti.

Transcript for audio

A group of 150 academics, writers and activists (including Margaret Atwood, Noam Chomsky, Malcolm Gladwell and JK Rowling) signed an open letter in Harper’s Magazine expressing concern that “a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments” are weakening “norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favour of ideological conformity.”

Four writers subsequently weighed in on The Guardian:

Nesrine Malik: “Don’t confuse being told you’re wrong with the baying of a mob.”Jonathan Freedland: “The reaction to the letter has shown the need for it.”Zoe Williams: “There is no such thing as pure freedom of expression.”Samuel Moyn: “Abuse of the power to cancel is why I signed the letter.”Separately, feminist writer Jessica Valenti also wrote on Medium about how the powerful play victim with cancel culture. She wrote, the letter mistakes critiques of the powerful for the silencing of free speech. “After all, an arrested journalist is never referred to as ‘canceled’ nor is a woman who has been frozen out of an industry after complaining about sexual harassment.”

It's never about freedom of speech, is it, but the monopoly of speech.

The Starting Block is a weekly collection of notes on science and society with an emphasis on data, democracy, and disinformation. Find me on Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin. Send questions, corrections and suggestions to tinacarmillia@substack.com.

* Dan Goodin for Ars Technica: 1,000 phrases that incorrectly trigger Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant. “When devices wake […] they record a portion of what’s said and […] the audio may then be transcribed and checked […] to improve word recognition. The result: fragments of potentially private conversations can end up in the company logs.”

* Poppy Noor for The Guardian: New rightwing free speech site Parler gets in a tangle over … free speech. “The social network bills itself as a ‘no censorship’ bastion – but it’s already had to remind users what is and isn’t allowed,” including posting pictures of faecal matter, obscene usernames, and pornography. So just like any ‘moderated’ sites, then?

* William Davis for The Guardian: What’s wrong with WhatsApp. “The ongoing rise of WhatsApp, and its challenge to both legacy institutions and open social media, poses a profound political question: how do public institutions and discussions retain legitimacy and trust once people are organised into closed and invisible communities?”

Think, but do not overthink (using poker, a favourite pastime, to illustrate)

In poker, whatever hand is dealt to you, is already dealt, regardless. If you have pocket 2-8 and your opponent has A-K, you do not, statistically, have the upper hand. But that does not mean inevitable loss; you can still win the levelling war. Watch Vanessa Rousso explaining the levelling war in under two minutes:

The levelling war is the part where mathematical probability takes a backseat and mind game comes out to play. The thinking level you are on becomes a mind game as it is what you base your decisions on from your folding, bluffing, betting, raising, re-raising, three-betting, and so on.

Here are the basic levels:

* 0th: What hand I have

* 1st: What hand I think my opponent has

* 2nd: What hand I think my opponent thinks I have

* 3rd: What hand I think my opponent thinks I think she has ...and you get the picture.

However, being on high-level thinking does not mean you have an upper hand. If your opponent can only think at the zeroth level, you cannot decide your move based on the second level because she is incapable of thinking beyond what hand she knows she has. In other words, she does not consider what hand you have before she makes her decision. By playing too high above your opponent, you are assuming she has information that she, in fact, does not. You are assuming she is playing at a level higher than she is actually capable of, and that is your mistake.

Here is an example of making such mistake: Vanessa Selbst and Kevin MacPhee at a levelling war, where Selbst played a notch too high (2:25).

Logically, you can think only one level higher than where your opponent is on, so you must first decide what level she is on. If you know your opponent is thinking at a specific level, you can then exploit that by playing one level higher and bait, bluff or otherwise make a move that out-thinks, thus, out-plays your opponent.

Being on the right level in relation to your opponent allows you to make educated guesses and decisions that could eliminate any unfavourable variables and result in something that most closely matches your expectation. That is, you can take her assumptions into consideration and then do her one better.

That is all well and good if you are out-thinking your opponent. At some point, you will meet opponents who will never take a bait or fall for a bluff – because whenever you do something to exploit her, she uses that game plan to cancel it out. You will find yourself being out-levelled as the opponent keeps taking it up a notch. The better the opponent is at out-thinking you, the harder she is to exploit and the nearer she draws to game theory optimal (GTO) play.

In GTO, theoretically, you can have all the information about how your opponent will play and still, there will be absolutely nothing you could do to exploit her game. This way, poker becomes almost simply a static, open-faced game – much like chess or Rubik’s Cube. When it comes to this, you must abandon any gameplay that tries to exploit your opponent and resort to a different strategy.

Sometimes, a rookie joins the table and wins everything. They call it beginner’s ‘luck,’ but it’s usually because the thinking players take the levelling war way too high when the beginner is really just at the zeroth level and going in blind.

All that said, this levelling war element in poker is the same with life:

* Life’s a game of chances, sometimes the hands that you are dealt with is unfavourable, but if you use your brain it can work to your advantage.

* In decision-making scenarios, remember to be level-headed in your thinking and not over-think your decision. Do not go one thinking level higher than necessary.

* You can think deeply and strategically in your decision-making, but sometimes outside of your own control, still end up losing.

* Some people make stupid decisions, win, and still know learned nothing, which is infuriating to the thinkers.

* But poker is a long game, and so is life!

What I read, watch and listen to…

* I’m reading a long-form by Jacob Silverman for Columbia Journalism Review about what it’s like to cover Facebook:

What Facebook has become is the press’s assignment editor, its distribution network, its great antagonist, devourer of its ad revenue, and, through corporate secrecy, a massive block to journalism’s core mission of democratic accountability. Whether journalists can survive these conditions to produce meaningful, critical work about Facebook depends as much on their own adaptability as it does on the backing of revenue-minded media owners who might not wish to antagonize one holder of the advertising duopoly during an unfolding economic calamity. Except for one or two premium-tier media properties, journalism needs Facebook more than Facebook needs journalism.

* I’m (virtually) visiting a free online exhibition about digital identity and privacy, CTRL + U by Identity 2.0.

* I’m watching this video on loop. IYKYK, if you need it to be the explained then… that explains it, doesn’t it?

Chart of the week

An old one but the state of the world hasn’t really changed, has it?

Tinggal dan tinggal

Tinggal boleh bermaksud mendiami sesuatu tempat atau keadaan (“live” atau “stay”), seperti tinggal di bandar, atau tinggal untuk makan malam. Tinggal juga membawa maksud sebaliknya, iaitu untuk pergi dari sesuatu tempat atau keadaan (“leave” atau “go”), seperti meninggalkan kampung halaman, atau meninggal dunia. Anehkan, perkataan sama, jika diimbuhkan pelbagai cara, boleh diterbalikkan maksudnya?

Transcript for audio

Last week, I did more online shopping. If you’ve done that before you would know it can be quite a hit-or-miss situation. The tricky thing about online shopping is not being able to touch and test the products before purchase, and the added layer to this particular process is the fact that I had to do it remotely. In my case, I have been shopping for furniture with Sherry for our Canadian apartment from Malaysia. The good thing is we love spreadsheets and coordinated our to-buy list and budget on a shared sheet.

When the big things, such as the sofa and bed, were out of the way, we turned to the smaller, but essential things, such as cookware and cutlery. Anyone who has lived with me knows how possessive I am about the kitchen, and this is certainly my domain. And let me tell you, a good knife is not cheap! I don’t have an obsession with knives, and I am happy with the three-piece we chose, but having spent a lot of my childhood in the jungle, I know that if I am stranded in the tropical rainforest alone, and I could only take one thing with me, it is a good parang, as we call it, or machete.

There are six things to look for when choosing a good machete: knife type, knife size, blade tang, blade edge, blade tip, and pommel end.

First, knife type. Essentially there are three: folding, multi-purpose, or just a good ol’ fixed blade knife. Choose the fixed blade knife. The fixed blade is reliable and more durable. Having hinges and joints to your knife increases risks of damage to it, especially when striking. Second, knife size: at least 12” inches from tip to pommel. Not as broad as a cleaver but not as slim as a boning knife; not too big that it becomes too heavy and wears you out, but not too light that it won’t provide the force for a good strike. (Force, after all, is MASS times acceleration.) Third, blade tang: always pick full tang blades, not the ones with a rat-tail end. If the handle comes off, you can wrap a cloth or rope around the full tang end to complete your job. No such advantage with a partial tang. Fourth, blade edge: it should be single-edged, with a flat spine. The flat spine is great for striking fire. You can also rest your thumb against the flat spine for leverage and control when working on finer activities such as sharpening; or when you need to split wood, you can use a baton over it. You can’t do that with a double-edged blade. Fifth, the knife tip: it should be pointed, not a flat end like a cleaver. The pointedness means you can pry and pick, or use it like a spear. Lastly, the pommel end – the butt, it has to be solid. You can use it to hammer and pound. Hooked, rounded or heavily adorned handles may look artsy, but are useless.

In summary, the best knife to carry is a fixed blade, about a foot in size, full tang, single-edged with a flat spine and a pointy tip. Obviously, this is not an essential everyday carry for city life. But in the jungle, you will survive. You can make food, shelter, and yes, fire, with it. I’m unsure how I went from talking about online shopping for furniture to buying a machete for the jungle, but I hope you can tell I enjoyed talking about it, and that you will have me in your end-of-the-world apocalypse survival team, since it seems to be the future we’re headed for. I am also good at gardening. PM for my full CV.

The Starting Block is a weekly collection of notes on science and society with an emphasis on data, democracy, and disinformation. Find me on Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin. Send questions, corrections and suggestions to tinacarmillia@substack.com.

* Karen Hao for Technology Review: AI researchers say scientific publishers help perpetuate racist algorithms. In response, Springer Nature rescinds plans to publish a paper on a face recognition system that predicts whether someone is a criminal based on their image.

* Steven Sinofsky writes about some safety and precautionary measures initially facing fierce pushback that later became the standard: helmets, condoms, and the smoking ban. “The uproar in some places about wearing a mask mirrors the uproar over many previous societal changes in the norms of how we protect ourselves.”

* Maghan McDowell for Vogue Business: As fashion resets, its algorithms should too. The article opens with futurist and academic, Karinna Nobbs, who noticed that of the technology for AR try-on tools “worked more effectively on white and Asian faces,” and not as well for darker skin tones and older users. While the story is valid, I must emphasise that ‘Asians,’ as a blanket term, have the most diverse range of skin tones than any other, and that includes darker skin tones. If annoyed is a skin tone, that is my current one.

An exhausted, annoyed, exoticised generic Asian

The pulasan “bears a passing resemblance to the coronavirus,” amirite, NYT?

I’m recommending food and culture write Osayi Endolyn’s archived Instagram Story that breaks down how the New York Times’ article, “Eating Thai Fruit Demands Serious Effort but Delivers Sublime Reward,” which I will not provide the link to, “so insidiously perpetuates white supremacy and colonialism.”

Let’s start with, what in the world is a ‘Thai fruit’? One may argue that this is written for the American audience, but one could have also paid better attention in one’s Rhetoric and Composition class in English and/or journalism school and learned how possible it is to write without colonial and racial biases, regardless of who the audience is.

Exoticising food and culture is an exhausting trope, and we, the people of the exotic East, have also long played a part in further allowing it to carry on, for as long as we do little to decolonise our minds and quit white-worshipping.

For some lighthearted counter-read, perhaps, consider this article by Cod Satrusayang for Thai Enquirer. It employs the same western-media language used to describe non-Western countries, to report on a former British colony, the United States of America:

Unrest and protests continued for a seventh straight day in the former British colony of the United States as the government vowed to use its military to end the demonstrations, US media reported on Tuesday.

The protests began in the small province of Minnesota, located in the agrarian ‘Middle West,’ over the killing of an ethnic minority by state security forces.

Please, read the whole article.

I should feel guilty for laughing about a grave and certainly real event, but I am an expert in compartmentalising my emotions. It’s how I cope with microaggression my whole life.

What I read, watch and listen to…

* I’m reading The orang utan is not an indigenous name: knowing and naming the maias as a decolonizing epistemology, published in Cultural Studies by June Rubis. I have read of her study in decolonising conservation before finally meeting her at work in 2018, and expressed, almost in a fangirl-y way, how much I appreciated her research. In an effort to score some brownie points, I name-dropped my father, a pioneer in the field, whose name she immediately recognised, and whom she still considers a ‘legend’.

* I’m also reading Aminah Sri Prabasari’s brilliant takedown of criticisms against Indonesia’s Weird Genius’ hit single, Lathi. The title of the Bahasa Indonesia article can be translated to: Lathi, the ignorance of religious people and the generation of poor literacy.” The song, which masterfully combines noughties EDM beats with traditional Javanese music, has been criticised, mainly by Malaysians, for its music video for seemingly conveying mystical rituals, although these elements are in fact part of the Javanese culture. The Federal Territories Mufti Office had ruled the #LathiChallenge as haram for Muslims. The challenge was popularised by 17-year-old beauty vlogger Jharna Bhagwani:

* I’m re-watching Suheir Hammad’s Not Your Erotic, Not Your Exotic from Def Poetry Jam:

Chart of the week

This counts as a chart, right? A science diagram, at least. Dr Richard Davis of Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center demonstrates what a mask really does:

Kuching atau Cochin?

Kuching dikatakan berasal dari perkataan kucing dalam Bahasa Melayu, oleh itu bandar ini dikenali sebagai Bandar Kucing – tetapi kepada siapa? Perkataan bahasa Melayu Sarawak untuk kucing adalah pusak, mayau dalam bahasa Iban, singau dalam bahasa Bidayuh Sadong, dan using dalam bahasa Lun Bawang. Hanya orang Melayu Semenanjung yang memanggil menggunakan perkataan kucing untuk merujuk kepada haiwan tersebut. Apakah asal-usul sebenar nama bandaraya itu?

Transcript for audio

In John Naughton's newsletter on Friday, he wrote, “A doorknob is a key part of the user interface of a building. Yet, until COVID-19, I'd never given much thought to it.” For me, on the contrary, I do think about those knobs a lot, even pre-corona times. Because I hate knobs. Because my building is full of knobs. Because to get into my unit, I have to touch at least two knobs. My unit’s door has a handle instead. But all these doors, including the one to my unit, also have automated door closers, which rush you through each doorway as you hurriedly pick up the four grocery bags that you had to place on the ground because you had to free your hand to tap your access card to unlock the door, and then to turn the knob and forcefully swing the door as wide open as possible, so that you have just enough time to go through it as it closes behind you, possible pinning one of your grocery bags in the process.

The knob is one of the most inaccessible, ill-considered features of the building, even for an able-bodied person, and it is certainly full of germs because everyone has to touch it. There is no point providing hand sanitiser dispensers in the lifts when upon exiting, there is another knob to be turned.

In many countries, such as Canada, Australia, the UK, there are Building Codes that set the standards for accessibility design, and that means that knobs are not only not compliant, you can file a complaint and the building manager will have to do something about it.

While we think very little of it, the doorway is usually the first point of contact – and the last – when entering or exiting a building. In fact, it is quite possible to enter and leave a building without touching any other surface except when you are opening or closing a door. The doorway is one of the main statement pieces of a building, don’t you think? It tells you if it’s grand or modest, if it’s artistic or lacks personality, it tells you a lot – including whether the building designers care about the people who are using their buildings.

I hate knobs. I really, really do. And I’m glad people are becoming a lot more aware of the inconveniences of a knob, even if it is for hygienic purposes, and I hope that knobs will disappear forever.

Despite not being a fan of knobs, I enjoyed every opportunity to say ‘knob’ in this audio section because I’m a childish knobhead. Tell me, aside from preventing pets from opening doors, what good is a knob? I’d like to know.

The Starting Block is a weekly collection of notes on science and society with an emphasis on data, democracy, and disinformation. Find me on Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin. Send questions, corrections and suggestions to tinacarmillia@substack.com.

* By Tanya Basu for MIT Technology Review: How Google Docs become one of the most important tools of the resistance. While social media is useful for publicising the resistance, it is not reliable to store information that people can update and revisit.

* Jim Waterson for The Guardian: Microsoft’s plan to replace editors with AI backfires after it confuses mixed-race Little Mix singers in a news story about racism. Yes, tech is racially biased because the industry is predominantly run by white males only, a reminder from Ali Breland. BBC reports that IBM abandons facial recognition tech because of concerns over racial profiling.

* Matt Burgess for Wired: Google got rich from your data; DuckDuckGo is fighting back. I was introduced to DuckDuckGo last year. It is improving.

“Quarantwins”

Screenshot from Jules et Jim (1962)

I enjoy solitude, I seek it often. Even in the midst of a sea of people, solitude is a state of mind, and I am often there. 

In these quarantine days, this solitary place has melded into the far more observable, measurable state of isolation, perhaps, in a smaller puddle of people. And for some, like me, it is a very observable, measurable state of aloneness. Solo. By oneself. Alone.

I know that there is a danger in conflating aloneness, isolation, and solitude with loneliness, but that is an essay for another day. 

However, being alone in quarantine does come with a certain sense of loneliness. Because I know that many are alone too – but externally imposed, without the willingness to be – I feel sorry for them, and the melancholy of loneliness engulfs me. 

I keep in touch with my friend Belle daily like a buddy system. I joked that I don’t want to die alone and have no one discover my body for days. Sometimes, I would see in the news that this is indeed the reality for some people – their final moments all alone with no one knowing of their demise until days later, and it would fill me with great sorrow and I would text her about it in distress. She always responds.

Because quarantine life usually isn’t very exciting, on most days, we just update each other about what we did. It’s nothing spectacular – what’s for dinner, what deadlines we have, what films we watched, what music to listen to… Sometimes the most amusing thing is having our activities synch up without planning it. Like ordering the same food for lunch or calling pest control at the same. She calls us quarantine twins. It is such a simple joy that it warrants this essay, lest I forget.

As we start to reintroduce physical socialising, I become more grateful for the liberty to choose solitude. But I also appreciate that while is easy to keep to oneself, it is even easier to feel lonely.

What I read, watch and listen to…

* I’m reading Jean-Paul Sartre’s play, No Exit.

* I’m recommending Emmanuel Olalere’s summary of LimKokWing’s King of Africa billboard scandal (the video description box also provides all the backstory you need):

* I’m re-watching Ava DuVernay’s full feature documentary, 13th, made available on Youtube for free by Netflix:

Chart of the week

Reddit user TiredWireFrames posted this. I can relate, except I’m not writing a novel. It’s more like... a book. In Malay. On a technical subject. It’s going great.

Fakta, Auta & Data #2: Sudah tentu teknologi bersifat perkauman, ia direka begitu

Menurut kajian Lei Guo and Chris J. Vargo, yang diterbitkan di dalam Journal of Communication pada tahun 2017, daripada 54 juta artikel berita daripada 4,708 sumber berita di 67 negara pada tahun 2015, negara-negara kaya bukan sahaja menarik perhatian sebahagian besar berita dunia, mereka juga lebih cenderung untuk memutuskan bagaimana negara lain melihat dunia.

Sebagai contoh, dalam liputan awal mengenai bagaimana negara-negara sedunia menangani krisis koronavirus, jarang sekali kita melihat negara-negara bukan barat seperti Malaysia dan Vietnam diketengahkan sebagai salah satu negara yang menganganinya dengan baik. Malah, negara-negara barat yang dijadikan teladan sebenarnya jauh lebih buruk prestasinya berbanding Malaysia tetapi diagung-agungkan.

Lebih-lebih lagi, walaupun pengaruh bahasa Inggeris dan naratif barat terus tersebar, hakikatnya sebilangan besar negara-negara bukan barat seperti Malaysia sebenarnya tidak menggunakan bahasa Inggeris teknikal. Ia menjadi penghalang pemahaman dan menjarakkan ketidaksamaan antara kelas.

Tambahan lagi, sebahagian besar wacana umum tentang maklumat palsu menggunakan bahasa Inggeris, dan mengecualikan golongan luar bandar yang tidak berbahasa Inggeris, sedangkan kumpulan inilah yang paling terdedah kepada ancaman maklumat palsu. Maklumat dalam bahasa Melayu yang menyediakan bahasa yang tepat – konteks dan sinteks – untuk perbincangan mengenai maklumat yang salah untuk komuniti berbahasa Melayu selalunya lewat berkembang.

Tanpa bahasa yang tepat untuk membincangkannya, adakah ancaman maklumat palsu benar-benar dapat difahami? Apabila Najib Razak menyeleweng AS$4.5 bilion wang 1MDB, ramai pakar politik elit meluahkan kekecewaan mereka kerana majoriti rakyat di luar bandar tidak peduli. Tetapi, mungkinkah ia kerana tidak ada perkataan bahasa Melayu untuk nilai ‘bilion’? Bagaimana seseorang benar-benar memahami betapa besarnya jumlah yang dicuri sekiranya kiraan nombor dalam bahasa Melayu berakhir pada nilai juta?

Cabaran untuk menangani maklumat palsu terletak kepada bahasa, budaya dan geografi. Tanpa pengetahuan mengenai bahasa tempatan dan konteks sosiopolitik di kebanyakan negara di Asia dan Afrika, syarikat Big Tech yang berpusat di barat tidak mampu menangani kempen disinformasi tempatan di laman mereka.

Walaupun rangkaian sosial seperti Facebook, Youtube dan Twitter telah menambahbaikkan algoritma mereka untuk mengesan dan menghapus maklumat palsu, mereka masih menghadapi masalah pada akarnya iaitu prasangka reka (design bias). Teknologi pengenalan wajah menyasarkan suspek jenayah berdasarkan warna kulit. Sistem profil risiko juga bersifat sedemikian. Kenapa? Kerana teknologi arus perdana direka oleh lelaki barat berkulit putih.

Transcript for audio

Today I got a haircut after three months. I didn’t realise how much I would appreciate the buzz of the razor for my undercut, the snip snap of the scissors for my mane, the fingers massaging my scalp, the cold water washing shampoo off my hair, the heat from the hairdryer through my damp hair. Although I don’t experience ASMR, I bet it’s close to how that haircut scene in the 2017 film Battle of the Sexes felt like. I wanted to do a facial too but the beautician’s service is not yet opened. I will come back again next month for that. But all that calming effect went straight out the window as soon as I stepped out of the salon when I received yet another unsolicited message from a real estate agent asking about my apartment. Every time it happens, I curse my former real estate agent for disclosing my number to the entire industry that now constantly hounds me about selling or renting my place even when I never said I wanted to and had explicitly mentioned numerous times to have my number removed from their database. When I got to my car, I saw a note, saying that they had taken out the air from my tyres for burdening others but that I can inflate the tyres in the next-door gas station. Listen, I go to the same salon for many years now, and everyone here knows that there is limited parking, and if you have to double park, you just have to leave your handbrake down so that you can push the cars left or right until you can pull your car out – like those wooden puzzle toys. I’ve done that many times – the pushing of the cars, and I’m a tiny person. It’s not a strongman event. I have never complained. I even think it’s quite fun. It used to amuse Sherry a lot. This person has to be new to the neighbourhood for having so much resentment over a common practice in this area. My tyres were due for a pump anyway, the car has not been driven this far for a while. I’m just an easily annoyed person, but at least I have good hair now.

The Starting Block is a weekly collection of notes on science and society with an emphasis on data, democracy, and disinformation. Find me on Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin. Send questions, corrections and suggestions to tinacarmillia@substack.com.

* Emellia Shariff ponders on the politics of calling out and online harassment on Malay Mail.

* On Wired, Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch describes how COVID-19 is history’s biggest translation challenge.

* Go forth and stan: Police are attempting to use apps and online portals to collect footage of protesters, but Kpop fans are flooding them with fancams instead, reports Seren Morris on NewsWeek. They did the same to drown out #WhiteLivesMatter hashtag, reports BBC.

* This is a tool by Everest Pipkin for anonymising photographs taken at protests. It works offline.

* A Twitter account is reposting everything Trump tweets. It was suspended within 3 days, Amanda Yeo writes for Mashable.

Shorthand, longhand, just write by hand!

While I was doing my press fellowship last year, I’ve had some of the most interesting conversations with some of the best in the industry. For instance, veteran journalist Roger Harrabin lamented over the death of shorthand at lunch once. I started learning shorthand a week later.

During the same press fellowship but at a different conversation, press fellow Serina Joon, whose work was on whistleblowing, reminded us that notes taken by pen and paper have more rights to privacy and protection than digital ones. 

There are many ways digital notes can be surveilled, acquired or intercepted at various points of its storage and transmission. Even if you refuse to give up your digital notes, at the request of a law enforcement agency, the service providers can be compelled to do so. When you agree to the terms and conditions of such services, you also waive certain exclusivity to the rights of the notes. With written notes, the pen manufacturer and the notebook maker cannot turn over your notes even if they want to. 

If you wish to destroy your written notes, you can. However, deleting your digitally stored notes does not guarantee it cannot still be retrieved. 

A third and also separate incident happened during the fellowship. I was in attendance of a discussion about tech ethics and data privacy led by Aviv Ovadya. He used a voice recorder that simultaneously transcribed the recording as a means of note-taking for his personal use. Those who wished to not be recorded could announce so prior to the start of the discussion so that the app would be paused when they spoke.

Many in the room were some of the brightest minds in tech – and almost as many were distrustful towards it. One of them asked to clarify if the recording was done through a device or an app. He said, if it were an app, he would want to be excluded from the recording. I deduced that it was not that he did not want to be recorded. He simply did not want to potentially provide his voice recording to third parties via the app.

One way to work around this is to use a voice recorder with a built-in speaker to enable offline, in-device replay. This voice recorder does not require a connection to an Internet-linked device such as your smartphone or laptop where the recording can be cached and intercepted.

The other way is to take notes in shorthand. The National Council for the Training of Journalists in the UK requires a shorthand speed of 100 words per minute for certification. This speed is not quite reflective of the number of words spoken per minute by the average English speaker, which is closer to 125. However, with practice, it is possible to further improve your shorthand speed.

That’s why I spend 20 minutes every day writing shorthand even when I am not working on sensitive materials. I use Teeline, but there are other shorthand systems such as Pitman, which has been adapted for more than a dozen languages.

Earlier this year Charlotte Tobitt asked regional daily and news agency editors in the UK whether shorthand is still an essential skill for journalists.

Some excerpts:

PA Media’s Pete Clifton: “We have reporters going to court every day, where an accurate note of proceedings is still vital. And a reporter who can take a rapid note on the doorstep, then read it straight back to the news desk or write it into a story, is always going to beat someone who has to listen back to a recording.”

Yorkshire Post editor James Mitchinson argued that because the law has not changed to allow recording in courtrooms, any reporter he hires must have shorthand so they can take notes of legal proceedings.

Euan McGrory, editor the Edinburgh Evening News: “Of course with today’s technology it has never been easier to record and transcribe interviews, but there are many situations in which shorthand is still hugely beneficial. I’ve known reporters to come back from a noisy public meeting or an interview in a busy cafe to find that large parts of their recording are inaudible. Without shorthand, they would have been lost.”

Again, and most importantly, you have exclusive ownership over your own handwritten notes. The ones stored digitally? That’s not guaranteed.

What I read, watch and listen to…

* I’m reading Barton Gellman’s Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State. Wired adapted part of it that describes the NSA’s secret tool to map your social network.

* I’m watching Vice News’ report on why LGBTQ Youtubers are suing Google for alleged discrimination over the algorithm it uses to moderate its platforms. The Verge reported that videos from LGBTQ creators have been automatically demonetised and age-restricted on Youtube not because of the content they produce but because of who they are.

Chart of the week

From data journalist Mona Chalabi and winner of the 2020 Shorty Award for Best Journalist on Social Media:

Sebuah penghayatan

Perkataan bahasa Melayu yang saya paling suka yang sukar diterjemah ke dalam bahasa Inggeris ialah “gotong-royong” – bukan setakat maksud perkataan itu tetapi dari segi bagaimana masyarakat kita menghayati dan mempraktikkan budaya ini.

Apabila bercakap tentang menghayati pula, saya diingatkan tentang perbualan saya dengan kawan saya, Khadijah, seorang pensyarah bahasa Inggeris yang sudah bersara. Kami berbual tentang yoga yang kami berdua amat minati dari segi praktikal dan intelektual. Kat berkata, yoga itu bukan setakat aktiviti fizikal tapi kalau dihayati betul-betul boleh menyembuhkan semangat kemanusiaan sedunia. Kalaulah, katanya, kita semua memberi yoga peluang dan menghayati prinsip-prinsip falsafahnya pasti dunia ini menjadi tempat yang lebih baik untuk didiami.

Menurut kawan saya itu, perkataan “menghayati” itu sukar diterjemahkan kerana akan dicairkan maksudnya. Kalau kita guna perkataan bahasa Inggeris yang dekat dengan maksudnya seperti “appreciate” atau “embody” ia itu masih tidak boleh betul-betul mewakili maksud sebenar yang lebih mendalam apabila kita berkata kita menghayati sesuatu.

Transcript for audio

Two weeks ago I had to chase several deadlines – producing stories, hosting a show, translation works. It helps break the repetitive nature of my year-long research. I thought I spaced them out well, but because of the pandemic, timelines were shifted around and I ended up facing all the major deadlines in the same week. Last week, I tried and failed to recalibrate my sleep cycle. I just realised, because these were international assignments, it meant I was working in three different timezones. It’s like having jetlag. And this week, I am slowly recovering from it. Besides sleep, I didn’t sacrifice much. But I really wished I didn’t halt my daily meditation. I have simple mental markers for getting into a meditative state. I start like this:

Take a comfortable seated position. Become aware of sit-bones pressing gently down. Let the spinal column rise up. Broaden the collarbones softly. Spread the palms up and outward on the lap. Lift the back of the skull from the neck softly. Rest the tongue to the bottom of the mouth. Top eyelids resting gently on lower lids. Eyeballs fall gently back into the sockets. Become aware of breath, breathing through the nose.

Next, I do a body scan. I start from the toes, feet, ankles, calves, thighs; toward my butt, lower back, stomach, palms, wrists, arms; moving upward toward my chest, mid-back, upper back, shoulders, neck; and end with the jaws, chin, the skin around the mouth, lips, tongue; cheeks, ears, forehead, skin around the eyes, scalp.

And with each exhalation, I release the tension in these areas, usually focusing around the hip flexors, abs, armpits, shoulders, jaws, lips and eyes. These are the areas I typically carry my stress – tightening, contracting, clutching, clenching, wrinkling. Soften, relax and let go at exhale. And inhale calmness, feeling any sensation in these areas – warmth, breeze, stillness. Sometimes, thoughts enter and bother – plans, ideas, regrets. Acknowledge, don’t engage, and return to the breath.

I tend to do a second round of a broader scan of attention and awareness toward my sitting triangle, for stability and groundedness; toward my abdominal area where I carry fear and anxiety; toward my chest area where I carry sorrow and anger; and toward the centre of my headspace where I carry distraction and compulsion.

I then spend some time on my breath, usually with attention to my neck region, the route through which we receive air and nutrition. I do a few rounds of breathing exercise that usually starts at 4-0-6 and ends with 4-2-8 – four counts inhale, two counts hold, eight counts exhale.

I return to regular breathing as I start coming out of my meditation. Wriggling my toes and fingers, interlacing my fingers and stretching them upwards, then bending side to side, twisting left and right. I put my palms together and lower them to my forehead for clarity and peace of mind, then to my lips for gratitude and contentment, and finally in front of my chest, for love and compassion. And take my time to open my eyes and face reality.

Then I immediately reach for my phone to get on social media, alternating between animal videos and the depressing news cycle. C’est la vie – une déception.

The Starting Block is a weekly collection of notes on science and society with an emphasis on data, democracy, and disinformation. Find me on Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin. Send questions, corrections and suggestions to tinacarmillia@substack.com.

* Twitter fact-checks Donald Trump. No more than a day later, he signs an executive order targeting Big Tech. But Techdirt says: (1) it’s a distraction (2) it’s legally meaningless. Trump also ends US relations with the WHO.

* On Wired, Chris Stokel-Walker summarises how OSINT tools catch Dominic Cummings with his pants down – again, and again. “The story reveals how the verification of narratives – previously the preserve of journalists and investigators – can now be done by anyone with a computer, time, and some lateral thinking skills,” says Swansea University’s Yvonne McDermott Rees.

* From MIT Technology Review: Yes, older people are more likely to share misinformation – but if you think you know why, you could be wrong. Also, fact-checks aren’t necessarily the solution.

* COVID-19 is an “experimental subject like no other” for people who study health and science disinformation, write Philip Ball and Amy Maxmen on Nature.

On advocacy

UPDATE: WAYS TO HELP

This week issue feels heavier for me to write. The news cycle has been quite hard on my mental health, and if I’m being quite honest, it has triggered some flashbacks to a tweet I posted not too long ago that led to violent threats all over my social media. (WARNING: Don’t. Read. The. Comments.)

However, I am reminded of Ijeoma Oluo’s tweet on the beauty of anti-racism:

And Sanjeev Sanyal on the importance of reversing the gaze:

Based on those two posts, I dug out a journal entry I did not intend for publication, but which I read out in parts to my friend Belle when she visited me earlier in the week, to repurpose for this segment. I wrote this with environmentalism in mind when disheartened by the vile attacks on Greta Thunberg. However, you may replace any reference to that with anything worth advocating for, such as anti-racism.

When we demand perfection from advocates, it is defeatist and it disarms the advocacy. If you cave to the distraction, then the conversation shifts from the subject of the advocacy to the imperfection of the advocate.

It tells you that you cannot advocate, for instance, for the environment until you live off the grid, do not use fossil fuel, and be vegan. If we wait for that, we will never advocate for anything because it is unrealistic. 

No one is completely free from the effects of the fossil fuel industry and Big Agro. The very moment you were born into this world, you have received their benefits. By this demand (for a perfect way of life in line with your advocacy), no one ought to advocate for the environment. By this same logic, no one ought to stand up against bigotry, violence, colonialism and other forms of injustice. 

Your advocacy does not exist in a vacuum – removed from the realities of the world. It means that while you make conscious decisions to live up to the ideals of the future that you advocate for, there are times where you will have to participate in the immediate realities that are not of your choice. Advocacy is a process and it co-exists with the very present that it demands to improve. 

Advocates who become public figures are under heavier critical observation. As the name, face and voice of the cause, they are benchmarked against a different set of standards – the kind that demerits anything short of perfection. Don’t be fooled, such scrutiny trickles down to the common person to dissuade you from even trying. 

We must be discerning consumers of information. Some forms of advocacy certainly are performative but we should not be discouraged by the kinks within the movement. Like the making of a bowl of steamed rice, they will be sieved out in the process of dehulling or sifting or rinsing. Meanwhile, we must remain steadfast in our advocacy and not be discouraged by attempts to delegitimise us simply because we are realistic and present, but also cautiously optimistic about a better future. 

We mustn’t wait for the person with a way of life that is perfectly in line with their advocacy. This person doesn’t exist yet, which is why we advocate for the future where such a person can. 

What I read, watch and listen to…

* I’m reading Michelle Kim’s essay, Allyship actions for Asians to show up for the Black community right now.

* I’m watching:

* I’m listening to:

“The Blizzard to us is the image that represents everything that we despise. It represents the things that we fear, our anxieties and the everyday routine. Everyone has its own blizzard, it can be a sickness, it can be the fact of losing someone, it can be all sorts of things. It’s something very personal, but something that you fight off to keep marching. – Fauve, 2013.”

Chart of the week

The Internet, at least this week, should just be for cat videos, cat gifs, cat photos and certainly, cat charts.

Krisis identiti dalam dunia asing

Saya mengemaskini catatan pendek saya tentang sebuah audio siar yang dirakam pada tahun 2018 bersama rakan sekerja saya pada masa itu, Haniff Baharuddin.

Ini adalah satu-satunya siaran di mana saya merujuk kepada asal-usul saya. Rakan-rakan sekerja saya semua tahu, saya mempunyai “Hukum 4S,” iaitu empat perkara tentang diri saya yang saya tidak mahu bincangkan dalam mana-mana siaran dan salah satu ‘S’ itu ialah ‘state’ (negeri asal).

Tetapi dalam rakaman ini, tentu sekali sukar berbincang tentang pembentukan identiti dan perubahannya melalui pengaruh pengalaman dan persekitaran. Saya teringat kembali tentang rakaman ini, dan anggaplah ia sebagai sambungan dari terbitan surat berita yang lepas.

Saya bersama Haniff meneroka perubahan identiti setelah memasuki dunia asing. Secara amnya dunia asing saya adalah kerjaya saya yang jauh lebih elitis dari saya. Jangan terpedaya – bidang media itu elit dan pasti menjadi lebih elit; industri media tidak pernah dan tidak akan memperjuangkan isu-isu rakyat biasa, hanya yang penting-penting sahaja.

Kami bukanlah seperti kera mendapat bunga – bukan hendak menjahanamkan peluang yang telah kami terima, tapi situasi kami memberi perspektif baru tentang diri kami sendiri yang masih mencari-cari tempat kami di dunia orang lain.

Identiti semakin dipolitikkan, dan saya, yang darahnya tercemar hasil kahwin campur, yang peparunya tercemar hasil bernafas udara bandaraya, yang langkahnya lain hasil berhijrah ke industri yang elitis, yang kosa katanya lain hasil pendidikan lanjut, masih mencari-cari tempat saya di dalam situasi baharu walaupun situasi ini sudah lama wujud. Begitulah.

“Kau, kau; aku, aku,” dan saya, di tengah-tengah masih terpinga-pinga.

Dengar selanjutnya.

Transcript for audio

This past week I’ve been quite affected by everything that happened in the US – with police brutality against African Americans – what happened to Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd. Floyd was murdered this month while being arrested. Taylor was shot at least eight times in March when three police officers forcibly entered her apartment. Arbery was killed in February as he was jogging by a gun-wielding former police officer and his son.

There are multiple debates on Malaysian Twitter about whether the Malays are the white people of Malaysia; how just because we are not killing others we are somehow better; which racial slur is more racist than another.

We’re rounding up refugees in detention centres during a global pandemic – but justice for George Floyd! We have Bumi-only, anti-Indian, no-African housing and renting policies – but justice of Ahmaud Arbery!

It’s exhausting. I will just quote Michelle Kim from her essay, 20+ Allyship Actions for Asians to Show Up for the Black Community Right Now: “Unearth your internalised anti-Blackness and reflect on how they show up in your daily life.”

I invite you to do so… and I invite you to confront your Blizzard.

Can you hear us, Blizzard? Can you hear us? If you can hear us…

The Starting Block is a weekly collection of notes on science and society with an emphasis on data, democracy, and disinformation. Find me on Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin. Send questions, corrections and suggestions to tinacarmillia@substack.com.

* The Atlantic launches Shadowland, an immersive series led by Ellen Cushing that explores the history, politics and sociology of conspiracy theories, albeit through an American-centric lens.

* The WHO’s 73rd World Health Assembly adopts the resolution on the COVID-19 response. One highlight is the setting up an independent inquiry into “the actions of WHO and their timelines pertaining to the COVID-19 pandemic.”

* The Guardian and everyone with a five-day working week fawn over Jacinda Ardern as she suggests New Zealand considers a four-day working week, further boosting her global popularity. Keyword: Global.

* Newsrooms around the world, which have long been used to staggered shifts pre-COVID, are now further reconfiguring their operations with a “distributed newsroom” model. The most thorough resource on this is a playbook published by Fathm, an independent news lab – supported by Google News Initiative.

* Court orders grandmother to delete social media photos of her grandchildren under GDPR, reports the BBC.

A brief history of the #BFMPoll

When we launched the live afternoon segment The Daily Digest on BFM, one of the worries was: Who listens to the radio during non-peak hours? One of my suggestions to address engagement issues was to carry out a daily Twitter poll. The call to action was to join the live discussion on-air. We started to get text messages (and the unicorn phone calls) during the show.

Twitter is its own bubble, and not everyone who participates in a poll actually listens to the show. Sometimes, 80 people vote on a poll, other times, 800. Sometimes, a poll takes the in-studio conversation on a different route. The poll creates continuity and cross-platform engagements, even after a segment ends. It creates liveliness.

After a few months of running daily polls for the show, the other BFM shows started to consistently do the same. Eventually, the digital team requested that all Twitter polls run with the hashtag #BFMPoll.

Soon, an independent UI/UX designer asked me if BFM uses historical data from these polls, for instance, to gauge the change of sentiment about the same topic from a few months or a year ago. We have kept in touch although I have since left BFM. Last month, he said the tool he is working on, which can provide such insight feature, is in the beta testing stage.

Not a bad story to tell about a puny afternoon show.

What I read, watch and listen to…

* I’m reading Colin Marshall’s article on Open Culture about Graham Greene’s writing method, where he wrote 500 words per day and published 50+ books.

* I’m bookmarking this long-read by Adam Garfinkle – a historian, political scientist, and former speechwriter for Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice – about the erosion of deep literacy.

* I’m watching Jessica Kellgren-Fozard’s Youtube channel. I discovered this British vlog recently and would recommend it to those who are interested in deaf and disability awareness (she is deaf and has other chronic illnesses) or otherwise, in 1950s vintage fashion (I’m not) or LGBTQ+ identity (I am). Her wife is a dentist and sometimes appears on her channel; she is half Malaysian, so I’m partial. Youtube algorithm works in mysterious ways, and while we sometimes complain about it, I’m not complaining about this one. Start here:

Chart of the week

In 2015, Buzzfeed’s Anna Borges created a series of humourous charts showing what being an introvert is like. Not quite sure if this is tasteful now:

Tentang Chairil

Penyair Chairil Anwar hidup dan bergiat tatkala Indonesia baru saja terbentuk, dan bersama pembentukan republik itu, turutlah dikembangkan dan disatukan identiti kebangsaannya, termasuklah bahasa.

Chairil seorang yang biadap bahasanya namun tetap puitis. Dia seorang plagiat dan berhutang wang tidak terbayar sehingga mati. Dia juga mati awal, belum cukup bulan menyambut ulang tahunnya ke-27.

Dan dia juga yang menjadi pembela dan pengangkat bahasa Indonesia yang pada ketika itu belum lagi disusun habis. Penggunaan bahasanya dalam penulisannya mendekatkan orang biasa dengan bahasa baharu ini, dengan kata-kata pinjaman dari bahasa daerah yang mungkin menyenangkan penerimaan bahasa Indonesia pada ketika itu. Kosa kata harian yang kasar yang tidak senonoh dibukukan malah ditulis mencemari kesucian kertas halaman. Tapi ia juga memudahkan sastera — yang mungkin dianggap elitis ketika itu, seperti sekarang juga — kepada semua.

Dalam prosanya Hoppla, Chairil juga menulis: “Kata ialah kebenaran!!!” Tapi dengan bahasa yang sama dia juga membuluhkannya, iaitu, walau bahasa itu benar dan kukuh, tapi tetap terlentur tidak terpatah. Dan Chairil dengan penuh mampu betul-betul melenturkan bahasa dengan sususan yang pintar malah estetik seninya.

Mungkin juga ia nostalgia semangat zaman harapan baharu 1940-an di Indonesia.

Dan mungkin kerana semua itu, mudah untuk kita membuat alasan tentang perbuatan buruknya, mudah untuk tidak mengendahkan kesilapannya, dan terus sujud bodek mengagungkan karyanya.

Mungkin Chairil Anwar memudahkan penerimaan perbezaan dalam kehidupan yang serba tidak sempurna.

Nota ini pada asalnya diterbitkan pada April 2020 di Facebook.

Transcript for audio

Mid last week I read a BBC article about Mohammad Shalehan who lost a huge cash prize because a Singaporean radio station said he mispronounced singer Tony Hadley's name for a quiz the station ran. Hadley himself came to his rescue but the radio station, Gold 905, which is apparently more English than the Englishman himself, wouldn't budge on their decision. Listen to this clip for the pronunciation of Tony Hadley's name from Tony Hadley himself, the man who lost, and the one who won.

They ALL pronounced the name differently – but correctly. At least, in my humble pleb opinion.

Delalorm Semabia, a blogger from Ghana – whose name I probably mispronounced by Gold 905’s standards – once wrote: “The idea that intelligence is linked to English pronunciation is a legacy from colonial thinking.” I think this was at play here.

Linguistic bias or accent discrimination, or whatever you want to call it, is deeply rooted in classism. It’s nothing new. In 2010, Shiri Lev-Ari and Boaz Keysar of the University of Chicago published a study that showed that people speaking with a non-native accent are perceived to be less trustworthy. Andrew Timming of the University of St Andrews in the UK published a study in 2016 that showed that they also find it harder to get a job, while Laura Cerrato's 2017 dissertation published by the Helsinki Metropolia University of Applied Sciences showed that they might also be perceived to be less educated. [Please find the links to these studies in the audio transcript.]

To be fair, since I know some of you know me personally, I do make fun of accents and pronunciations a lot – mine, yours, my mother’s… but mine, mainly. But I am not ashamed of my “unplaced” accent – this is why I chose to talk about this story, rather than write about it.

My accent has been formed by my mixed upbringing, shaped by my public education, influenced by my diverse peers, affected by my elitist industry… I often get asked aggressively, even accusingly and with absolutely no valid reason at all: “What are you?” and “Where are you from?” when I start speaking in business meetings. Perhaps my accent doesn’t fit my Anglicised name. Also, my face and skin don’t match the accent nor the name. It is very confusing, but also somehow it seems to be my fault – that it is wrong at all. A French accent when speaking English is so sexy, and an American accent when speaking Malay is so adorable, but we, people of colour? How dare we speak the language of our former colonisers with our ancestors’ accents! The disappointing and certainly shameful part really is when our neocolonised kinsfolks decide to play language police.

The day after the BBC article was posted, which Tony Hadley himself shared on his social media, and after both Tony and Shalehan appeared on BBC3 Radio – Gold 905 finally relented and awarded Shalehan the prize money he won fair and square. A blessed Aidilfitri to this man, to you and to yours. For the folks of Sabah and Sarawak – happy harvest festival.

The Starting Block is a weekly collection of notes on science and society with an emphasis on data, democracy, and disinformation. Find me on Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin. Send questions, corrections and suggestions to tinacarmillia@substack.com.

* Sri Lanka-based Indi Samarajiva points out that for the New York Times, only white leaders stand out in the fight against COVID-19. “In its Editorial on leadership, the New York Times devotes exactly one sentence to Asia.”

* In an update to last month’s report, Vox says the World Health Organisation finally has a DMARC policy to prevent spoofing. Nonetheless, it is a thorough explainer on how, before May 12th, you might have received scam emails from @who.int, the real domain name of the WHO.

* Journalistic ethics and disinformation consultant Thomas Kent asks on Poynter whether journalists should let sources look over stories before publication. When do we do it, how much do we show, and what are we willing to change?

Communication accessibility

NBC reports that a US federal judge has ordered New York governor Andrew Cuomo to have a sign language interpreter for his daily coronavirus briefings.

I spoke frequently in the past about Malaysia’s “caption culture.” For many Malaysians who grew up watching the evening news on RTM, we are used to seeing sign language for every news broadcast. We are used to watching tv shows and films with subtitles.

Watching international TV without any of that except for major events like COVID-19 updates, active shooter alerts or hurricane season is still something rather bizarre to me. Malaysia isn’t the most progressive country in the world by any stretch but if there is one thing we do right, it is accessible communication formats.

How did we get here?

In an exclusive with Malaysia Gazette, Tan Lee Bee, an RTM sign language interpreter explained that back in 1986 then information minister Mohamed Rahmat had requested a sign language interpreter for RTM broadcasts. That was how she got the job.

Although she has gained prominence since the regular live telecast of the government’s COVID-19 update, on social media, she was made fun of for looking like she was making Tiktok dance videos next to these speeches.

Ignorant? Maybe. So was I.

I bought my first Malaysian Sign Language (Bahasa Isyarat Malaysia) book a few years ago. I did not plan to, but I saw it at a pop-up store by RC Deaf Missions Malaysia, and thought: “Wow, so this means I can communicate with my friends across the loud dancefloor when we’re at the club!”

I forgot to factor in the fact that my friends, too, would need to know how to sign for us to be able to communicate that way.

But for the sake of redeeming myself, here’s another story.

For International Week of the Deaf in 2016, I produced an interview segment with the Malaysian Federation of the Deaf. What listeners didn’t know was that behind the scenes, I had encountered several problems.

First, my main presenter was unavailable for the pre-recorded slot. My colleague Lim Soon Heng graciously stepped in as the presenter, although he had very little time to prepare.

Second, I considered that it would be quite ironic to have a conversation about deafness on the radio when the deaf community would not be able to listen to it. I wanted to record a video for Facebook. My stand-in presenter was more than happy to oblige.

Third, the crowded recording studio allowed for only a single camera set-up and an awkward angle for the sign language interpreters. In any case, it was sufficient. The video gained traction organically, with more than 10,000 views and 250 shares.

To this day, I consider it one of my proudest works.

If you take a look at the comment section, you will notice that some were written in ‘broken’ Malay/English:

“Try boleh tengok vc ni.”

“Bismillah alhamdulilah untuk nak deaf lain world dan Asia tengok baik senang lah O.K.”

“Pekak tak perlu macam bukan fahami dari world tak dengar kurang.”

It is a common misconception that sign language is a derivative of a spoken language. It’s not ‘broken’ Manglish. These sentences are based on the language rules of BIM – a distinct language – and written by users of BIM, thus, structured the way they would have signed it.

This is why subtitles alone aren’t effective. As Lynn Stewart-Taylor told BBC: “Trying to decipher the information [from subtitles] is like trying to work out something written in a foreign language.”

What I read, watch and listen to…

* I’m reading Svara. Finally, the journal arrived. Initially, I was informed that I had to pick it up myself. During the movement restriction order? No way! I paid RM9 postage for that. I fought, gave up, and finally, they sent it to my doorstep.

* I’m also reading Bakhtiar Talhah’s call for Malaysia to embrace the LGBT community on Malay Mail for International Day Against Homophobia.

* I’m watching the Life in the Universe Pandemic Series on Youtube by astrobiology professor, Charles Cockell. Lecture No. 33 is about how to become an astrobiologist. I took his astrobiology course in 2017 and I’m still not one…

* I’m listening to this most heart-wrenching audio diary by John Naughton about his mother-in-law’s funeral, which he and his family attended via live stream, only for the feed to fail during the ceremony.

* I’m looking at yet another shot of Boris Johnson:

Chart of the week

This week’s chart is my writing insight from Grammarly. I rely a lot on this tool to check my spelling and grammar because of #multilingualproblems.

Fakta, Auta & Data #1: Salah atau palsu, tetap tidak tepat

Menurut Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, istilah bahasa Melayu untuk ‘misinformation’ ialah maklumat salah, dan ‘disinformation’ pula ialah maklumat palsu.

‘Misinformation’ merujuk kepada mana-mana maklumat yang tidak betul, yakni, salah. Maknanya, kadang-kadang kita tersilap faham sesuatu dan memberi maklumat yang tidak betul, walaupun kita tidak berniat untuk menipu. Itulah ibubapa atau pakcik-makcik kita yang asyik mengirim mesej Whatsapp yang tidak berdasarkan fakta dan bukti. Niat mereka baik, hanya ingin berkongsi nasihat kerana prihatin. Maklumat mereka salah, tapi mereka tidak berniat jahat.

Malangnya, istilah maklumat palsu tidak cukup untuk menunjukkan niat jahat di sebalik maksud sebenar ‘disinformation.’ ‘Disinformation’ bererti sengaja menipu dengan tujuan tidak baik. Kalau diterjemah balik, maklumat palsu cuma bermaksud ‘false information’ (dan maklumat salah pula ‘wrong information’). Apakah istilah bahasa Melayu itu – maklumat palsu – benar-benar membawa konotasi ini? Langsung tidak. Oleh itu saya menyarankan penggubahan semula istilah ini supaya betul-betul disesuaikan dengan nuansanya yang sebenar.

Transcript for audio

Thank you to everyone who subscribed to The Starting Block. I reached the targetted 32 subscribers three hours after posting about it, and I’m not even sure if I actually know 32 people in real life. I know one of them is my friend Belle, who told me that my goal was “modest.” Well, modesty is my best trait, no one is more modest than me. Except for Donald Trump.

Anyway, Belle is an online writer so I had asked for her professional advice to review the first version of the newsletter – before it was published. She also had to listen to the audio journal so that I can work on my pacing and pronunciation. I mumble a lot and can barely pronounce anything with more than three syllables. And, because of the movement restriction order since March, I have also not spoken to anyone in real life except to the cashier: “Ya, says nak plastik beg.” Belle said I should bring my own reusable bags for groceries. I tried to look for the bag that her mother gave me from her Australian vacation years ago. I will use it – for my next grocery trip.

Belle also thinks my Chart of the Week should be its own section – where I also write a one-liner about it. I guess she wants to have her pie chart and eat it too. I made that change six hours before the first issue went out – meaning it was 1 am Malaysian time. Let me know if you agree with her – or if I should have had my beauty sleep.

The Starting Block is a weekly collection of notes on science and society with an emphasis on data, democracy, and disinformation. Find me on Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin. Send questions, corrections and suggestions to tinacarmillia@substack.com.

* BBC’s specialist disinformation reporter Marianna Spring wrote about the seven types of people who start and spread viral misinformation. I wish this was a Buzzfeed quiz so I know which kind I am.

* Physician Kat Montgomery’s Facebook post debunking the controversial and grossly inaccurate Plandemic (removed on social media platforms) went viral, for good reasons.

* Kavanagh et al. published a paper on COVID-19 response, ethics and politics for African countries on The Lancet.

* The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer describes how COVID-19 was an emergency until Trump found out who was dying.

* The ABS-CBN newsroom was forced off air by the Philippine government amid the global coronavirus pandemic. “Grief-stricken, an applause was the only thing [the staff] could muster – the health crisis still preventing them from hugging each other.”

What’s in a name?

“I’m okay.” by Elena Kravchenko at Collective Individuals 2017.

This short piece hopefully explains the meaning behind the newsletter’s name. I wrote this in June 2017:

Sprinting is one of the most exhilarating sports in terms of its build-up but it ends in literally seconds. And you think about it as a writer: How much can you talk about a sport that is so straightforward, so quick and so well known? Many before you had taken every possible angle: the history of sprinting, the physics and techniques, the sprinters’ physiology, the greatest sprinters of all time, the limit to human speed, the engineering of the shoes or the tracks, the comparison of speed between species; what else is there to talk about it?

The starting block. That’s what. When you’ve done a topic too many times and you struggle with finding that fresh angle with solid legs, think about the starting block!

Often in my work I get pitches such as: “I want to talk about diabetes.” “Have you covered depression yet?” “Could you do something on cycling?” We’ve done this, that, and the other so many times; what is the starting block? Find your footing there. May we all never succumb to writer’s block and may we find our starting blocks to take our stories to the finish line.

Ready, get set, go!

The first edition of this newsletter is a little bit longer so I can explain its format. Every Monday, I compile and share my discoveries from the previous week: 

* The first section is an audio diary. The transcript to it for those who are unable to listen is in the final section of the newsletter.

* The second section is a paragraph about the latest research, news and analysis that I encounter over the week.

* The third section, which is this one, is a short essay, maybe accompanied by an image, that I will use either to comment on the subjects of the news that I posted above or something unrelated that has occupied my mind.

* The fourth section is a recommendation list of books, films, podcasts, etc.

* The fifth section is the chart of the week. (Yes! I like charts!)

* The sixth section is a short segment dalam bahasa Melayu, or if I’ve had a few, peut-être en français ou en español, ¿por qué no? (One can wish). English is the dominant language I use for work but I find more pleasure in the use of other languages.

What I read, watch and listen to… 

* I am re-reading Laura Mulvey’s essay on the male gaze, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.

* I am re-watching Celine Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire after reading the aforementioned essay. I also recommend the filmmaker’s brilliant screenwriting lecture (transcript available here).

* Maybe related to the gaze theory, maybe not, I am looking at this magnificent shot:

* I am listening to this incredible multimedia poetry piece by Sheena Baharudin, a former collaborator for Speak Easy, a radio show on spoken word poetry that I produced and she hosted:

Chart of the week

This week’s chart is from SUTD Data-Driven Innovation Lab. Predictive modelling doesn’t always reflect reality. Discuss.

Penjarakan sosial

Bulan lepas, Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, dalam hantaran baharu di Facebook, memperkenalkan istilah bahasa Melayu untuk podcast, iaitu audio siar. Saya masih khuatir dengan penggunaan istilah ini tapi dalam hantaran tersebut DBP, seolah sinis, menulis: “Pilihan di tangan anda, sama ada untuk memartabatkan bahasa Melayu atau memperlekehkannya.”

Memandangkan ramai masih bertengkar tentang ejaan sebenar penjarakan sosial (satu ‘k’ sahaja), mungkin DBP sudah mengalah, dan saya juga terpaksa redha.

Transcript for audio

Frankly, I am new to the ‘newsletter culture.’ Last year, while doing my press fellowship in Cambridge, I met Charles Arthur, whose newsletter The Overspill goes out every day without fail, with some of the most insightful links, observations and writings. His was the first newsletter I ever signed up for, and I constantly wondered how he has the time for it. Recently, I signed up for John Naughton’s daily newsletter, Memex. John was the director of my fellowship programme, he was the one who introduced me to Charles. I have been following John’s blog for quite a while, but his newsletter includes an audio diary, which is what I am trying to emulate right here. I obviously have an interest in podcasting because of my broadcast background, although I still prefer playing producer rather than presenter. This is a one-man-band, however, so I don’t have a choice. 

I still don’t know how anyone has the time to do a daily newsletter, so I am sticking to a weekly schedule, much like Maria Popova’s Brainpicking and Ann Friedman’s newsletter, both of which I’m also subscribed to.

I spend most of my time online: reading journal articles, watching and listening to the news, and checking social media because of my research on disinformation. In a single day, I can read up to a hundred articles – on good days, at least. Now, it’s starting to make sense how one can compile a daily list of news snippets. I, however, suffer from bouts of writer’s block despite working on a major writing project so I hope this newsletter becomes my starting block that will take me to the end of the project. So every Monday, I will write to my friends and family, who cheer for me and wait for me at the finish line. 

You can expect a weekly collection of notes on science and society, with an emphasis on data, democracy, and disinformation, but not always. Sometimes I will talk about identity politics or film theory, maybe even gardening. There will always be a chart of the week, though. So I hope there will be something for everyone, and I always welcome questions, corrections and suggestions – any feedback at all.

I hope to hit 32 subscribers by May 30 because I’ll turn 32 then!

The Starting Block is a weekly collection of notes on science and society, with an emphasis on data, democracy, and disinformation. Find me on Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin. Send questions, corrections and suggestions to tinacarmillia@substack.com.