23F Week 9. AI: What It Means for All of Us -- Whether We Like It or Not

Focus talk from personal experience by Susan Nulsen, delivered by Martha Nielsen

                                                                   Me and AI

What is AI?  Ever since people have been people they have been trying to create artificial intelligence.  You might say it goes back to stories of gods creating artificial life out of clay.  In more modern times people used the art of the clockmaker to make ingenious figures that could, on the hour, come out of a door on a clock and perform a little act.  Mechanical automata entertained thousands of people and still do.  But we wanted to create something that could recreate the mind of a human, in other words, computers that could think like people. Mechanical calculating machines culminated in Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine and Analytical Engine in the mid 19th century, but Babbage was unable to build these machines with the technology, and funding, of the time.  In fact only the Difference Engine has ever been built.  The main part was finished in 1991 and it was finally completed in 2002.  It contains 8000 parts and weighs five tons! The Analytical Engine is even more complex and was designed to be programmed using punched cards, like those used to specify the patterns for jacquard looms.

The first difference engine built, on display in the
London Science Museum
The Difference Engine was designed to calculate
tables of mathematical functions.
Photo credit: Wikipedia user: geni

Ada Lovelace   Daguerreotype by Antoine Claudet 1843 or 1850

            

Of course Babbage's machines needed programming.  Ada Lovelace, daughter of the poet Lord Byron, is credited with being the first person ever, apart from Babbage himself, to write a computer program.  As I understand it, she was the first to realize that computers could be used more generally than for just calculating numbers.

Perhaps my talk should be called “Me and Computers”.  My first contact with computers came when I was sixteen in high school and learned how to write simple programs that could do things like find all the prime numbers less than a given number or find what day of the week any day in the Gregorian calendar fell on.  It was fun! (We had no exams and no assignments.)  At university programming was not part of my course.  Instead I had the experience, in Applied Mathematics, of using mechanical calculators which were about the size and shape of a heavy mechanical typewriter.  After you set them up you furiously turned a handle while cogs chugged and whirred until the answer popped up.  The electric ones turned the handle for you and practically bounced off your desk in the process.  That was fun too, for an hour or so.

In the physics lab I was able to experience using an early desktop computer, but the most interesting thing was when one of the mathematics lecturers informally introduced us to “perceptrons”. He was trying out the concept of crowd-sourcing before that was even a word! 

A single perceptron is a model of a single neuron and by connecting a network of them together you can try to model the workings of a brain.  Mathematically a perceptron can be viewed as a plane that divides a space of many dimensions into two.  If the space is populated with the objects of interest you can use a series of these planes to box in objects of one sort and separate them from the rest.  The trick is in deciding how to connect the outputs of each perceptron to the inputs of the others.  You can then train your network on a set of objects reinforcing connections when you get the response you want and weakening them when you get the wrong answer.  Paul, now my husband, and I worked on this together.  We first of all taught our network how to play noughts and crosses.  And then we were able to train it to recognize hand written examples of the letter “A” regardless whether it was written in upper or lower case.  By the way, punched paper cards were used to program one of the computers we had access to.  Just like Babbage and the looms.

At this stage our project was shelved as we had more important things, like exams, to spend our time on.  And poor Mike, the lecturer, never got a proper report on what we had achieved.

Looking back I think we were remarkably successful.  Of course the way we did it was certainly an overkill.  This technique is now known as a deep neural network or DNN.  It went out of favour and received very little attention for many years because people mistakenly believed it was incapable of bundling separated regions (like upper case “A” and lowercase “A”) together. Now it is a very important part of modern AI.

Schematic diagram illustrating the classification of 

hand-written images of the letter "A". 

In two dimensions a plane becomes a line.

When I was working in a solid state physics group in the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge (England) again I used a desktop computer, this time for making calculations of the intensities of x-ray diffraction patterns - classic crystallography. I also was able, with the help of the electronics workshop, to build a little microprocessor based computer to control the temperature of ovens I used to grow crystals in.  This computer used the same CPU chip, a 6502, [sixty-five oh two] as the Apple II one of the first successful personal computers.  I then had the fun of programming everything in machine language, which is just a series of numbers.

It was also while we were in Cambridge, in 1983,  that we acquired our first personal computer.  This computer included a chip that was able to analyze sound into a number of frequency bands.  We were intending to try experimenting with speech recognition.  But once again life had other ideas.  Instead we had a baby and moved back to Australia.

There I was out of a job and in the civil service capital of the country, Canberra (which is also the real capital).  There seemed to be an infinite number of computing jobs and no physics jobs for someone like me, so I decided I should do a computing course. By the time I finished that, I had had another baby and, now that I had a better idea of what it entailed, the thought of working in one of those civil service jobs seemed stultifying.  Fortunately one of my lecturers offered me a job as a research assistant on her speech recognition project.  This took me right back to the plans we had had when we got our first home computer.  I enjoyed this work but once again we were on the move, this time to Wollongong. [Pronounced like “woollen gong”.]

Before we left Canberra my boss, Mary, took me out to lunch and offered me the opportunity to do a PhD on automatic speech recognition with her.  It would have to be long distance which did turn out to be a disadvantage and cause the process to take longer than it should have but I think I would still choose to accept.  The result was that I was doing most of the work, including deciding what I would work on, on my own.  

Automatic speech recognition is another important part of A.I.  At first I continued the type of work I had been doing in analyzing the sound waves from different samples of speech.           

Waveform of a person saying the word "heed".
This shows air pressure versus time.
The first three segments marked on the waveform
correspond to the sounds  of  "h", "ee" and "d".
The final segment is the release of breath after the "d". 

A spectrogram of the same sound, the word "heed".
This shows frequency versus time. In the vowel "ee"
you can see four strong frequency bands or formants.
Credit: Macquarie University Department of Linguistics

That proved extraordinarily difficult.  Too many speech sounds are almost impossible to distinguish unambiguously.  This led to my second approach which was to look at the context of the sounds.  What sounds can become before and after a given sound?  I had access to a large corpus of data from court transcripts.  I was able to work out a sort of grammar for the sounds of speech in Australian English.  This is also the statistical technique that is used for completing (and correcting) text that you type into your computer or your phone.  It is called a language model. It is the same idea that is used in the large language models of ChatGPT for example.

Now I still use computers to help interpret various forms of light from the heavens and to model the behavior of galaxies and the gas they are embedded in, but I don’t believe that has any relevance for AI!  Never-the-less people around me need to use AI to make it possible to interpret the huge amount of data that is flooding in from missions such as the JWST. [John Webb Space Telescope]

I feel as if I have spent my working life on the edges of the sea of AI, now and again dipping my toes in and even going as far as getting ankle-deep with my work on speech recognition.  AI  has come a long way since the days when I was experimenting with it.  It has not leapt fully formed from the ether, but it has developed steadily over many decades.  It is a tool which has much to offer the world. 

The thing that scares me most about AI and tools like ChatGPT is that it will become impossible to distinguish truth!  It could mean the end of the internet and sharing data.  Can you imagine a world without computers?  Of course you ought to be able to - that was the world most of us grew up in - but I don’t know if I can.

Another thing which scares me even more, if that is possible, doesn’t relate directly to AI at all.  It is that the vast computing power that quantum computing promises to deliver would make all our passwords and forms of identification simple to bypass.  Nothing will be uncrackable.

Humanity has some work to do.

With those cheery thoughts I will end my talk.

Thank you Martha for delivering it!!

Susan

22 Fall Week 2, 29th September 2022 : My Search for Magic

I always knew that fairy tales were simply made-up stories and I never believed in the tooth fairy or Easter bunny. I tried to convince myself that Father Christmas was real. I had glimpsed a rotund figure clad in red in my bedroom one Christmas Eve when I was five or so, but I knew that my grandmother, who was staying with us that night, had a red dressing gown. Dev, the man who later became my grandmother's second husband, was able to pull a shilling out from behind my ear. I wasn't fooled. Even though I didn't know how it was done, I knew it was just a trick.

Around the time of my seventh birthday I spent a while in hospital and as a consequence a friend persuaded her mother to buy me a book, Cherry Ames at Hilton Hospital. It was the first book I ever read that wasn't a picture book. I was engrossed. Not only did I learn all about amnesia and how to treat it (late 50's style), but I became an instant avid reader. I would visit the library regularly with my younger sister. It was only down the road and across the park. On the way home I would get my sister to walk in front of me so I didn't need to move my eyes from the page. (Only the other day I saw a young boy leaving the local branch library here doing exactly the same thing with his mother, who walked ahead laden with books.) I wanted to read all the children's fiction. The only trouble was that, although we were allowed to have out six books at a time, only two could be regular fiction and the remaining four had to be non-fiction. I soon discovered the loopholes. The library had one bookcase devoted to the classics and a non-fiction card sufficed for these. I generally found them quite heavy going.  The Lady of the Camellias, for example, went way over my head, and I didn't even follow The Three Musketeers completely. However the non-fiction section that included books on myths and legends from around the world was full of magic. I couldn't get enough.

All the while, I should say, I was regularly attending Sunday school where we had the story of just about a miracle a week. This magic didn't satify me – God could do anything. I wanted magic that was in the domain of ordinary people, magic that I could experience myself.

When I was nine we moved town to a new library, a new collection of books. I learned how to use the libray catalogue so that I could find what I wanted. This was not always successful.  The Talisman Ring turned out to be a boring, or so I thought at the time, romance novel. (A few short years later I was to change my opinion about that.) I did discover the Salem witch trials. As horrifying as this was, I clung to the fact that responsible adults, or at least adults who ought to have been responsible, firmly believed in witchcraft, so it must be real. And it wasn't just confined to Salem. Also, like millions of others, I was led into an exploration of Tibetan Buddhism through the works of Lobsang Rampa the author of The Third Eye. I became a believer in reincarnation.

My grandfather had drowned at the age of twenty-six in 1932. In her own quest for a way of contacting him, my grandmother turned to spiritualism and Theosophy. According to Theosophers: “Devotion to truth, love for all living beings, and commitment to a life of altruism are the marks of the true Theosophist.” My grandmother taught me that all religions are just different facets of the truth. She was a hairdresser and as a young child I sometimes accompanied her when she made home visits for housebound women. I also went with her delivering meals for Meals-On-Wheels. I think she enjoyed the company and the old people liked to see young children. I did not think much of the food though – I particularly remember the disgusting prunes in rice custard! My grandmother showed me a book containing photographs of fairies taken by a couple of young cousins. These are known as the Cottingley fairies. They were finally exposed as a hoax when one of the, by then, old, ladies admitted the fairies were paper cutouts propped up with hat pins or suspended on fine threads. Modern image processing a few years before the admission had indeed revealed some threads. At the time I first saw them there was no solid evidence that these photographs were not authentic. I found them intriguing but I kept an open mind.

Meanwhile as I progressed at school I was discovering more and more about the magic of mathematics. The world of numbers was opening up to me. And it wasn't just numbers. With a very few basic axioms and some definitions, the application of logic suddenly created the whole of geometry. It was mind-boggling and extremely powerful.

I still continued to search through the libraries. In my school library I found The Man Who Was Magic by Paul Gallico. This is a book that I would like to read again. It was about a man who really was magic in a town of magicians who performed standard magic tricks. Of course, I had no illusion that this novel would reveal real magic to me. The book did suggest that nature is magic and magic is all around us. This is something I was coming to discover for myself. I started reading a lot of science fiction and historical novels. I did not expect to find magic there either but they did allow me to explore a lot of what-if scenarios. What would happen to society if .. if, for example, someone created a machine that could duplicate any object at no cost. Maybe that one should have been called “economic fiction”.

I was the only person in my family still going to church when I stopped attending at around the age of fourteen. It was not for any big principle but simply because we moved again. However I didn't stop thinking and philosophizing about God and religions.

My search for magic was now leading me into the realm of the supernatural and the paranormal. My boyfriend at the time, my husband now, and I even tried a series of experiments in telepathy. I thought that if ever two minds were in tune it ought to have been ours. Needless to say we had no success. 

I was also beginning to discover how magical the real world was. When I went to university I knew I wanted to study science and mathematics. It was only as I learnt more that I was particularly drawn to physics. Physics is real. It is not speculative but must demonstrate that it describes the real world. Physics is the study of the most simple and basic properties of this amazing universe that we are part of. It covers everything from smallest subatomic particles and the forces which glue them together to the vast reaches of space where we are able to literally look back in time to almost when the universe came into existence. This is precisely what the James Webb Space Telescope was designed to do. Just as we think we are getting to the bottom of things it always seems that the universe throws up surprises to show how little we know. In the twentieth century it was quantum mechanics and relativity, which have still not been entirely knitted together, and now it is the great mysteries of dark matter and dark energy. Dark matter is the term used to describe the large proportion (27%) of matter or energy that we cannot see but which we can “weigh” by looking at the motions of the matter we can see. Dark energy (68%) is something even more mysterious – it doesn't behave like anything else we know. It has a constant density even as the universe expands. It seems to come into existance and cause space to expand, or maybe the causality is the other way around. I am now working mainly in x-ray astronomy which is able to capture some of the most high energy events that take place as the universe evolves. At lower energies, which means lower temperatures, we get atoms which are able to bond together to form compounds and suddenly we are in the field of chemistry. As we get more complex molecules we find that life emerges and we are now looking at biology: ourselves and our fellow lifeforms. People are amazingly complex, as you all know first hand, and, to ourselves, exceedingly interesting. I have always been interested in language and have now spent some time studying spoken language, one aspect of human complexity. 

We went to England for my husband to do his PhD in astronomy. While we were there we became friends with a fellow student, Bernard Carr, who was in fact one of Stephen Hawking's students. Because of his own interest in the subject Bernard later became involved some serious scientific investigations into phenomena such as reports of ghosts. Despite his very best efforts all he was able to do was disprove every case he could investigate fully, much to his own great disappointment.

I have become comfortable with the idea that when I die I will be no more. I promise not to haunt you! I admit that I find it less comfortable thinking about the the end of the human race. Perhaps it is for that reason that one of my favorite stories is a short story by Isaac Asimov in which he describes the evolution of computers as the universe slowly dies until the last star blinks out. By then the whole universe has been integrated into one massive omnipotent computer. And then the computer says “Let there be light!”

Having children unexpectedly gave me a totally fresh view of the world around me, a perspective I have not lost. I found new wonders every day as I introduced these new people to this place they had never been in before. I can remember one day seeing a new-born foal as we were driving somewhere and trying to draw my children's attention to it. They barely looked up from the books they were reading in the back seat. Did I used to be like that?

Now I find magic everywhere I look. For example, one thing that always amazes me is that bees and humans, who could not be more different animals, are both able to appreciate the exquisite beauty of flowers. I can see no evolutionary reason for this. Flies, for example, don't think the same way.

Above the entrance to the Cavendish Laboratory, which is the physics department of Cambridge University and which is where I worked for nine years, is an inscription which reads “The works of the Lord are great, sought out of all them that have pleasure therein.”  I always remembered it as “Great are the works of the Lord, sought out by all those who have wonder therein”. In either case it is expressing the view that this universe is an awesome place. Looking up at the sky on a dark night on my mother's farm, or in any dry and dark place, truly fills you with awe as the stars blaze overhead and reach down to the ground in every direction. You feel as if you are right among them.

I want my children and their children, and all your children's children's children to be able to continue to experience this wonderful world that we all know today and knew when we were children.

That is all I have to say for now. Thank you for listening.

—Susan Nulsen

Week 8 Becoming a Minimalist. 5th May 2022

Focus talk: Susan Nulsen. Click here to listen.
Susan Nulsen’s Bio
Both of Susan Nulsen's parents were born in the Depression and had been brought up in country Western Australia. Her mother's parents were farmers. Her father's father had drowned when her father was a baby and her father's mother had become a hairdresser in a country town (where she had little competition) to support them both. Neither of Susan's parents families had been particularly well-off. Although the Depression hadn't hit the farmers too badly, subsequent droughts had had more of an effect . Her mother's family had been forced to move to the city where her grandfather had worked as a dustman for some time.
Susan's parents were both twenty-two when she was born. Her father had a low paid job as a car mechanic and her mother was a stay at home housewife, so money was tight. Susan is the eldest of four girls. Her next sister was less than two years younger than her but Susan was nearly seven when her second sister was born and closer to ten than nine at the birth of her youngest sister.
Struggling to Remain a Minimalist.
Hello. I hope that you won't be disappointed that I cannot tell you how to become a minimalist. I am still trying to work it out myself. In fact I will call my talk Struggling to Remain a Minimalist. I try to minimize clutter for my serenity. I try to minimize my environmental impact for the good of humanity and the planet.
You can deduce from that brief bio that I started out as minimalist by necessity rather than by any conscious choice. Fortunately my mother made how hard up we were invisible to us. She kept chickens, (or “chooks” as they were known) which consumed all our kitchen scraps. The chickens were mainly for the eggs but from time to time my father would, very reluctantly, kill one. He really disliked that job. Plucking and cleaning the bird involved heating a copper full of boiling water in the laundry which sat away from the house in the back yard. That was my mother's job and it took quite some time. You can imagine that chicken was only eaten on very special occasions. My mother also grew vegetables which she fertilized with horse manure. In the late 50's we still had hot bread delivered daily by horse and wagon. The horse knew the route and would stop or move slowly while the driver ran in and out of the houses. When the opportunity arose my mother would rush outside with a spade to collect the manure from the road. My mother was also an excellent dressmaker and I think that we were the best dressed children in the neighborhood. She cut down other people's cast-offs or she bought pieces from the remnant bin at the fabric shop. Being dressed in the height of fashion wasn't always a positive thing though. I will never forget the acute embarrassment I felt at the age of seven or eight when I came out of the changing shed at the swimming baths in my extremely modest two-piece swimsuit, which I had been very fond of up until then, only to be greeted by whistling and hooting from every boy in the school! I still feel like sinking through the floor.
Of course my mother also knitted and crocheted and cooked and much more. She made icecream from condensed milk and it took me a long time when I was older to get used to the taste of commercial icecream. Our diet was completely nutrionally balanced as I discovered at school when I was 13 and we all had to record what we ate and compare it with an ideal diet. I will just take a moment to show you some of my mother's products. Firstly here is my teddy bear who now shows signs of being well-loved. He was made of scraps from my grandmother's overcoat with brown buttons for eyes. When my husband saw him this morning, he asked whether I was intending to illustrate how I hoard things forever! Secondly here is a handerchief with a crocheted border. My mother would give us these as presents from time to time. Finally the pièce-de-résistance is the cardigan that I am wearing now. My mother knitted it from a natural-colored (undyed) mixture of mohair and merino wool that she spun herself. Although you might describe my mother as a minimalist we did not experience a very austere life-style. And her use of time was far from minimal. I think that only a stay-at-home mother could possibly have done all she did. I should say that she wasn't a perfect housekeeper. Her method of tidying up after us messy kids was to bundle everything up off the floor and shove it into a cupboard or onto a shelf.
My father had very few household chores. I can only think of mowing the lawn, which he did as infrequently as possible –he worked on the principle that if you didn't water the lawn it wouldn't grow– and chopping the wood for the fire which was the only heating we had in the house. The wood, by the way, was never bought but came from a fence that someone pulled down, or roots that had been cleared out of a paddock at someone's farm or ... However he contributed in his own way. While working full time he enrolled full time at the Perth Technical College to become an engineer. My earliest memories of him are as he was studying at our dining table. He told me stories about the genie that lived in the exotic bottle of India ink that he used for his technical drawings. One outstanding thing that he did was to build us a solar hot water system many years before they were commercially available. The backup heating was a little chip heater that needed to be lit most winter days. From when I was 14, I became the principal wood chopper.
My father was the best bargainer that I have ever known. He liked good things but could never afford to go out and buy them new. If he couldn't find a good second hand item he would manage to get the display item in a shop, or a returned item, at some huge discount. Two of my most valued possessions as I was growing up were the result of his bargaining. I had a watch with a beautiful mother-of-pearl face. Once I unwittingly said to a friend that I could look at it “for hours”. That evoked a big groan. The second item was a compact 35 mm Zeiss Ikon camera with a fold-out lens. However I was never able to take as many photos as I would have liked because film and processing were expensive. Unfortunately none of my father's daughters inherited his bargaining ability. I think we all lack his effrontery as well as his charm.
My parents' initial reasons for being minimalist were simply financial. At first they had no money but even when they could have afforded more, my father did not believe in wasting it. My sister and I used to call him “Scrooge”. Later, of course, he too realized the importance of reducing your environmental footprint.

There are many more good reasons, very good reasons, other than financial ones for becoming a minimalist, although I don't think I will ever be as good at it as my mother was. So, why do I continue to strive for minimalism?
The first time I thought about minimalism was when I learnt at school of the Christian monks' vows of poverty, obedience and chastity. I envisaged a life of contemplation in a cell with no possessions but with access to a library and everything provided for me. It seemed idyllic. I did not consider what obedience and chastity would entail or the amount of work and goods that were required to maintain that lifestyle. I found the simplicity very appealing. Looking back now I realize that I was, in fact, already living a lifestyle very much like that.
My horizons were broadened when I went to university in the early 70s. I became aware of how the earth's resources were strictly limited and the environment was under increasing threat as the global population grew exponentially. There was even discussion about how the climate would be affected. As physics students we thought about various means of generating renewable power. That was fifty years ago! The climate crisis is now upon us and the world population continues to grow. I cannot understand why the warnings that were given then, and have continued to be repeated, have remained unheeded for so long. I guess it is so that a few wealthy people or corporations could maintain and increase their wealth and power even at the expense of the lives of their children and grandchildren and everyone else. I feel that this is a failure of democracy.
When my husband went to study in England it was very much a culture shock for us. I didn't realize that the UK was still suffering from the aftermath of the war thirty years after it had ended. The buildings and the streets were all black and grimy and in a state of disrepair. Our friends were students and no-one had any money. People patched their trousers where they wore out on bicycle seats (that didn't look very elegant!) and sewed elbow patches on their sleeves. I never saw my friend Shauna Shaw except with a sock that she was darning. We fitted right in. I was working but all my income went to save up for a trip back to Australia. It was over a year before we had enough. I was amazed when some of our new American friends flew back home for Christmas only a few months after they had arrived. Nowadays the average person in the UK appears to be much better off. The buildings and streets have all been cleaned and repaired. The country is a completely different place.
When we returned to Australia with our new baby and had a second child I discovered that children are the exact opposites of minimalists. They are huge generators of disorder and they are the recipients of much unnecessary stuff. Even the necessary stuff is very temporary since babies quickly grow out of both clothing and equipment as their needs change.
Coming to America was the opposite of going to the UK. I was shocked by how profligate many Americans appeared to be. The thing that exemplifies that to me is the way someone will grab a whole handful of paper napkins when all they need is one, or perhaps two when they are very flimsy. The positive side of this is that the second hand shops are really wonderful.

My guiding principle to being a minimalist is to follow the four Rs: Reduce, Reuse, Repair and Recycle. So why, you might ask, is my house so cluttered? Well, we will see.
The first of the Rs is
1) Reduce: I find that I do do a reasonable job of not acquiring or using more than I need, with a few weaknesses such as books and equipment for the arts and crafts that I do. Even when I paint I usually try to identify who I will give the painting to before I start. Recently I took a painting course which produced a number of paintings that don't have anyone's name on them. At least they are only on art paper so they don't take up a lot of space. With clothing I have taken to not bringing something into the house without sending something out. That was a necessity because of limited cupboard space. We no longer get any magazines and only subscribe to the New York Times online. The biggest input and source of clutter is paper that contains information that I do not want to lose. We have decided that we should donate all the novels that we have both read and are very unlikely to read again to one of the Little Libraries that we encounter on our daily walks, no more than one book a day. This is working quite well (and they do disappear from the Libraries) but it is a slow process. Reference books are still a stumbling block.
We drive our one car as little as possible but I think our flights to Australia undo all those efforts. Of course, long haul flights are more efficient, I hope you appreciate!
Another thing we have done to minimize our carbon footprint is to sign up for 100% sustainable electric power. This is more expensive but it is an expense that we can and ought to bear. Because we are lucky enough to be able to afford what others may not be able to, it is only more imperative that we make the change.
2) Reuse: This R is a trap! There is a tension between minimizing your environmental impact and minimizing the clutter you are surrounded by. This explains why, for example, our house is cluttered with boxes and other packaging waiting to be reused. The incoming rate is definetly exceeding the outgoing rate. Reusing a box has much less impact on the environment than recycling that box and buying another one when you need it. I never know what sized box I will want next, but I am going to have to make some arbitrary decisions to cull our supply soon. The same applies to old clothes and linen that we keep for rags.
3) Repair: This R is another trap! This is applied to any clothes which are damaged or slightly worn, with the result that I have a huge pile of mending waiting for me. I have a wardrobe half full of clothes that are nearly worn out, okay for wearing around the house but not good enough for when in company. I would happily donate these to anyone who would be willing to wear them, but if I recycled them I know they would only qualify as rags. We also try to mend other goods that break down. Well over a year ago our printer stopped working. I was able to work out what was wrong but it took me a couple of months to pull the printer apart and fix. Putting it back together was another story – a few unidentified pieces appeared. It took about a year to get it back into one piece. Now it is refusing to print until it is reset with the Canon software which I can only find for PC's, not Macs. I've given my husband that job since he tells me it should be straightforward. Over the last year or so we managed to repair both our fridge and our stove. The internet is invaluable because we are able to both find out what needs to be done and order the parts that we need. The stove was rather awkward but the repair went well. We gave up in despair on the refrigerator because it still just wasn't cooling. I was already looking up replacement refrigerators when the repairman we had called out came. He pointed out to us that we might get better results if we switched the fridge on! Didn't we feel stupid.
4) Recycle: We do a lot of this on a weekly basis, and really should do more to reduce our clutter. We are lucky because the City of Cambridge has a very good waste management program. Each week we generally only have about one supemarket vegetable bag of trash. It is mostly packaging and little bits of plastic that we can't recycle.
The four Rs I considered are given in order of minimizing environmental impact. This order is not totally rigid. Sometimes, for example, donating some good clothing can become another way of reusing, but the handling and transport have additional environmental impact over continuing to use, adjusting the size, or handing on to someone you would normally be in contact with, such as giving your children's outgrown clothes to their cousins.
An alternative approach to minimalism is to adhere to motto “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without”, which I believe is a variation of a phrase uttered by Calvin Coolidge in World War I. (He said “Eat it up,” etc).
One point, which I will not go into here, is the significant amount of time I spend trying to reduce my environmental impact. It may be made up to some extent, but definitely not completely, by time saved in having to take care of less stuff. Lack of time is the reason why I have so many bits of paper waiting to be dealt with. I have plenty of other things I would rather be doing!
To end I have two short video clips of Juliet Schor. She agrees with Lizabeth Cohen that it is essential that governments take action. The first clip is a very recent one and explains where we are in reducing our carbon emissions globally.
[The audio recording ends here.]
Scope of the Climate Crisis 2min 3sec to 5min 35sec: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlFKMIfqaPE If you can spare the time it is worth listening to the whole 31 minutes.
The other video clip is a personal one with Juliet Schor describing how she and her family live.
Why Ethical Consumption? 2min 4sec to 5min 7sec: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VutnFgED10U
As I said at the beginning, “I try to minimize clutter for my serenity. I try to minimize my environmental impact for the good of humanity and of the planet”. I know what I do is only a drop in the bucket, but that is a good analogy because all the water in that bucket is nothing more than many drops. If we all did what we could it would make a big contribution to reducing our environmental impact. Remember that 70% of the US GDP is based on consumption.
I am looking forward to hearing what you all have to say. Thank you.

For people who listened and didn't read, the following points were missed from the original talk in the recording (but are included in the text above):
Looking back at what I said, the URGENCY I feel about the importance of limiting climate change and other environmental destruction does not come through nearly enough. Reducing clutter in my life would free up my time and give me more opportunity to enjoy the company of friends and the good things in life. It would enable me to feel more serene. BUT how can I feel serene when faced by the threats of climate change and the danger to everyone on the earth! I try to reduce clutter for my serenity. I try to minimize my environmental impact for the good of humanity and of the planet.
There is a tension between these two ends. This explains why, for example, I am surrounded by packaging waiting to be reused. Reusing a box has much less impact on the environment than recycling that box and buying another one when you need it.
The four Rs I considered are given in order of minimizing environmental impact. This order is not totally rigid. Sometimes, for example, donating some good clothing can become another way of reusing, but the handling and transport are additional environmental impact over continuing to use, adjusting the size or handing on to someone you would normally be in contact with, such as giving your children's outgrown clothes to their cousins.
An alternative approach to minimalism is to adhere to motto “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without”, which I believe is a variation of a phrase uttered by Calvin Coolidge in World War I. (He said “Eat it up,” etc).
One point, which I will not go into here, is the significant amount of time I spend trying to reduce my environmental impact. It may be made up to some extent, but definitely not completely, by time saved in having to take care of less stuff. Lack of time is the reason why I have so many bits of paper waiting to be dealt with.

21F Week 3. The Battle for Our Digital Rights

FOCUS TALK:

Susan Nulsen's professional interests are physics and language. She is very lucky to have been paid to work in subjects which interested her! After nine years of experimental solid state physics research she moved onto speech science research and somehow acquired a PhD in Computer Science on the way. After a detour into the study of welding as a research fellow in mechanical engineering and a period of unemployment following her move to this country she is now employed in astrophysics using the Pleiades supercomputer of NASA's Advanced Supercomputing Division to model the merging of galaxies. (It is named after the Seven Sisters constellation, which is a loose cluster of hundreds of stars, just as the supercomputer is a cluster of hundreds of processors.)

Her hobbies are WomenExplore and painting. Except for her husband, her much loved family, including her 17 month old grandson she has never met, is now inaccessible in Australia.

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Hello.

I always avoid telling people that I have a PhD in Computer Science because it might give them the mistaken impression that I know any more about computers than they do. My PhD research was studying spoken language. Computers were merely the tool I used to that end. All the same I have a long history of playing with programming computers as a pastime – I wrote my first computer program in 1969 when I was in high school and we have had a family computer since 1983, although we weren't connected to the internet until the 90s when we had a dedicated phone line.

In this talk I feel that I am speaking for everyone.

Society has become evermore dependent on computers and networks to handle all of our data. Nowadays, except perhaps for a handwritten journal, most of our new data exists in digital format. Many people even keep their shopping lists on their phones. As computers became more common so did hackers, viruses and other malware.

It has become a battle between those trying to attack our computers to gain access to people's private data and those trying to keep the data safe. Passwords are one way to help maintain privacy. Initially I was taught not use dictionary words in my passwords and instead use a complex mixture of letters, numbers and special characters. This was because a hacker could scan through all the words in the dictionary to find a match to a password. Now that computers are much more powerful, we are taught that that is not good enough. We should use very long “pass phrases” which may include some numbers or other characters. In many cases we also need to back that up with “dual factor authentication”. For example, to fill out my time sheet, once I have logged in to a virtual private network, I need to sign in with a long password and then receive a notification on my phone to check my identity by facial recognition. I just have to confirm with one click that I am indeed the one trying to sign in. 

To get to the Pleiades supercomputer it is even more complicated. When I request access I sign in with a long “pass phrase”. Then I enter an eight digit pin number into an app on my phone and am given an eight digit token, only valid for 30 seconds at most, to enter into my computer. The fourth and final “password” is my NASA one. This must be changed every couple of months. A new password cannot be very similar to the previous one, and it cannot be identical to any of the previous twelve passwords.

Like most of you, I imagine, I have hundreds of passwords. Because I don't trust storing them in electronic format I have written then, in pencil so that I can change them, on a sheet of card. Unfortunately it has become rather full and I will need to make another one soon.

Since I started work at the Center for Astrophysics I have had to do an annual training course on Computer Security Awareness. This mainly warns us of the different ways bad actors can gain access to private digital information. Sad to say, I have encountered many of these ways in real life. 

In April last year I received an email, sent to my old email address which I no longer use, with one of my very old weak passwords as the subject heading. It was a blackmail attempt. The sender claimed to have complete access to my computer – which was where, they said, they had obtained the password – and to have made a pornographic recording of me through my computer camera. Fortunately I knew that the most pornographic thing they could have seen was me in my very staid nightgown, and that password was not anywhere on the computer. They wanted me to deposit a couple of thousand in bitcoin in the bitcoin account given or they would distribute the video to my contacts. 

I changed the password to something a bit stronger, covered my camera with a piece of post-it note when I wasn't using it, and otherwise ignored the email. In the next few days I received three more almost identical emails, with different bitcoin accounts, from three different people, and two more blank ones in the next couple of weeks. I don't know what those last two were trying to achieve – saying “I know your password” to prime me for something further? I have no idea where they all got the password and my email address from. Perhaps someone is selling a list of them with accompanying blackmail letters.

The next story involves my mother. She was living on a farm far from any cable so her internet connection was via satellite. She had some problems so she phoned her internet provider and eventually a serviceman came out and fixed them. All was well and good, until the next day when she received a phone call from another man who said that there were a few things that still needed to be fixed on her computer before her connection was fully operational. He guided her through installing some software requiring her name and phone number which she supplied. (he already had those, in any case.) It was when he made the mistake of asking her for her bank account details that my mother realized he was not who he claimed to be, and she ended the call and shut down her computer. A friend took the computer into town where the local computer repairman was able to remove a number of items of malware. So any harm was narrowly averted.

I belong to a Harvard Spouses group called HSSPA. One day I received an urgent email from one of the organizers of this group. She said she needed $200 worth of gift cards, asking me to purchase them immediately and email back the numbers on the cards. I got in touch with her via a Facebook message, since I didn't have her phone number to ask about this. Of course it was a scam and she was able to let others on her email address list know that was the case.

More recently I received a text message from Fedex on my phone. It warned me that a gift package was on its way to me and sent a link so that I could track the package. I was suspicious so I googled the text message and was taken to the Consumer Information site of the Federal Trade Commission (https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/blog/2020/02/text-message-about-your-fedex-package-really-scam) where this and other similar scams were described with Fedex and other delivery services, including even the US Postal Service. The advice is, if you think it might be legitimate contact the company using a website or phone number that you know is real. Otherwise you could just delete it. I have also noticed some similar emails apparently from Amazon in my spam folder. I have deleted all of those. I use gmail and I must say that I find it does quite a good, but not perfect, job of recognizing spam.

However I am not immune to malware. In this story I failed to do the right thing and infected my computer. I had been using Adobe Acrobat Reader for many years to read pdfs. When a pop-up appeared on my computer telling me I needed to update it I clicked on the button and downloaded … some malware. My computer then became almost unusable. In my usual fashion I googled what to do and found an Apple Support Community that recommended I scan my computer with some free software called EtreCheck (https://etrecheck.com). This produced a report identifying two groups of malware. I was able to delete these and rerun EtreCheck until my computer was clean. The EtreCheck reports are designed to provide the Support Communities with the information they need to solve your problem. Alternatively you could pay EtreSoft, the very small Canadian company which makes EtreCheck, $18 for an extension which will do the deleting for you. I have had no problem with my computer since. In a final twist, while I was writing this talk I discovered that VirusTotal.com, an anti-malware company recently bought by Google, claims that EtreCheck itself is infected with malware. It is impossible to know who can be trusted! 

More and more things are made to include computers these days from your car to your fridge. There is an arms race between malware and the rest of us who are all users of computers in one form or another. It is indeed a “battle for digital rights”.

So far all my examples are cases of malware where data about me, or my mother, was obtained illegally for the purpose of extorting money or obtaining further data that can be used to obtain money. However, frequently when you download a new app or an upgrade to your phone or your computer you are asked to supply a lot of information that is unnecessary for what you want. I recently had to supply my birthdate to Apple. It was a required field and the format was checked to ensure it was a valid date. If I needed to be over 18 or over 21 I could just as well ticked a box. Alternatively I could have supplied a fake date. I don't like lying, but I don't like handing out my information unnecessarily. This reminds me about my Facebook account. When I joined many years ago I gave a birthdate that would have made me a hundred years old at the time. Recently I realized that I was now well on my way to becoming the oldest person in the world, so I changed the birthdate in my Facebook profile to another fake date making me younger than my real age. No problem. Except that when I had finished I got a message saying that I was only allowed to change my age three times! You don't know where all the information you are coerced into supplying ultimately ends up.

A couple of days ago I was required to upgrade the operating system on my phone. Usually I just accept the license agreement without reading it because I have no option if I want to continue to use my phone. However, because of this talk I decided to read it through. I gave up after two hours. I was near the end and just scanned through the remainder. It is very dense and difficult to read. One thing that is clear is that I do not own any of the Apple software on my phone – I am only using it under license – I guess that it is a “license agreement” after all. I am only allowed to make one other copy as a backup. This seems to mean I could not save a map from the Apple Maps app in a file to use when I am not connected to the internet. In other words it limits the usefulness of the maps.

Some of the language like the sentence from the middle of a paragraph that reads: “Unpublished-rights reserved under the copyright laws of the United States.” just didn't make sense. This doesn't even look like a sentence to me. Maybe you could add the word “are” so that it reads “Unpublished-rights are reserved under the copyright laws of the United States.” I still don't know what it means but at least it looks like a sentence. At another place where it is talking about ID cards it says '…  presentment may vary by state or location”. “Presentment” didn't look like an English word to me. I was wrong: “A presentment is the act of presenting to an authority a formal statement of a matter to be dealt with” or it is “a formal presentation of information to a court, especially by a sworn jury, regarding an offense or other matter”. I would say that the word was meant to be “presentation”. These two cases, and I am sure much more of the agreement, look like the work of some lazy lawyers.

No company should be allowed to collect more information than they need to provide the service they are offering and they should not be able to use the necessary information for any other purpose. All people should be allowed to use digital devices without being spammed by advertising or scams trying to harvest their data and ultimately part them from their money.

The lockdowns and isolation covid required have highlighted the essential nature of access to high speed internet and phone service and that it has become a human right. Just as we expect to be able to use the roads in our neighborhood without paying we should expect the internet to be free and safe.

I hope politicians at all levels from our local councillors on upwards will now be motivated to work towards this end. 

That is all I have to say for now. Thank you for listening.

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MAIN LECTURE:

Josephine Wolff is an associate professor of cybersecurity policy and has been associated with The Fletcher School at Tufts University since 2009. Her research interests include international Internet governance, cyber-insurance, security responsibilities and liability of online intermediaries, government-funded programs for cybersecurity education and workforce development, and the legal, political, and economic consequences of cybersecurity incidents. Her book "You'll See This Message When It Is Too Late: The Legal and Economic Aftermath of Cybersecurity Breaches" was published by MIT Press in 2018. Her writing on cybersecurity has also appeared in Slate, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Wired. Prior to joining Fletcher, she was an assistant professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a fellow at the New America Cybersecurity Initiative and Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. She received received a Ph.D. in Engineering Systems and M.S. in Technology and Policy from MIT, and an A.B. in mathematics from Princeton. As a student, she also spent time at Microsoft, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the Department of Defense.

Click here to play main lecture and discussion (1 hr 30 m)

Fall 2020: Democracy in Crisis! Week 8

Week 8 IS OUR ELECTORAL INTEGRITY AT RISK? 29th October 2020

Focus talk: Susan Nulsen

Susan has lived and experienced the voting systems in the UK, Australia and most recently here in the US.

My talk is more on the topic of voting and voting systems in general rather than on electoral integrity specifically.  I want to explain the WomenExplore voting system and how it came about.

First of all, I would like to expand a bit on the voting system in Australia. Like the US, and very much patterned on the US, the Commonwealth of Australia was a federation of a number of states. The Commonwealth is governed by two houses of parliament: the Senate, in which each of the six states has equal representation with a few extra seats for territories, and the House of Representatives, where each member of parliament represents a roughly equal number of constituents. 

Simplifying slightly, in federal elections the voters fill out a ballot for each house by numbering the candidates in their order of preference. (Voting is done with pencil and paper.) For the House of Representatives each district is represented by a single member who is elected by a straightforward ranked-choice vote in which the candidate with the least number of votes is eliminated and their votes go to the next choice of the voter. This process of elimination continues until one candidate gets more than 50% of the votes. 

For the Senate, where each state is a single district usually choosing six representatives, counting the votes becomes more complicated. When choosing six representatives any candidate who get more than one seventh of the votes is elected immediately. Their surplus votes will be redistributed but each of these redistributed votes will only be worth a fraction of a single vote. For example if the candidate received one and a half times as many votes as they needed the redistributed votes will only be worth a third of a single vote, because a third of the votes were surplus. Once this redistribution has taken place the candidate with the least votes is eliminated and their votes are redistributed at full value. And so on. This is why this voting system is sometimes referred to as STV – Single Transferable Vote. Each voter gets to contribute a single vote to the process, although part of it might go to one candidate and part to another. The Senate system is a very fair way of electing the required number of candidates and results in proportional representation of the electorate. On occasion when all twelve seats are up for grabs in each state it becomes even more representative with smaller parties having more chance of winning a seat. Of course the big parties don't like this but it is what the voters want.  The Senate system is a variation of the Hare-Clark system which you may have heard of.  The Hare-Clark system has been used in the state of Tasmania since 1909. I think that the Senate system is slightly more fair in the way in which votes are transferred. 

After I arrived in America and when the subject came up in conversation I would point out what I regarded as two things in the Australian voting system which produced more representative results from elections, but I soon realized that there was a third which was every bit as important. This was the Australian Electoral Commission and the corresponding state electoral commissions which are made up of civil servants who act impartially in determining the boundaries of the electoral districts as well as in running the elections.  Gerrymandering is a powerful force in maintaining a minority government in power, when its political appointees are able control redistricting.  They aim to create as many districts as possible in which their party has a small but safe majority, thus ensuring that the voices of opposition supporters in these districts are nullified. The remainder of the voters are corralled into districts that are as close as possible a hundred percent opposition supporters. In this way these voters elect as few as possible opposition candidates. Just last year the Supreme Court validated the right of states to gerrymander. In gerrymandered districts the winning candidate is always appealing to a majority of supporters. They have no incentive to reach out to the other side. They just need to gin up their voters to make sure they get out to vote.

Those first two differences I had noticed between the two voting systems were compulsory voting and preferential voting (or ranked choice voting as it's being called in this election). 

Three weeks ago Jenny Mansbridge mentioned that she was leery of preferential voting because it dampened the debate between opposing sides. She might have been thinking of the 2018 election for the mayor of San Francisco which used ranked choice voting. In this election two of the candidates[1] who opposed the front runner[2] and who realized that they had more in common with each other than the front runner decided to join together and swap second preferences. Of course, they can actually only recommend that their supporters put the other second, they cannot compel.  The ability to express a second (or third or fourth etc) preference prevents a third candidate acting as a spoiler as happened in the 2000 presidential election when Ralph Nader's candidacy deprived Al Gore of the presidency. Also, even when courting valuable second preferences, the candidates still need to put their positions clearly and draw a distinction between their policies and their opponents'.  It is true that a candidate is probably less hateful towards the other candidates than they would be in a first-past-the-post election, but I regard this as a plus.  It is much less likely to incite violence in their supporters.  It is much less polarizing.

By the way, in San Francisco the front runner still won. From my experience in Australia, I can say that there is still a very robust debate at election time, and, in practice, about seven times out of eight preferential voting gives the same outcome as the first-past-the-post system, but that eighth time still matters.

What about compulsory voting? Why should I be forced to vote? You can all think of reasons why that is a good thing.  Just think of all the money and effort that is spent on trying to get out maybe 60% of the vote, money and effort that could be much better spent on explaining policies. One of the techniques used is to scare voters to the polls by portraying the opposition as monsters.  This has the effect of further polarizing the electorate.  I also suspect that compulsory voting would act as another hurdle to bad actors disenfranchising voters.  When everyone votes it goes without saying that the result is much more representative of the people.  Voting is not very onerous, and actually, in Australia, you are not required to cast a valid vote, just to turn up. I saw recently that people were fined $55 for not voting in state elections in New South Wales.  When I left Australia I think the fine for not voting in a federal election was only $20. Still who wants to pay $20?  Voter turnout in Australia is around 95%.  It could probably be better.   I believe that voting is not only a privilege but also a duty. 

In a representative democracy the aim of voting should be to select the most representative representatives. Impartial districting, ranked choice voting and compulsory voting all do that. In addition, it turns out, they all have a tendency to decrease the polarization of the electorate which is a welcome benefit.

All of the above explains where I am coming from, what informs me with regard to voting systems.  Now to WomenExplore.

In 1896 Anna Parker Lowell, the wife of a Harvard professor, started a group called the Society of Harvard Dames which met on Thursday afternoons for a talk followed by afternoon tea. You might be interested in this notice [5] that I found in the Harvard Crimson from nearly a hundred years ago.

Published: Thursday, May 10, 1923
The Society of Harvard Dames will be addressed by Professor L. J. Johnson '87 on "Proportional Representation" in Phillips Brooks House at 3 o'clock this afternoon. The feature of the meeting will be a mock election to illustrate the subject of the speech.

Clearly the subject of voting systems has been with us for a long time and is not going away.

In the late 50s the divinity school resurrected the Society of Harvard Dames as Ladies Lectures. In 1973 Brita Stendahl with a small advisory committee reformulated these lectures as the Theological Opportunities Program (TOP).  Like the Ladies Lectures they weren't just open to Harvard wives but to any women who were interested. TOP evolved into the WomenExplore we know after Liz Dodson Gray became coordinator in 1978. She opened the advisory committee up to all who attended, developing our unique method of devising a lecture series through the topics that are on our minds. She then introduced the idea of an existential focus to ground the topic of the day in the experiences of one of the women who attended. Today I am that woman. These two features are what distinguish WE from the myriad of other lectures that are available to us.

In 2003 TOP/WomenExplore cut its ties with Harvard, becoming an independent non-profit. This legally required us to have a board which was initially selected by Liz, who became the executive director and president of the board. In 2008 Liz asked whether we, the Advisory Committee, could set up a committee to nominate potential new board members. I was on that committee along with Louise McMurray, the chair, Erica Kenny and Sandy Wayne. What Liz was looking for was a list of volunteers in the order of preference of the Advisory Committee. We decided on the procedures for running an election whenever it might be required, and I volunteered to come up with a voting system, because I was intensely interested in ensuring that our board members truly represented the Advisory Committee and that the elections were as fair as possible.

From what I have just been telling you about my background, you might guess that I would choose a system like the Senate system and you would be right. However when I looked closely I realized just how unwieldy that system could be, even for such a small group as WomenExplore. I dreaded the thought of trying to explain how to count the votes to all the future generations of WE members. Then I had the idea of just averaging the order of preference numbers that each candidate received (or simply just summing them). The result would give an overall order of preference of the candidates, with the most preferred candidates having the lowest numbers. It was immediately obvious that this had some advantages over other systems I have mentioned. You can imagine the situation where there is a compromise candidate, I'll call her Claire, who is liked by all the voters, but not quite as much as they like their first choice candidate. So everybody ranks her second after their varied first choices. Under other systems she would be the first candidate to be eliminated, and the voters would lose the opportunity to have elected a candidate that they are all happy with. This method of counting the votes tends to select consensus candidates which is very much in line with the philosophy of WomenExplore which always looks for consensus in its decision making. As a way of making it easier for voters by allowing them to number only as many of the candidates as they like we give the unnumbered candidates the average of the numbers that the voter missed. This is equivalent to saying that all of the unnumbered candidates are equal last in order of preference. It does not distort the result and encourage voters to game the system (or “vote strategically”), not that I think anyone in WomenExplore would deliberately do that. Still it is what we all do when we vote Al Gore rather than our first choice, Ralph Nader. [This method of using the average of the missing numbers can also be generalized to allow voters to, for example, give two candidates equal second preference. This would translate to each getting a preference of 2.5 and the next candidate in order of preference would have a preference of 4. It is somewhat like awarding places in a running race.]  Preferential or ranked-choice voting is one thing. Interpreting those votes for all the voters in a district is another.

With a little bit of research I discovered that the WE voting system is just one of a family of voting systems called Borda counts, named after Jean-Charles Borda who devised the method in 1770. A number of these variants are used in different places around the world, including the Harvard Undergraduate Council which, in 2018, adopted one of the Borda variants for its elections, after finding the Hare-Clark system too complicated, following in WomenExplore's footsteps.

The following slide takes the example of a small district which needs to elect one of three candidates. The first two candidates, Adele and Brooke are very polarizing. Supporters of one would do anything rather than vote for the other. Our friend Claire is the third candidate. Some of her supporters favor Adele as their second choice and some Brooke.

The slide shows how the different systems can give different results with the same votes for a simple case of 100 voters.

And the second slide shows the tally sheet from a real WE board election. The names are changed to protect identities.

Thank you.

[1] Jane Kim and Mark Leno     [2] London Breed

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Week 8 IS OUR ELECTORAL INTEGRITY AT RISK? 29th October 2020

Main lecture:  Eitan Hersh

Eitan Hersh is associate professor of political science at Tufts University. His research focuses on US elections, voting rights, and civic participation. Hersh is the author of Politics is for Power (Scribner, 2020), Hacking the Electorate (Cambridge UP 2015), as well as many scholarly articles. Hersh earned his PhD from Harvard in 2011 and served as assistant professor of political science at Yale University from 2011-2017. His public writings have appeared in venues such as the New York Times, USA Today, The Atlantic, POLITICO, and the Boston Globe. Hersh regularly testifies in voting rights court cases and has testified to the US Senate Committee on the Judiciary about the role of data analytics in political campaigns.

Click here to play main lecture and discussion (1 hr 25 m).

Note: Naakh Vysoky, Ukrainian immigrant, died peacefully on 31st December 2019, just three days shy of his 99th birthday.