Stress Leaks Through Skin and Is Contagious - Dr. Tara Swart Neuroscientist

 

Silicon Valley siphons our data like oil. But the deepest drilling has just begun

Ben Tarnoff in The Guardian


What if a cold drink cost more on a hot day?

Customers in the UK will soon find out. Recent reports suggest that three of the country’s largest supermarket chains are rolling out surge pricing in select stores. This means that prices will rise and fall over the course of the day in response to demand. Buying lunch at lunchtime will be like ordering an Uber at rush hour.

This may sound pretty drastic, but far more radical changes are on the horizon. About a week before that report, Amazon announced its $13.7bn purchase of Whole Foods. A company that has spent its whole life killing physical retailers now owns more than 460 stores in three countries.

Amazon isn’t abandoning online retail for brick-and-mortar. Rather, it’s planning to fuse the two. It’s going to digitize our daily lives in ways that make surge-pricing your groceries look primitive by comparison. It’s going to expand Silicon Valley’s surveillance-based business model into physical space, and make money from monitoring everything we do.

Silicon Valley is an extractive industry. Its resource isn’t oil or copper, but data. Companies harvest this data by observing as much of our online activity as they can. This activity might take the form of a Facebook like, a Google search, or even how long your mouse hovers in a particular part of your screen. Alone, these traces may not be particularly meaningful. By pairing them with those of millions of others, however, companies can discover patterns that help determine what kind of person you are – and what kind of things you might buy.

These patterns are highly profitable. Silicon Valley uses them to sell you products or to sell you to advertisers. But feeding the algorithms that produce these patterns requires a steady stream of data. And while that data is certainly abundant, it’s not infinite.

A hundred years ago, you could dig a hole in Texas and strike oil. Today, fossil fuel companies have to build drilling platforms many miles offshore. The tech industry faces a similar fate. Its wildcat days are over: most of the data that lies closest to the surface is already claimed. Together, Facebook and Google receive a staggering 76% of online advertising revenue in the United States.

An Amazon Go ‘smart’ store in Seattle. The company’s acquisition of Whole Foods signals a desire to fuse online surveillance with brick-and-mortar business. Photograph: Paul Gordon/Zuma Press / eyevine

To increase profits, Silicon Valley must extract more data. One method is to get people to spend more time online: build new apps, and make them as addictive as possible. Another is to get more people online. This is the motivation for Facebook’s Free Basics program, which provides a limited set of internet services for free in underdeveloped regions across the globe, in the hopes of harvesting data from the world’s poor.

But these approaches leave large reservoirs of data untapped. After all, we can only spend so much time online. Our laptops, tablets, smartphones, and wearables see a lot of our lives – but not quite everything. For Silicon Valley, however, anything less than total knowledge of its users represents lost revenue. Any unmonitored moment is a missed opportunity.

Amazon is going to show the industry how to monitor more moments: by making corporate surveillance as deeply embedded in our physical environment as it is in our virtual one. Silicon Valley already earns vast sums of money from watching what we do online. Soon it’ll earn even more money from watching what we do offline.

It’s easy to picture how this will work, because the technology already exists. Late last year, Amazon built a “smart” grocery store in Seattle. You don’t have to wait in a checkout line to buy something – you just grab it and walk out of the store. Sensors detect what items you pick up, and you’re charged when you leave.


Imagine if your supermarket watched you as closely as Facebook or Google

Amazon is keen to emphasize the customer benefits: nobody likes waiting in line to pay for groceries, or fumbling with one’s wallet at the register. But the same technology that automates away the checkout line will enable Amazon to track every move a customer makes.

Imagine if your supermarket watched you as closely as Facebook or Google does. It would know not only which items you bought, but how long you lingered in front of which products and your path through the store. This data holds valuable lessons about your personality and your preferences – lessons that Amazon will use to sell you more stuff, online and off.

Supermarkets aren’t the only places these ideas will be put into practice. Surveillance can transform any physical space into a data mine. And the most data-rich environment, the one that contains the densest concentration of insights into who you are, is your home.

That’s why Amazon has aggressively promoted the Echo, a small speaker that offers a Siri-like voice-activated assistant called Alexa. Alexa can tell you the weather, read you the news, make you a to-do list, and perform any number of other tasks. It is a very good listener. It faithfully records your interactions and transmits them back to Amazon for analysis. In fact, it may be recording not only your interactions, but absolutely everything.

Putting a listening device in your living room is an excellent way for Amazon to learn more about you. Another is conducting aerial surveillance of your house. In late July, Amazon obtained a patent for drones that spy on people’s homes as they make deliveries. An example included in Amazon’s patent filing is roof repair: the drone that drops a package on your doorstep might notice your roof is falling apart, and that observation could result in a recommendation for a repair service. Amazon is still testing its delivery drones. But if and when they start flying, it’s safe to assume they’ll be scraping data from the outside of our homes as diligently as the Echo does from the inside.

  Silicon Valley is an extractive industry. Its resource isn’t oil or copper, but data. And to increase profits, Silicon Valley must extract more. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Amazon is likely to face some resistance as it colonizes more of our lives. People may not love the idea of their supermarkets spying on them, or every square inch of their homes being fed to an algorithm. But one should never underestimate how rapidly norms can be readjusted when capital requires it.

A couple of decades ago, letting a company read your mail and observe your social interactions and track your location would strike many, if not most, as a breach of privacy. Today, these are standard, even banal, aspects of using the internet. It’s worth considering what further concessions will come to feel normal in the next 20 years, as Silicon Valley is forced to dig deeper into our lives for data.

Tech’s apologists will say that consumers can always opt out: if you object to a company’s practices, don’t use its services. But in our new era of monopoly capitalism, consumer choice is a meaningless concept. Companies like Google and Facebook and Amazon dominate the digital sphere – you can’t avoid them.

The only solution is political. As consumers we’re nearly powerless, but as citizens, we can demand more democratic control of our data. Data is a common good. We make it together, and we make it meaningful together, since useful patterns only emerge from collecting and analyzing large quantities of it.

No reasonable person would let the mining industry unilaterally decide how to extract and refine a resource, or where to build its mines. Yet somehow we let the tech industry make all these decisions and more, with practically no public oversight. A company that yanks copper out of an earth that belongs to everyone should be governed in everyone’s interest. So should a company that yanks data out of every crevice of our collective lives.

To all friends who have relatives visiting from outside the UK

You are aware about the way NHS hospitals prey on foreigners who happen to fall ill during their visit to the UK -for details please visit
http://giffenman-miscellania.blogspot.com/2011/08/uk-tourists-beware-cambridge-hospital.html

I have now created an e-petition on the government website which states 'a Visitor's visa fee should include provision of medical insurance to cover emergencies'. It requires signatures of 100, 000 folks resident in the UK for it to be discussed in parliament. This will I hope prevent predatory behaviour from staff at NHS hospitals. Kindly sign this petition if you agree with it. Also please forward it to as many UK residents you know so that the petition reaches the discussion stage in parliament. You can sign the petition here.

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/15381

Thank you
 
 

British Tourism

You have all seen images of the injured Malaysian tourist being robbed by British citizens.

Now VISUALISE THE NEXT SCENE. 

This tourist is in an NHS hospital having recovered his consciousness. His hospital bed is now visited by predatory finance staff from the hospital demanding that he produce instant cash or he will be deported.

So do you see a similarity between this story and the following one? Please comment

http://giffenman-miscellania.blogspot.com/2011/08/uk-tourists-beware-cambridge-hospital.html

UK TOURISTS BEWARE – Cambridge Hospital Staff Demand Instant Money from Sick and Ailing Indian Tourist

Cambridge Hospital Staff Demand Instant Money from Sick and Ailing Indian Tourist

The UK likes to portray itself as a friendly and inviting place for tourists. Its visa regime informs tourists who possess medical insurance that in case of an emergency they will receive adequate medical treatment without any need to pay the money upfront. But this is not true in reality as the following story illustrates.

VM, aged 73, is an Indian tourist visiting her family in Cambridge UK since June 2011. On Thursday 18 Aug she was admitted to Cambridge's famous Addenbrooke's hospital for an emergency illness and she received good medical care. Her medical insurers contacted the hospital on Friday 19 August in order to confirm her medical insurance cover and to guarantee payment. Yet on Tuesday 23 August and Wednesday 24 August VM received a rude shock in her hospital bed. Staff from the finance department beseiged her sick bed and demanded that she sign a carte blanche document agreeing to pay any/all charges the NHS may levy for her treatment. When it was pointed out that her insurance company was willing to offer a payment guarantee for her treatment they refused to listen and threatened to deport the tourist.

This issue becomes even more important as London prepares to invite tourists for the 2012 Olympic games. As the following article shows, NHS hospitals have made it a policy to use such high handed behaviour to extort cash from patients in their ailing beds.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-562980/Foreigners-asked-produce-cash-hospital-beds-crackdown-health-tourists.html

In short if this behaviour is allowed to continue, if a luckless tourist finds himself in an NHS hospital s/he will not only have to hope to get better soon in a foreign land, but also try to figure out how to arrange large amounts of cash to fob of the finance staff of these hospitals.

You have been warned, visit the UK only if you or your relatives have large amounts of instant cash. Else you and your relatives will be in peril should you have a medical emergency as NHS hospitals fail to honour the legal commitment made when you obtained your visa.

THE DAILY MAIL ARTICLE

Foreigners asked to produce cash in their hospital beds in crackdown on 'health tourists'

By OLINKA KOSTER
Last updated at 17:54 30 April 2008

A hospital is pioneering a "get tough" attitude on health tourists - by throwing them out of hospital before their treatment is complete unless they pay up.
It means that foreigners who travel to Britain to get free care on the NHS will now be asked to produce cash or a credit card at their hospital bed.
The new approach has already saved the West Middlesex University Hospital in Isleworth up to £700,000 a year. Its proximity to Heathrow Airport makes it a particular target for immigrants.
If all hospitals did the same, the NHS could recoup tens of millions of pounds a year from health tourists.
Scroll down for more...

Crackdown: West Middlessex University Hospital is getting tough on illegal 'health tourists'

Andy Finlay, the hospital manager in charge of collecting the money at the Middlesex trust, said patients had to pay up-front - or face being discharged within 48 hours.
"We will discharge a patient before they are well," he insisted.
"We will discharge a patient when they are stable, when we have provided what we have to provide - the minimum benchmark.
"Generally, within the first 48 hours after admission they will be given a price on how much, roughly, their treatment is going to cost.
"If I'm interviewing an inpatient I will be at that patient's bedside and I will ask them there and then for a visa, MasterCard, debit card, or cash. We don't take cheques."
Under the current system, anyone who needs emergency care, such as for a heart attack or accident and emergency treatment after an accident, does not have to pay.
But patients not eligible for free care who attempt to use the NHS for ongoing care or treatment that is not immediately necessary have to pay.
These so-called health tourists normally receive a bill on departure from hospital - but only an estimated 30 per cent of the money is recovered.
Under the pilot scheme, they will be asked to pay at their hospital bed for non-emergency care, or told to leave.
However, they would only be discharged after three consultants have agreed their condition is stable.
In the case of a heart attack victim, NHS patients would normally stay in hospital for 10 days. But anyone not eligible for free care could be asked to leave after 48 hours if they are judged stable.
Most patients told to leave did so willingly, Mr Finlay added - but not all of them.
"I've had two death threats, I've been held up against a wall, I've been grabbed round the throat, I've been manhandled by relatives - verbal abuse is almost day-to-day," he said.
"You have to have a very thick skin."
Last year, a secret Government report based on figures from 12 NHS trusts suggested that the bill for treating health tourists was at least £62million a year.
This did not include the cost of treating foreigners entitled to free healthcare, such as asylum seekers and students.
Health tourists not entitled to free treatment include pregnant women who arrive on holiday visas and give birth here.
Many foreign HIV sufferers also target UK hospitals for treatment, the study from 2005 revealed.
In the case of an HIV patient, a clinical decision would be made as to whether emergency care was needed.
At the time the figures were revealed, Conservative MP Ben Wallace said hospitals appeared to be pursuing a "don't ask, don't charge and don't chase policy".
Cash-strapped hospitals are being pushed further into debt because they are failing to claim the millions owed to them by those abusing the system.
As well as the West Middlesex University Hospital, the Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust and the Luton and Dunstable NHS Foundation Trust have been chosen to take part in the pilot scheme because their catchment areas contain both a "major point of entry to the UK" and a large proportion of asylum seekers.
Mr Finlay said his methods had received an enthusiastic response from across Whitehall - and saved the trust between £600,000 and £700,000-a-year.
"They think it is a fantastic idea, a solution to a relatively new problem," he said.
"It is up to the Department of Health to see how brave they will be to use innovative ways to tackle health tourism."
A spokesman for the Department of Health said: "It is important that those who are not entitled to NHS services pay for any they receive.
"The Government is currently reviewing access to primary and secondary care for all foreign nationals.
"In doing this we must take into account the implications of any such decisions on the key preventative and public health responsibilities of the NHS.
"We always treat people and do not charge them for emergency treatment, but the thinking behind the pilot schemes is that the NHS is there first and foremost for people who live here."

The man who proved that everyone is good at maths

By travelling all the way to Madagascar, the French academic Marc Chemillier has shown that humans have remarkable innate skills with numbers. Alex Duval Smith reports

Saturday, 16 July 2011 The Independent

Maths is simple. But to discover this requires travelling to the ends of the earth where an illiterate, chain-smoking fortune teller lives in a room with a double bed and a beehive.
As the sun rises over the hut belonging to Raoke, a 70-year-old witch doctor, a highly pitched din heralds bee rush hour. The insects he keeps shuttle madly in and out through the window.
This bizarre setting, near nowhere in the harsh cactus savannah of southern Madagascar, is where a leading French academic, Marc Chemillier, has achieved an extraordinary pairing of modern science and illiterate intuition.
In his book, Les Mathématiques Naturelles, the director of studies at EHESS (School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences) argues that mathematics is not only simple, it is "rooted in human, sensorial intuition". And he believes that Madagascar's population, which remains relatively untouched by outside influences, can help him to prove this.
Mr Chemillier argues that children should be encouraged to do maths before they learn to read and write. "There is a strong link between counting and the number of fingers on our hands. Maths becomes complicated only when you abandon basic measures in nature, like the foot or the inch, or even the acre, which is the area that two bulls can plough in a day."
To make his point, Mr Chemillier chose to charge up his laptop computer, leave Paris and do the rounds of fortune tellers on the Indian Ocean island because its uninfluenced natural biodiversity also extends to its human population. Divinatory geomancy – reading random patterns, or sikidy to use the local word – is what Raoke does, when not smoking cigarettes rolled with paper from a school exercise book.
With a low table covered in pieces of wood – each of which has a particular medicinal virtue – Raoke sits on his straw mat and chants as he runs his fingers through a bag of shiny, dark brown tree seeds. "There were about 600 seeds in the bag to begin with but I have lost a few," he says. "They come from the fane tree and were selected for me many years ago. The fane from the valley of Tsivoanino produces some seeds that lie and others that tell the truth so it is very important to test each seed. I paid a specialist to do that," said the father of six.
Raoke pours a random number of seeds on to his mat, then picks them up singly or in twos and lays them in a grid from right to left. Each horizontal gridline has a name – son, livestock, woman or enemy – and each vertical one has a name, too: chief, zebu (cattle), brother and earth. Whether one or two seeds lie at the intersection of two gridlines determines the subject's fortune and informs Raoke as to the cure required, and its price. From the selection of wood pieces on his table, Raoke can mix concoctions to cure ailments, banish evil spirits and restore friendships.
A basic session with the seeds costs 10,000 ariary (£3), then a price is discussed for the cure. It seems there is nothing Raoke cannot achieve for the top price of one or two zebus – Malagasy beef cattle that cost about £300 each – though some remedies are available for the price of a sheep. "A white man came from Réunion with a stomach ailment that the hospitals in France could not cure. I gave him a powder to drink in a liquid. He vomited and then he was cured," said Raoke.
Given the thousands of plant species in Madagascar that are still undiscovered by mainstream medicine, it is entirely possible that Raoke holds the key to several miracle cures. But Mr Chemillier is not interested in the pharmacopaeic aspect of the fortune teller's work.
"Raoke is an expert in a reflexive view of maths of which we have lost sight in the West," says Mr Chemillier. "Even armed with my computer program, I do not fully comprehend Raoke's capacities for mental arithmetic. He can produce 65,536 grids with his seeds – I have them all in my computer now – but we still need to do more work to understand his mental capacity for obtaining the combinations of single seeds and pairs."
The way in which he poses questions over the seeds requires the same faculties for mental speculation as might be displayed by a winner of the Fields Medal, which is the top award any mathematician can aspire to, said Mr Chemillier.
Over the years, Mr Chemillier has earned respect from Raoke and other Malagasy fortune tellers. "Initially they thought France had sent me to steal their work in an attempt to become the world's most powerful fortune teller. But once I was able to share grids with them that had been through my computer program, we established a relationship of trust," says Mr Chemillier.
Raoke says God shows him how to position the seeds. He does not understand why "Monsieur Marc", and now this other visiting white person, keeps asking him why he lays the seeds in a certain way. Yet it is clear from a stack of grimy copybooks he keeps under his bed that if indeed God is a mathematician dictating to Raoke, then the Almighty keeps him busy. When not consulting clients, the diminutive fortune teller spends hours with his seeds, laying them in different formations and copying the dots down in pencil. Those grids have value and Raoke sells them to other fortune tellers.
Seeing that pages of the copybooks are being sacrificed to his roll-ups, I offer Raoke a packet of cigarette papers which he accepts with delight, having never seen them before. He buys his tobacco leaf in long plaits from the market. So I offer him a green plastic pouch of Golden Virginia. Raoke cannot read but he recognises the word "danger", written in red at the start of the government health warning. He drops the packet to the floor in shock and disgust.