Is your data really oil? [feedly]

Is your data really oil?
https://digitopoly.org/2018/01/17/is-your-data-really-oil/

[with Ajay Agrawal and Avi Goldfarb, originally published in HBR Online under the title "Is your company's data actually valuable in the AI era?" , 17 Jan 2018. Their book, Prediction Machines, is coming out in April 2018].

AI is coming. That is what we heard throughout 2017 and will likely continue to hear throughout this year. For established businesses that are not Google or Facebook, a natural question to ask is: What have we got that is going to allow us to survive this transition?

In our experience, when business leaders ask this with respect to AI, the answer they are given is "data." This view is confirmed by the business press. There are hundreds of articles claiming that "data is the new oil" — by which they mean it is a fuel that will drive the AI economy.

If that is the case, then your company can consider itself lucky. You collected all this data, and then it turned out you were sitting on an oil reserve when AI happened to show up. But when you have that sort of luck, it is probably a good idea to ask "Are we really that lucky?"

The "data is oil" analogy does have some truth to it. Like internal combustion engines with oil, AI needs data to run. AI takes in raw data and converts it into something useful for decision making. Want to know the weather tomorrow? Let's use data on past weather. Want to know yogurt sales next week? Let's use data on past yogurt sales. AIs are prediction machines driven by data.

But does AI need your data? There is a tendency these days to see all data as potentially valuable for AI, but that isn't really the case. Yes, data, like oil, is used day-to-day to operate your prediction machine. But the data you are sitting on now is likely not that data. Instead, the data you have now, which your company accumulated over time, is the type of data used to build the prediction machine — not operate it.

The data you have now is training data. You use that data as input to train an algorithm. And you use that algorithm to generate predictions to inform actions.

So, yes, that does mean your data is valuable. But it does not mean your business can survive the storm. Once your data is used to train a prediction machine, it is devalued. It is not useful anymore for that sort of prediction. And there are only so many predictions your data will be useful for. To continue the oil analogy, data can be burned. It is somewhat lost after use. Scientists know this. They spend years collecting data, but once it has produced research findings, it sits unused in a file drawer or on back-up disk. Your business may be sitting on an oil well, but it's finite. It doesn't guarantee you more in the AI economy than perhaps a more favorable liquidation value.

Even to the extent that your data could be valuable, your ability to capture that value may be limited. How many other sources of comparable data exist? If you are one of many yogurt vendors, then your database containing the past 10 years of yogurt sales and related data (price, temperature, sales of related products like ice cream) will have less market value than if you are the only owner of that type of data. In other words, just as with oil, the greater the number of other suppliers of your type of data, the less value you can capture from your training data. The value of your training data is further influenced by the value generated through enhanced prediction accuracy. Your training data is more valuable if enhanced prediction accuracy can increase yogurt sales by $100 million rather than only $10 million.

Moreover, the ongoing value of data usually comes from the actions you take in your day-to-day business — the new data you accrue each day. New data allows you to operate your prediction machine after it is trained. It also enables you to improve your prediction machine through learning. While 10 years of data on past yogurt sales is valuable for training an AI model to predict future yogurt sales, the actual predictions used to manage the supply chain require operational data on an ongoing basis. And this is the important point for today's incumbent companies.

An AI startup that acquires a trove of data on past yogurt sales can train an AI model to predict future sales. It can't actually use its model to make decisions unless the startup obtains ongoing operational data to learn from. Unlike startups, large enterprises generate operational data every day. That's an asset. The more operations, the more data. Furthermore, the owner of the operation can actually make use of the prediction. It can use the prediction to enhance its future operation.

In the AI economy, the value of your accumulated data is limited to a one-time benefit from training your AI model. And the value of training data is, like oil or any other input, influenced by the overall supply — it's less valuable when more people have it. In contrast, the value of your ongoing operational data is not limited to a one-time benefit, but rather provides a perpetual benefit for operating and further enhancing your prediction machine. So, despite all the talk about data being the new oil, your accumulated historical data isn't the thing. However, it may be the thing that gets you to the thing. Its value for your future business prospects is low. But if you can find ways to generate a new, ongoing data stream that delivers a performance advantage in terms of your AI's predictive power, that will give you sustainable leverage when AI arrives.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Why a Successful Union Organizer Thinks Traditional Organizing is a Lost Cause

https://portside.org/node/16301

Why a Successful Union Organizer Thinks Traditional Organizing is a Lost Cause Rick Wartzman  January 16, 2018 Beyond Chron Instead of being sufficiently innovative, says Seattle SEIU Local 775 David Rolf, most labor leaders have been "reinvesting and doubling down on our American system of enterprise-based collective bargaining since the union movement started to shrink in the early 1950s." The result: "Through decades . . . we've seen unions grow weaker and weaker every year while continuing to repeat the same strategic directions." , David Rolf, president of Service Employees International Union Local 775 in Seattle, says the collective-bargaining system is outdated and worker advocates need to search for a new model of unionism.   If anyone has shown a keen understanding of how to unionize workers in America, it's David Rolf. In the 1990s, he was a key player in the Service Employees International Union winning the right to represent some 74,000 home care aides in Los Angeles—the largest union organizing campaign since the 1940s. In his present post, as president of SEIU Local 775 in Seattle, he has spearheaded growth from 1,600 to 45,000 members. In 2014, The American Prospect called Rolf "the most successful union organizer of the past 15 years." All of which makes Rolf's take on the collective-bargaining system—that it is a relic, and that those who truly care about workers should stop focusing their efforts on promoting it—particularly provocative. "I think we made a valiant . . . bet that if we put enough talent and enough resources behind traditional union organizing that we could somehow bring back the old model," Rolf told me on the latest episode of my podcast, The Bottom Line. "It wasn't the wrong theory to try necessarily. . . . But ultimately, when you try something over and over again and cannot achieve the results you want, it's time to try something new." Instead of being sufficiently innovative, Rolf adds, most labor leaders have been "reinvesting and doubling down on our American system of enterprise-based collective bargaining since the union movement started to shrink in the early 1950s." The result: "Through decades . . . we've seen unions grow weaker and weaker every year while continuing to repeat the same strategic directions." Today, less than 6.5% of the private-sector workforce in the United States is unionized, a steady drop from nearly 35% in 1955, 26% in 1975, and 10% in 1995. To move forward, Rolf has plenty of ideas, including promoting worker ownership and introducing "ethical workplace" certification and labeling programs designed to appeal to socially conscious consumers. Especially important, he believes, is to supplant firm-by-firm bargaining with a European-style paradigm in which representatives of the employees, employers, and the government set standards for wages and benefits throughout an entire industry or across a geographic area. "The more there's bargaining centralization," Rolf says, "the less anti-union the culture is, the more union coverage you have in the workplace, the lower inequality is within the overall society, the lower the level of gender wage inequality is, and the more time people get for social and leisure activity." Another part of Rolf's strategy has been to build advocacy organizations like the Fight for $15, which, in his words, has put forth a "bold and morally compelling demand" to elevate the pay of more than 20 million low-wage workers. Whether a critical mass of labor leaders will ever agree with Rolf and push hard to replace the status quo is far from certain. But nobody, he says, should interpret the organizing triumphs that he and a relatively small number of others around the country have enjoyed as a sign that 20th century trade unionism can survive the 21st. "Overall, the trend lines are not good," Rolf says, suggesting that the current system is simply "marking time until its eventual extinction." "It's not to say that you can't find a few dozen black rhinos left in the wild somewhere," he continues, "but that shouldn't make us think that they're suddenly going to take over the world." This story first appeared in Capital and Main

Recovery Radio:Recovery Radio: If you are addicted, you are marketable

John Case has sent you a link to a blog:



Blog: Recovery Radio
Post: Recovery Radio: If you are addicted, you are marketable
Link: http://recovery.enlightenradio.org/2018/01/recovery-radio-if-you-are-addicted-you.html

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Belabored Podcast #142: Smartphone Sweatshops in Asia, with Joe DiGangi [feedly]

Belabored Podcast #142: Smartphone Sweatshops in Asia, with Joe DiGangi
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/belabored-podcast-142-smartphone-sweatshops-asia-joe-digangi

Steve Bannon may have lost his perch in the White House and Breitbart; but the themes of white supremacy, intolerance, bigotry, and anti-government extremism that drive radical nationalist populism survive his fall. In The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality Justin Gest attempts to explain how this movement has been able to draw support from white working class men and women -- often in support of policies that are objectively harmful to them. Here is how he describes his central concern:

In this book, I suggest that these trends [towards polarization] intensify an underlying demographic phenomenon: the communities of white working class people who once occupied the political middle have decreased in size and moved to the fringes, and American and European societies are scrambling to recalibrate how they might rebuild the centrist coalitions that engender progress.

The book makes use of both ethnographic and survey research to attempt to understand the political psychology of these populations of men and women in Western Europe and the United States -- low-skilled workers with limited education beyond secondary school, and with shrinking opportunities in the economies of the 2000s.

A particularly interesting feature of the book is the ethnographic attempt Gest makes to understand the mechanisms and content of this migration of political identity. Gest conducted open-ended interviews with working class men and women in East London and Youngstown, Ohio in the United States -- both cities that were devastated by the loss of industrial jobs and the weakening of the social safety net in the 1970s and 1980s. He calls these "post-traumatic cities" (7). He addresses the fact that white working class people in those cities and elsewhere now portray themselves as a disadvantaged minority.

There and elsewhere, the white working class populations I consider are consumed by a nostalgia that expresses bitter resentment toward the big companies that abandoned their city, a government that did little to stop them from leaving, and a growing share of visible minorities who are altering their neighborhoods' complexion. (10)

The political psychology of resentment plays a large role in the populations he studies -- resentment of government that fails to deliver, resentment of immigrants, resentment of affirmative action for racial minorities. The other large idea that Gest turns to is marginality -- the idea that these groups have that their voices will not be heard and that the powerful agents in society do not care about their fates.

Rather, this is to say that—across the postindustrial regions of Western Europe and North America—white working class people sense that they have been demoted from the center of their country's consciousness to its fringe. And many feel powerless in their attempts to do something about it. (15)

And resentment and marginality lead for some individuals to a political stance of resistance:

Unimpressed with Labour's priorities, profoundly distrustful of government, and unwilling to join forces with working class immigrants, Barking and Dagenham's working class whites are now engaged in a largely unstructured, alternative form of minority politics. They tend to be focused on local affairs, fighting for scarce public resources and wary of institutionalized discrimination against them. The difficulty has been having their claims heard, and taken seriously. (71)

The resentments and expressions of marginality in Youngstown are similar, with an added measure of mistrust of large corporations like the steel companies that abandoned the city and a recognition of the pervasive corruption that permeates the city. Here is Evelyn on the everyday realities of political corruption in Youngstown:

The more I saw, the more I realized that money can buy your way out of anything. Then you see your sheriff get indicted, your congressman dishonored, our prosecutor in prison, and a mayoral nominee with a cloud over his head. The Valley has been embroiled in political corruption for a long time, and people just look out for themselves. It makes you sick. You don't see it firsthand, the corruption, but you know it's there. (128)

The overriding impression gained from these interviews and Gest's narrative is one of hopelessness. These men and women of Youngstown don't seem to see any way out for themselves or their children. The pathway of upward mobility through post-secondary education does not come up at all in these conversations. And, as Case and Deaton argue from US mortality statistics (link), social despair is associated with life-ending behaviors such as opioids, alcohol abuse, and suicide.

Gest's book lays the ground for thinking about a post-traumatic democratic politics -- a politics that is capable of drawing together the segments of American or British society who genuinely need progressive change and more egalitarian policies if they are to benefit from economic progress in the future. But given the cultural and political realities that Gest identifies among this "new minority", it is hard to avoid the conclusion that crafting such a political platform will be challenging.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Populism's base [feedly]

Populism's base
http://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2018/01/populisms-base.html

Steve Bannon may have lost his perch in the White House and Breitbart; but the themes of white supremacy, intolerance, bigotry, and anti-government extremism that drive radical nationalist populism survive his fall. In The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality Justin Gest attempts to explain how this movement has been able to draw support from white working class men and women -- often in support of policies that are objectively harmful to them. Here is how he describes his central concern:

In this book, I suggest that these trends [towards polarization] intensify an underlying demographic phenomenon: the communities of white working class people who once occupied the political middle have decreased in size and moved to the fringes, and American and European societies are scrambling to recalibrate how they might rebuild the centrist coalitions that engender progress.

The book makes use of both ethnographic and survey research to attempt to understand the political psychology of these populations of men and women in Western Europe and the United States -- low-skilled workers with limited education beyond secondary school, and with shrinking opportunities in the economies of the 2000s.

A particularly interesting feature of the book is the ethnographic attempt Gest makes to understand the mechanisms and content of this migration of political identity. Gest conducted open-ended interviews with working class men and women in East London and Youngstown, Ohio in the United States -- both cities that were devastated by the loss of industrial jobs and the weakening of the social safety net in the 1970s and 1980s. He calls these "post-traumatic cities" (7). He addresses the fact that white working class people in those cities and elsewhere now portray themselves as a disadvantaged minority.

There and elsewhere, the white working class populations I consider are consumed by a nostalgia that expresses bitter resentment toward the big companies that abandoned their city, a government that did little to stop them from leaving, and a growing share of visible minorities who are altering their neighborhoods' complexion. (10)

The political psychology of resentment plays a large role in the populations he studies -- resentment of government that fails to deliver, resentment of immigrants, resentment of affirmative action for racial minorities. The other large idea that Gest turns to is marginality -- the idea that these groups have that their voices will not be heard and that the powerful agents in society do not care about their fates.

Rather, this is to say that—across the postindustrial regions of Western Europe and North America—white working class people sense that they have been demoted from the center of their country's consciousness to its fringe. And many feel powerless in their attempts to do something about it. (15)

And resentment and marginality lead for some individuals to a political stance of resistance:

Unimpressed with Labour's priorities, profoundly distrustful of government, and unwilling to join forces with working class immigrants, Barking and Dagenham's working class whites are now engaged in a largely unstructured, alternative form of minority politics. They tend to be focused on local affairs, fighting for scarce public resources and wary of institutionalized discrimination against them. The difficulty has been having their claims heard, and taken seriously. (71)

The resentments and expressions of marginality in Youngstown are similar, with an added measure of mistrust of large corporations like the steel companies that abandoned the city and a recognition of the pervasive corruption that permeates the city. Here is Evelyn on the everyday realities of political corruption in Youngstown:

The more I saw, the more I realized that money can buy your way out of anything. Then you see your sheriff get indicted, your congressman dishonored, our prosecutor in prison, and a mayoral nominee with a cloud over his head. The Valley has been embroiled in political corruption for a long time, and people just look out for themselves. It makes you sick. You don't see it firsthand, the corruption, but you know it's there. (128)

The overriding impression gained from these interviews and Gest's narrative is one of hopelessness. These men and women of Youngstown don't seem to see any way out for themselves or their children. The pathway of upward mobility through post-secondary education does not come up at all in these conversations. And, as Case and Deaton argue from US mortality statistics (link), social despair is associated with life-ending behaviors such as opioids, alcohol abuse, and suicide.

Gest's book lays the ground for thinking about a post-traumatic democratic politics -- a politics that is capable of drawing together the segments of American or British society who genuinely need progressive change and more egalitarian policies if they are to benefit from economic progress in the future. But given the cultural and political realities that Gest identifies among this "new minority", it is hard to avoid the conclusion that crafting such a political platform will be challenging.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

The second American revolution [feedly]

The second American revolution
http://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-second-american-revolution.html

The first American Revolution broke the bonds of control exercised by a colonial power over the actions and aspirations of a relatively small number of people in North America in 1776 -- about 2.5 million people. The second American Revolution promises to affect vastly larger numbers of Americans and their freedom, and it is not yet complete. (There were about 19 million African-Americans in the United States in 1960.)

This is the Civil Rights revolution, which has been underway since 1865 (the end of the Civil War); which took increased urgency in the 1930s through the 1950s (the period of Jim Crow laws and a coercive, violent form of white supremacy); and which came to fruition in the 1960s with collective action by thousands of ordinary people and the courageous, wise leadership of men and women like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. When we celebrate the life and legacy of MLK, it is this second American revolution that is the most important piece of his legacy.

And this is indeed a revolution. It requires a sustained and vigilant struggle against a powerful status quo; it requires gaining political power and exercising political power; and it promises to enhance the lives, dignity, and freedoms of millions of Americans.

This revolution is not complete. The assault on voting rights that we have seen in the past decade, the persistent gaps that exist in income, health, and education between white Americans and black Americans, the ever-more-blatant expressions of racist ideas at the highest level -- all these unmistakeable social facts establish that the struggle for racial equality is not finished.

Dr. King's genius was his understanding from early in his vocation that change would require courage and sacrifice, and that it would also require great political wisdom. It was Dr. King's genius to realize that enduring social change requires changing the way that people think; it requires moral change as well as structural change. This is why Dr. King's profoundly persuasive rhetoric was so important; he was able to express through his speeches and his teaching a set of moral values that almost all Americans could embrace. And by embracing these values they themselves changed.

The struggle in South Africa against apartheid combined both aspects of this story -- anti-colonialism and anti-racism. The American civil rights movement focused on uprooting the system of racial oppression and discrimination this country had created since Reconstruction. It focused on creating the space necessary for African-American men and women, boys and girls, to engage in their own struggles for freedom and for personal growth. It insisted upon the same opportunities for black children that were enjoyed by the children of the majority population.

Will the values of racial equality and opportunity prevail? Will American democracy finally embrace and make real the values of equality, dignity, and opportunity that Dr. King expressed so eloquently? Will the second American revolution finally erase the institutions and behaviors of several centuries of oppression?

Dr. King had a fundamental optimism that was grounded in his faith: "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." But of course we understand that only long, sustained commitment to justice can bring about this arc of change. And the forces of reaction are particularly strong in the current epoch of political struggle. So it will require the courage and persistence of millions of Americans to these ideals if racial justice is finally to prevail.

Here is an impromptu example of King's passionate commitment to social change through non-violence. This was recorded in Yazoo City, Mississippi in 1966, during James Meredith's March against Fear.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Everybody Knows About Alabama [feedly]

Everybody Knows About Alabama
https://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2018/01/15/everybody-knows-about-alabama/

"You don't have to live next to me
Just give me my equality
Everybody knows about Mississippi
Everybody knows about Alabama
Everybody knows about Mississippi goddam, that's it"

                                                   "Mississippi Goddamn" Nina Simone

The Arena Stage production of Nina Simone: Four Women

We saw the play with music, Nina Simone: Four Women, on the same day Simone was named as an inductee to Rock'n' Roll Hall of Fame. That alone gave the play extra meaning. But the experience was made even richer by an unusual convergence of culture and politics: the day before, Doug Jones won a special election in Alabama to become that state's first Democratic Senator in a long while. While Jones's prosecution of two of the KKK members responsible for the 1963 bombing of the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham helped him win support in this year's election, the bombing also influenced Simone. Along with the murder of Medgar Evans, it inspired her to begin writing protest songs, including what she called her first civil rights song, Mississippi Goddam, in which she angrily exposes the violations of human rights in Southern states and challenges the Civil Rights movement's gradualism.

Playwright Christina Ham sets her play in the bombed-out church in the days after four adolescent girls were killed there. Drawing on Simone's 1966 song, "Four Women," Ham imagines the fear and anger of four Black women with different stories and perspectives, including different class backgrounds and experiences with political activism. The play explores how the women might have responded to the bombing, using dialogue as well as Simone's songs, including "To Be Young, Gifted, and Black"; "Sinnerman"; and "Four Women," as well as "Mississippi Goddamn."

The play presents a diverse quartet: the dark-skinned struggling Aunt Sarah; "high yellow" Saffronia, caught between the worlds of her rich white father and her less-privileged African American mother; the prostitute Sweet Thing; and—in place of Peaches, the last of the four women in the song—Nina Simone herself, who rages as she writes the song and argues with the other three characters. Their responses to the bombing and to the battles of the civil rights movement generally reflect their different experiences. Aunt Sarah is cautious about resisting, Saffronia supports Dr. King's nonviolent and reasoned approach, while Sweet Thing doesn't think the movement has much to do with her. Through it all, Nina Simone argues for more active, even violent resistance.

The memory of the Civil Rights era also drove opposition to Republican candidate Roy Moore, who  told a supporter who asked him when America was last "great" was during the period of slavery. Many younger Alabama voters, especially African Americans, found comments like this – perhaps even more than Moore's reported pedophilia – frightening. As Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, said "There's no state in America where black people recognize the horrors of turning back the clock more than the State of Alabama." Richard Fausset and Campbell Robertson reported in the New York Times, that Black voters, especially, were "motivated" by concerns about specific policies that Moore might support, but "they also voted out of a more general concern that the country, in the Trump era, was going back to a place best left in the past."

Those concerns were most visible in the strong turnout among African-American women in Alabama, 98% of whom voted for Jones, as did 92% of African-American men. While more than 60% of younger voters between 18 and 44 chose Jones, white men and women without college degrees – the poll data often used as a stand-in for working class — voted for Moore by over 75%. Among all white voters, only 34% of white women and 26% of white men voted for the Democrat.

While commentators have made much of Black women's strong opposition to Moore, we would also do well to attend to Nina Simone and to Ham's version of "Four Women." In the play, the four women fight among themselves about their own identities and choices. For example, Simone dismisses Saffronia by calling her "good hair," while Simone and Saffronia both goad Aunt Sara to take a more activist stand. These battles emphasize the way class, education, sexuality, experience, and ideas create points of tension even among people whom others might see as part of a single, well-defined group. That they stand together at the end of the play is not a given. It reflects a hard-won and tenuous solidarity.

What lessons can we take from the Alabama election and Ham's play about the centrality of race and gender in American politics? The election reminds us that Democratic candidates will not attract the votes they need solely through campaigns focused on economics. They must attend to racial injustice and, perhaps more now than ever before, to sexism. Yet as the play reminds us, discussions of race and gender cannot ignore class. While the conflicts among the women in the play are rooted in multiple sources, education, colorism, and social class are central points of tension.

At the same time, the play suggests the power of a shared sense of injustice and frustration to foster solidarity across differences. As 2017 nears its end, many Americans but perhaps especially women, poor and working-class people, LGBTQ people, and people of color are angry about the injustice of the Republicans' tax bill and their promises to cut Social Security and other programs that so many people rely on for survival. Many of us are worried about the current Administration's non-legislative actions – cutting regulations, stacking the courts, backing out of the Paris climate change accords, and more.  And we are frustrated that, so far, Trump does not seem to be paying any cost for his racist, sexist, xenophobic attitudes, much less for his persistent lies.

But will we be able to do what Simone's four women do at the end of Ham's play: recognize the our common ground matters more than our particular wounds? Will we let fear and resentment obstruct solidarity? In December, culture and politics came together. What would it take for that to happen again in 2018?

Sherry Linkon and John Russo

A version of this commentary appeared on the American Prospect website.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed