Citizen Cartwright

Note to readers

Because of the Labor Day holiday, Citizen Cartwright will publish next on Tuesday, Sept. 4. Have a great weekend!

Bias at Google?

As you know, in this blog I’m trying to focus on hard news and not on each tempest in a tweet.

 

And I’ve mentioned my latest personal strategy for dealing with upsetting news: focusing on those who are responding with compassion.

 

A few days ago, I discovered that Mister Rogers’ mother gave him this advice when he saw scary things in the news as a kid: "Always look for the helpers. There’s always someone who is trying to help.”

 

But on to bias at Google:

 

President Trump tweeted on Tuesday that Google is suppressing the voices of conservatives, that "96 percent of (Google News) results on ‘Trump News’ are from National Left-Wing Media.”

 

False, says PolitiFact, among others.

 

Yet "Trump’s false charges crashed into a longstanding set of worries about Google, its biases and its power,” says Farhad Manjoo, a technology columnist at The New York Times.

 

Google is the product of humans who have preferences, opinions and blind spots and who work within a corporate structure that has clear financial and political goals, says Majnoo. And because Google’s systems increasingly are created by artificial intelligence tools that learn from real-world data, there’s a growing possibility that it will amplify the many biases found in society, even unbeknown to its creators.

 

Google’s influence on public discourse comes primarily through algorithms, chief among them the system that determines which results you see in its search engine, Manjoo says. These algorithms are secret, which Google says is necessary because search is its golden goose and because explaining the precise ways the algorithms work would leave it open to being manipulated.

But this initial secrecy creates a "troubling opacity,” he says. Because search engines take into account the time, place and some personalized factors when you search, the results you get today will not necessarily match the results someone else gets tomorrow. This makes it hard for outsiders to investigate bias across Google’s results.

 

And "researchers point out that if Google somehow went rogue and decided to throw an election to a favored candidate, it would only have to alter a small fraction of search results to do so,” says Manjoo.

 

Researchers also say Google’s algorithms favor recency and activity, which is why they're so often vulnerable to being manipulated in favor of misinformation and rumor in the aftermath of major news events.

 

Some of Google’s rivals say the company favors its own properties in its search results over those of third-party sites — for example, how it highlights Google’s local reviews instead of Yelp’s in response to local search queries.

 

Google says it's working on addressing misinformation and that it’s aware of the potential for certain kinds of bias in its search results.

 

“What you have from us is an absolute commitment that we want to continually improve results and continually address these problems in an effective, scalable way,” says Pandu Nayak, who heads Google’s search ranking team. “We have not sat around ignoring these problems.”

 

Frank Pasquale, a professor at the University of Maryland’s law school who's studied the role that algorithms play in society, outlined in 2010 a way for regulatory agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission to gain access to search data to monitor and investigate claims of bias. Nobody has taken up the idea.

 

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, has asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate potential anti-competitive effects in Google’s search and digital advertising practices in the wake of Trump’s claims.

Also in the news

Reuters: Iran moves ballistic missiles to Iraq in warning to enemies

 

Trump administration to cancel U.S. funding to U.N. program for Palestinian refugees

Trump cancels pay raise due to most civilian federal employees in January

 

Justice Department accuses Harvard of ‘outright racial balancing’

 

Federal government can stop paying to house Puerto Rico hurricane victims, judge rules

AP: Trump allies raise alarm as his team of legal advisers shrinks

 

Pediatricians change child car seat guidelines

 

FDA warns of common diabetes medicine's link to dangerous genital infection

New quest to clean up the trash in the ocean

The bad news: We humans are mighty messy. I’m always surprised to learn how much trash we’ve left, for example, in outer space and on Mt. Everest.

 

The good news: We humans also clean up.

 

On Sept. 8, a 2,000-foot-long “giant sea sieve” will head out under the Golden Gate Bridge with the goal of collecting millions of tons of garbage from what's known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

 

The project is the brainchild of Boyan Slat, who was disgusted by the plastic waste he came across when diving off Greece as a teen.

 

Now 23, he heads The Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit devoted to developing advanced technologies to rid the world’s oceans of plastic. His group estimates that its passive drifting systems can clean up half the Great Pacific Garbage Patch within five years.

 

Preventing plastic pollution of the oceans "should be the focus of 95 percent of our current effort, with the remaining 5 percent on clean up," says Richard Thompson, who heads the International Marine Litter Research Unit at the University of Plymouth in Britain.

 

Sure. But I applaud this young guy for drawing attention to the problem and trying to do something about it. 

 

 

Dead albatross chick found with plastics in its stomach on Midway Atoll in Northwestern Hawaiian Islands/National Geographic

Also in the news

WPost: U.S. denying passports to Americans along the border, throwing their citizenship into question

 

ProPublica: Nuclear safety board slams Energy Department's plan to weaken oversight

 

Don McGahn, Trump’s top White House lawyer, to leave this fall

 

Politico: Trump personally lobbying Republican senators to flip on Jeff Sessions

 

Air pollution may hinder thinking skills, study in China suggests

 

Making sense of new alcohol study

 

Primary results: The ‘ideologically pure’ to fight it out for Florida governor, flip-flops in Arizona

Bernie Sanders-backed Democrat Andrew Gillum pulled off an upset victory Tuesday in Florida’s gubernatorial primary and Trump-backed Rep. Ron DeSantis cruised to victory for the GOP, setting up a fierce fall showdown in the nation’s biggest political battleground, says The Associated Press.

 

Current Florida GOP Gov. Rick Scott, who can’t run for re-election because of term limits, is challenging Democratic U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson. Scott had an easy win in Tuesday’s GOP primary; Nelson, at 75 and seeking his fourth term, is considered particularly vulnerable as voters continue to show disdain for candidates with deep ties to the establishment.

 

If Democrats lose Nelson’s seat, their already narrow path to the Senate majority becomes virtually nonexistent, AP says.

 

The Senate race in Arizona is "a tale of 2 pivots,” says The [Arizona] Republic. Rep. Kyrsten Sinema once was a member of the Green Party and a self-described “Prada socialist,” but now she’s one of the congressional Democrats most likely to vote with Trump and a champion of moderate compromise. She had token opposition from the left in Tuesday’s primary.

 

Rep. Martha McSally represents a moderate Arizona district and was a Trump critic in 2016, but she's since embraced him to win her party’s Senate nomination. She defeated two challengers from her right in the GOP primary Tuesday but may emerge with less than half of Republican primary voters supporting her after being slammed as a flip-flopper by opponents.

 

Florida and Arizona both are closely watched states, featuring growing minority populations that have bolstered Democratic candidates and Republican electorates that have grown older and more conservative, says AP.

 

In a runoff election in Oklahoma, mainly to choose the Republican nominee for governor, Tulsa business executive Kevin Stitt defeated Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett, giving hope to Democrats who want a shot at picking off the governor’s mansion, says Vox.

 

Here are more results of the Florida primary, from The New York Times.

 

And Arizona.

 

And from the Oklahoma runoff.

Also in the news

Russia to hold its biggest war games since Cold War

 

U.N. human rights experts: Some Saudi-led airstrikes in Yemen could be war crimes

 

Reuters: Iranian influence operation targeting internet users worldwide is bigger than was thought

 

Canada rejoins NAFTA talks; U.S. lawmakers warn against bilateral U.S.-Mexico deal

 

California Legislature poised to send bill to governor requiring all retail electricity to be generated by renewables by 2045

California becomes first state to abolish bail for suspects awaiting trial, so 'rich and poor alike are treated fairly'

 

Thank you, John McCain

Many people have been sharing their memories of Sen. John McCain, and I’d like to share mine.

In the early 1990s, McCain was the Senate chairman and I was the director of an informational office within the Congress.

Every year, some 90 of the 100 senators and 300 of the 435 members of the House subscribed to the unbiased information we provided on environment, energy and natural resource issues.

Unbiased? Believe it or not, lawmakers of every political persuasion took our publications with them to the floor, to inform their vote. And it's a tribute to the lawmakers of that time that no one ever tried to get us to alter the content of our publications. I was honored to work there.

Our officers and the other lawmakers on our executive committee didn’t get much public attention for their work with us. They just believed in the importance of being good stewards of this planet. McCain’s predecessor as Senate chairman was then-Sen. Al Gore.

Since McCain's passing, Dana Bash, who covered him for CNN, has said he “was as complex as they come.” No one could read his New York Times obituary and disagree.

Jennifer Steinhauer, who covered McCain for the Times, says there were two McCains. One was "irreverent, cheerful, reverential … and thoughtful about policy.” The other, "brooding, impatient and sometimes dismissive, seemed to surface when he was uncomfortable with the bend that politics had put in his road.”

McCain’s own staff described him to me as “all elbows."

Yet while I knew of that other McCain, I didn’t experience it personally.

I experienced what ex-Sen. Russ Feingold describes in his Times op-ed titled "John McCain was a committed leader. He was also really fun.”

Feingold says McCain had a good sense of humor. I agree. He says McCain was a good listener. McCain surprised me because he listened to staff. I don’t mean that he necessarily took the advice of staff. I mean that he paid attention to what I was saying. It was often joked back then that lawmakers and staff considered the other irrelevant. Most of the lawmakers I knew had so many demands on their time that they quickly tuned staff out, even when they wanted to know the answer to the question they’d just asked.

In 1994, funding was eliminated for organizations in Congress like ours. The executive committee voted to cooperate with us, the staff, in privatizing our services so they would be available to subscribers in Congress and beyond. We had six weeks to do so.

McCain wrote us a lovely letter thanking us for our work and wishing us well. One of our staff said a McCain staffer probably wrote the letter. Maybe, but that staffer would have known that McCain wanted to send it. Staff tend to reflect the lawmaker.

And of the 390 lawmakers who subscribed to our publications, it was the one letter we received.

Later, I heard that McCain occasionally asked how we were doing in our new venture.

While our staff handled the stress of that transition well, it meant a lot to me to feel that John McCain cared.

So now, as John McCain is being remembered, I remember his humanity.

 

---------------

Speaking of people paying their respects to McCain, don’t miss this from his jailer at the “Hanoi Hilton,” where McCain was confined as a prisoner of war for more than five years. Hanoi residents are laying flowers at a monument to McCain at the lake he parachuted into after the bomber he was piloting was shot down in 1967.

 

And “John McCain’s Rules for Living,” by his long-time staffer John Raidt, in Politico Magazine.

 

Also, more on McCain’s “rascally” wit, from The Associated Press.

 

Here is McCain’s final statement, in which he includes a line from his concession speech to Barack Obama in 2008: "Do not despair of our present difficulties but believe always in the promise and greatness of America, because nothing is inevitable here."

Also in the news

U.N.: Myanmar military leaders must be investigated for genocide against Rohingya Muslims

 

U.S., Mexico reach NAFTA deal, putting pressure on Canada

 

Farmers hurt by trade wars to get $4.7 billion in relief payments starting next month

 

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight: Forecast of the race for the House

 

Federal judges again rule North Carolina's congressional map unconstitutional

 

Federal judge extends his order blocking 3D gun blueprints from internet

 

NASA's global aerosol map shows the long reach of our planet's disasters

 

Note to readers

Citizen Cartwright is taking off to spend time with some inspirational humans. See you on Tuesday, Aug. 28!