Cisco has announced a new update to the People Insights feature for Webex.
Now available as part of the all-new Webex experience, People Insights align with the goals that each person sets for their meetings, such as focus time, connectivity, and work-life integration. The offering uses a people-first mindset to deliver insights that support teams, and all are built on a foundation of security, and privacy.
According to Webex, the pandemic has had a profound impact on the way we work, with around 98 per cent of meetings expected to feature remote participants. In this new hybrid landscape, Webex says it’s increasingly important to help people connect and thrive, wherever they are. People Insights offer a view into the trends and strategies of how we work and supports teams in building better relationships.
According to SVP and GM for Collaboration and Security at Cisco, Jeetu Patel, the Webex team believes that great work starts with each individual person. Cisco wants to help people achieve more productive, positive and inclusive work experiences wherever they are.
New Insights for the Workplace
EVP and Chief Purpose, People, and Policy Officer at Cisco, Fran Katsoudas notes that our most precious resource these days is time, and we need to use that time wisely. People Insights makes it easier for users to design their day around their personal goals and priorities. The insights available provide a more inclusive working experience and empower people to develop their collaborative network in the way that suits them.
People Insights will enhance wellbeing and employee productivity through:
Personal Insights: Available only to you, your personal insights will show daily trends and interactions that allow you to monitor your personal preferences and performance. Through this information, you can tailor how you focus your time and collaborate with colleagues. For instance, you might notice that you’re frequently accepting meeting invitations that you never attend. People Insights will help you to decide which meetings really need your engagement.
Team Insights: Through Team Insights, team members can get a full view of the patterns between collaboration habits, connections, and work-life integration for teams, while maintaining privacy. The benefit is a more inclusive workplace for everyone involved and a team that can consistently optimise the way it works together.
Organisational Insights: These insights will offer a more comprehensive view of the company’s collaboration trends, so you can spot teams that might need additional support or help with inclusivity.
Empowering Employees with Greater Wellbeing
Lead Analyst and CEO of Aragon Research, Jim Lundy, identifies employee wellbeing as a critical priority now that the lines between home and work are blurring. Cisco is assisting companies in transforming their workplace environment, to make the hybrid space more inclusive. The new offering builds on a strong history of Webex assisting employees to remain productive and innovative wherever they are.
For the hybrid workforce, Webex has also introduced a future feature called “People Focus”. This solution will use AI and machine learning technology to re-frame meeting participants situated around a meeting room, helping remote participants to feel more connected.
Social media has produced plenty of stories that have a ring of truth but are packed with ridiculous twists that seem way too good to be true. Thus it was with #TheStory, a 148-part Twitter thread by Aziah “Zola” Wells King — except her thread turned out to be a relatively true recounting of two women on a nightmare Florida road trip. Last year at the Sundance Film Festival, director Janicza Bravo turned that thread into a film that dramatizes the story without losing Zola’s sardonic charm.
A24 is now releasing Zola in theaters this summer, and the first trailer was released online today. It’s a pretty good encapsulation of the movie, starring Taylour Paige as the semi-fictionalized A’Ziah King and Riley Keough as her volatile frenemy...
Verizon stopped activating phones on its 3G network several years ago. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
After years of delays, Verizon says it will finally shut down its 3G CDMA network at the end of 2022 — and the company means it this time.
Verizon initially targeted 2021 for the shutdown and later revised with a more ambitious goal of 2019. That didn’t happen, and as recently as January 2021, the company said the plan was on hold indefinitely. Now, Verizon has confirmed an official shutdown date of December 31st, 2022, and a statement that “the date will not be extended again” on the company’s news site leaves no room for ambiguity.
This move won’t affect anyone who has activated a phone with Verizon in the past few years; the company stopped activating 3G-only phones in 2018. Verizon is also keen to point out that it will be the last...
We already knew that PayPal was planning to support cryptocurrencies as a form of payment. And now, the online payment app announced US customers can do just that with its “Checkout with Crypto” feature, rolling out today.
After rolling out the ability for US users to directly buy and sell cryptocurrency directly from their accounts last November, PayPal’s new “Checkout with Crypto” allows users to instantly convert their Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, or Bitcoin Cash to US dollars (with no additional transaction fees) that PayPal then uses to complete the transaction. If a merchant doesn’t take US dollars, PayPal also converts those dollars into local currency at standard conversion rates set by PayPal.
The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued a recall for 2019–2020 Hyundai Kona and 2020 Hyundai Ioniq electric vehicles after over a dozen battery fires were reported. The agency is also warning owners against parking their vehicles near their homes or any flammable structure.
An electrical short in the Kona’s lithium-ion battery cells increases the risk of fire while parked, charging, and driving, NHTSA said, adding, “The safest place to park them is outside and away from homes and other structures.”
Last month, Hyundai announced that it would recall some 76,000 Kona EVs built between 2018 and 2020 over battery fire concerns. It was the second recall for the Kona but the first one that was global in nature. The...
Birx looks on as Trump speaks during a press briefing on March 20, 2020. | Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
The former Trump health official’s comments to Sanjay Gupta and the ensuing backlash, briefly explained.
Dr. Deborah Birx, coordinator of former President Donald Trump’s failed coronavirus response, is facing criticism after making an obvious but notable claim in a new CNN documentary: that the vast majority of the US’s nearly 550,000 coronavirus deaths could’ve been prevented.
“I look at it this way: The first time, we have an excuse. There were about 100,000 deaths that came from that original surge,” Birx told CNN chief medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta. “All of the rest of them, in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially.”
In sum, Birx suggested that thousands of American deaths were all but unavoidable as a result of the initial surge of the coronavirus in February and March of last year. But she said better adherence to public health guidelines — including mask-wearing and social distancing — could’ve saved the lives of many of the 450,000 people (and counting) in the US who have died since then.
Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator under former President Trump, said in a CNN documentary clip that she thinks the US could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives lost to Covid-19 following the pandemic's first surge. https://t.co/cB08LLbIawpic.twitter.com/cXqvnYWYa7
While Birx’s suggestion that as many as 100,000 deaths were too difficult to prevent is arguable — a better-prepared federal government could have limited spread and saved lives by building out a testing infrastructure much more quickly than the one overseen by Trump, for instance — her conclusion that many lives could have been saved is absolutely correct.
And yet her comments on CNN have brought her freshcriticism anyway, as they failed to address her own role in the Trump administration’s response.
Dr Birx portrays herself as an ill-fated passenger on the Titanic when in fact she was an officer on the bridge.
Indeed, a look back at the historical record makes clear that Birx was not a victim of circumstance.
Birx helped create a distorted picture of the Trump administration’s coronavirus response
There’s something important Birx has yet to acknowledge in her CNN interview or elsewhere: that she contributed to the problem by whitewashing Trump’s incompetence instead of sounding the alarm about it.
To cite the most notorious example, CNN’s coronavirus documentary aired almost exactly one year to the day after Birx went on the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) and effusively praised Trump as being “so attentive to the scientific literature and the details and the data” in a clip that was viral then and went viral again with Birx’s new interview.
"[Trump is] so attentive to the scientific literature & the details & the data. I think his ability to analyze & integrate data that comes out of his long history in business has really been a real benefit” -- this is shocking, hackish stuff from Dr. Birx. pic.twitter.com/c2phsRYaJs
But what was already clear by the time of that CBN interview was that Trump was behaving the opposite of what Birx wanted people to believe. Instead of listening to public health experts, Trump spent the earliest months of the pandemic saying the coronavirus would go away on its own “like a miracle,” dismissing efforts by Democrats to take it more seriously as “a hoax,” and then pushed to reopen churches and businesses even as the virus spread unchecked.
That the Trump White House was engaged in politically motivated wishful thinking instead of trying to save lives was painfully obvious by late March 2020. And yet Birx opted to try and stay in Trump’s good graces instead of telling the public the truth.
Intentionally or not, Birx repeatedly misled people on Trump’s behalf. During a briefing in April of last year, for instance, she cherry-picked numbers from sparsely populated states to make it seem like cases were declining across the country when they actually weren’t. There were numerous occasions in which she appeared to go out of her way to run interference for poor decisions Trump made, ranging from defending his refusal to wear a mask to cajoling the CDC to exclude presumed positive cases from the coronavirus death count.
But, as Birx told Gupta, even this wasn’t enough to prevent Trump from turning on her.
Last August, Birx went on CNN and acknowledged a truth that was obvious to anyone who wasn’t guzzling the Trump Kool-Aid — that the coronavirus was “widespread” in “both rural and urban” areas, and “that is why we keep saying, no matter where you live in America, you need to wear a mask and socially distance, do the personal hygiene pieces.” But those comments set off Trump, who she said called her to instigate an “uncomfortable conversation” that was borderline threatening.
“That was a very difficult time because everyone inside the White House was upset with that interview,” Birx told Gupta. “I think you’ve heard the conversations people have posted with [Trump]. I would say it was even more direct than what people have heard ... It was very uncomfortable, very direct, and very difficult to hear.”
While she was a fixture at Trump’s daily coronavirus briefings — including an infamous incident in which Trump suggested to her that disinfectant injections or sunlight treatments could be miracle cures for the coronavirus — Birx faded into the background following her August CNN interview. She wasn’t heard from again nationally until the weekend after Trump left the White House in January, when she did an interview with CBS that kicked off an effort to rehabilitate her image.
In a separate interview for CNN’s coronavirus documentary, Dr. Anthony Fauci — who unlike Birx was more critical of the Trump administration’s Covid-19 response, and who continues to serve in government as a medical adviser to President Joe Biden — defended Birx, arguing that he had more freedom to speak out than she did because Birx’s office was literally in the White House.
And it should be noted that while Trump administration officials may have prevented Birx from doing national TV interviews following her August appearance on CNN, she did spend the fall traveling to states to consult with them about how best to handle the coronavirus response.
At no point, however, did Birx acknowledge the obvious truth: that she was working for a president who was unwilling to prioritize American lives over his hope of winning another term. And that, tragically, is what she will be best remembered for.
Microsoft has introduced a new Application Bounty Program that invites researchers to identify vulnerabilities in specific Microsoft apps and share them with Microsoft. Qualified submissions are eligible for bounty rewards from $500 to $30,000 USD.
The first, and at the moment only app, in this new program is Microsoft Teams desktop client. It’s not very clear but I would assume this is the Windows desktop electron client, I’d expect x86/x64 and ARM. More Microsoft apps will be added to this new app bounty program in the future.
There is an existing program that covers the Microsoft Teams Service, the Microsoft Online Services Bounty Program. This covers all of Office 365 and Microsoft Accounts.
It’s nice to see Microsoft expand the scope of these bounty programs to apps. For more information check out the Microsoft blog post, or contact bounty@microsoft.com
For the last seven weeks, workers at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, have been voting by mail on whether to unionize. Their ballots are due on Monday, March 29th, and counting will begin the next day. If the union wins, the warehouse employees would become the first members of Amazon’s US workforce to unionize, a momentous event at a company that has long aggressively resisted labor organizing, and one that could be a first step toward improving conditions at the country’s second-largest employer. Here is what’s happened so far and what might happen next.
Who’s voting?
The vote is taking place at an Amazon warehouse called BHM1 in Bessemer, Alabama, outside Birmingham. It opened recently, beginning operations last March, but...
From Cisco and Samsung to Ericsson and Huawei, here’s the ten market leaders who made Gartner’s 2020 Magic Quadrant for 5G Network Infrastructure for Communication Service Providers.
Voters in Atlanta protest new voting bills on March 3. | Megan Varner/Getty Images
The very worst provisions enable partisan Republicans to seize control of election boards in Democratic counties.
Georgia’s new voting law, signed by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp on Thursday night, is a small-d democrat’s nightmare.
The bill, known as SB 202, gives state-level officials the authority to usurp the powers of county election boards — allowing the Republican-dominated state government to potentially disqualify votersin Democratic-leaning areas. It criminalizes the provision of food and water to voters waiting in line, in a state where lines are notoriously long in heavily nonwhite precincts. It requires ID for absentee ballots and limits the placement of ballot drop boxes.
Coming on the heels of President Trump’s potentially illegal campaign to pressure Georgia’s election officials into flipping the state into his column, the intent of the bill is clear: to wrest a state that’s increasingly trending blue back toward Republicans.
“This is anti-democratic,” says Cas Mudde, a political scientist at the University of Georgia. “It literally tries to undermine the one-person, one-vote principle that is at the core of democracy.”
SB 202 will almost certainly make elections less fair, giving the GOP a structural advantage well outsize to its actual strength among Georgia voters. It doesn’t signal the end of democracy in Georgia, but it is the latest significant step in the Republican Party’s move toward becoming an anti-democratic political faction.
The Georgia law is part of a broader wave of GOP efforts, at the state and national level, to undermine the fairness of American elections. What happened in Georgia reveals the true face of the modern Republican Party: a far-right institution that threatens American democracy even after Trump’s defeat.
The most important provisions in the Georgia bill are about who gets to run elections
The most significant provisions in SB 202 don’t create new election rules, exactly. Instead, they change who gets to determine how those rules are implemented — handing significant power to the Republicans who control the state legislature, called the General Assembly.
“One of the worst aspects of the bill is the part making election administration even more partisan,” says Rick Hasen, an election law expert at UC Irvine. “That’s a move in exactly the wrong direction.”
Under current law, key issues in election management — including decisions on disqualifying ballots and voter eligibility — are made by county boards of election. The new law allows the State Board of Elections to determine that these county boards are performing poorly, replacing the entire board with an administrator chosen at the state level.
At the same time, the bill enhances the General Assembly’s control over the state board.
It removes Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who famously stood up to Trump’s attempts to overturn the election results in Georgia, from his role as both chair and voting member of the board. The new chair would be appointed by the legislature, which already appoints two members of the five-person board — meaning that a full majority of the board will now be appointed by the Republican-dominated body.
Getty Images
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
To simplify: The state board, which now will be fully controlled by the Republican legislative majority, is unilaterally empowered to take over (among other things) the process of disqualifying ballots across the state. Given that Georgia Republicans have helped promote false allegations of voter fraud, it’s easy to see why handing them so much power over local election authorities is so worrying.
The greatest area of concern here for Democrats is Fulton County, home to Atlanta and a disproportionate number of Black voters. Republicans have baselessly alleged that this Democratic bastion was a major site of fraud, citing (among other things) a purported video of ballot-stuffing in the county. Though official investigations, court cases, and independent fact-checks found no evidence of such fraud — in the video or otherwise — the myth that it happened persists.
The new bill would allow Republicans to seize control of how elections are administered in Fulton County and other heavily Democratic areas, disqualifying voters and ballots as they see fit.
“I think the provision for state takeover of local election processes is a natural choice for a party whose election policy is driven by Trump’s ‘big lie,’” Josh McLaurin, a Democratic representative in the Georgia House of Representatives, tells me, referring to Trump’s baseless claims that the election was stolen. “By centralizing control over those processes, Republicans make their own manipulation easier while also removing a principal barrier to their lies.”
The Georgia bill’s other key provisions, explained
While the changes to election administration are the most troubling provisions in SB 202, they are far from the only significant changes to the state’s laws.
One attention-grabbing section prohibits “the giving of any money or gifts, including, but not limited to, food and drink, to an elector...within 25 feet of any voter standing in line to vote at any polling place.” In effect, this means that it is now illegal in Georgia to provide food and water to people waiting in line to vote.
Observers were quick to note that in 2020, many voters had to wait in hours-long lines to vote, especially in heavily Black areas. This is a real and long-running problem: One study of the 2018 elections found that, nationwide, voters in low-income and minority communities had to wait in longer lines than voters in wealthier and whiter areas. The longest lines in the country, according the study, were in Fulton County.
This is a problem of the Georgia GOP’s making. As Georgia’s population has grown in the past few years, particularly in Democratic-leaning areas, the Republicans who control state elections have cut the number of polling places statewide by 10 percent. And now it’s illegal for people to bring food and water to help the voters who wait in these artificially long lines.
Other notable provisions in the bill include:
Allowing any individual Georgian citizen to file an unlimited number of challenges to the eligibility of particular voters, effectively increasing the number of opportunities for newly centralized election authorities to exercise their powers to disqualify Democrats
Imposing new limitations on ballot drop boxes that effectively ban their widespread deployment outside of a governor-declared emergency
Applies voter ID laws to mail-in ballots by requiring voters to submit their driver’s license or state ID number as part of their vote-by-mail application. If they have neither number, they need to submit a photocopy or electronic image of an acceptable form of identification (e.g., a passport).
Creating a fraud hotline that allows people to anonymously complain about allegedly fraudulent behavior at the polls
When you put all of that together, it’s fairly clear what this bill is designed to do: create barriers to voting that are most likely to affect voters who don’t have the time and resources to navigate them. In Georgia, as in most places, that’s low-income and minority voters — two disproportionately Democratic groups.
“It’s Jim Crow in a suit and tie,” writes Stacey Abrams, a voting rights advocate and the 2018 Democratic candidate for governor in Georgia. “Cutting off access, adding restrictions, encouraging more ‘show me your papers’ actions to challenge a citizen’s right to vote [is] facially neutral but racially targeted.”
SB 202 is part of a nationwide GOP effort to undermine democracy
It would be one thing if the Georgia bill were a standalone: an aberration that reflects the agenda of one particularly brazen state Republican Party. But it’s not: Across the country, Republican statehouses are working to stack the electoral deck in their favor.
The Brennan Center, a nonpartisan institute focused on voting rights, has been tracking the spread of new voting restrictions across the country. As of February 19, the last time its data was updated, there were more than 250 bills under consideration in statehouses that would limit access to the ballot box. That’s “over seven times the number of restrictive bills as compared to roughly this time last year,” according to Brennan’s calculations.
Not all of these bills are equally damaging. Historically, both parties benefit from mail-in voting in non-pandemic conditions; restricting it, while clearly undemocratic, might not help Republicans too much in the 2022 midterms. The evidence on the impact of voter ID laws on turnout is somewhat mixed.
But the parts of the Georgia bill mostly likely to affect election outcomes — the partisan power grab over actual electoral administration — are far from unique.
“Nationwide, Republican lawmakers in at least eight states controlled by the party are angling to pry power over elections from secretaries of state, governors and nonpartisan election boards,” the New York Times’s Nick Corasaniti reports. A few of his examples:
In Arizona, Republicans are pushing for control over the rules of the state’s elections. In Iowa, the G.O.P. has installed harsh new criminal penalties for county election officials who enact emergency voting rules. In Tennessee, a Republican legislator is trying to remove a sitting judge who ruled against the party in an election case.
This surge in voting restrictions is clearly motivated by Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 elections. It’s now an article of faith among Trump supporters, who make up a majority of the GOP primary electorate, that the election was stolen from him. Republican legislators at the state level are pushing legislation that’s designed both to appeal to these voters and to cement their own power.
But at the same time, the Republican use of state-level power to give themselves a leg up long predates Trump.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Stacey Abrams.
Take the last round of redistricting, after the 2010 census. That year’s midterm election swept Republicans to power in statehouses across the country; the party’s legislators used the conjunction of these victories and federally mandated redistricting to embark on a systematic campaign of extreme gerrymandering. Their new lines, with few parallels in Democratic-controlled states, gave it a profoundly unfair leg up in state and House elections in swing states like Wisconsin and North Carolina.
There is a reason that a 2019 survey of political scientists found that the GOP’s closest peers abroad are not normal center-right parties, like Canada’s CPC or Germany’s CDU, but rather extreme anti-democratic parties like Turkey’s AKP or Poland’s PiS. The GOP is a radical right faction that increasingly sees its opposition as fundamentally illegitimate, and is willing to abuse its political power to lock them out.
This kind of democratic backsliding, where an established political party works to degrade the fairness and quality of the electoral system, is not unique internationally. But the GOP’s strategy for implementing it is particularly American.
The party takes advantage of our federalized electoral system to tilt elections at the local level, creating pockets of electoral unfairness in an otherwise free system, giving them a significant leg up. It simultaneously uses the many veto points available to them at the national level — including the filibuster and control over the Supreme Court — to prevent Democrats from doing anything about it when they do manage to overcome these barriers.
The obvious parallel in American history, as people like Abrams note, is Jim Crow — voting laws in Southern states that effectively blocked Black voters from casting ballots. To be clear, the current Georgia system is nowhere near as restrictive as the way things worked in the pre-civil rights South.
But scholars who study that period still think the current bill should trouble anyone committed to democracy, in part because (unlike Jim Crow) it represents a coherent national Republican approach to voting issues rather than the interests of one sectional faction.
“What worries me most in this voter suppression package is the ability of the state to overwhelm county election boards in counting/certification of the count,” says Rob Mickey, a political scientist and the author of Paths Out of Dixie (a study of authoritarianism in the Jim Crow South). “This in GA, and nationally, is the scariest part of the nexus between state-level Republicans’ long-standing (since ~2000) attack on voting around the county and the spasm of response to the 2020 presidential election.”
Correction, March 26: An earlier version of this article misstated the manner in which SB202 applies Georgia’s voter ID law to mail-in ballot applications. Photographic proof of ID is only necessary as part of the application if the voter lacks a state ID number or driver’s license ID number, not in all cases.
Facebook is planning to start its return to in-person work in May, after over a year of working remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Bloomberg. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced remote work plans near the start of the pandemic that promised around half of his employees could work remotely in the next five to 10 years, but until then, in-person work, at least in a limited capacity, is in the company’s immediate future.
Facebook is reopening its offices in the Bay Area — including its Menlo Park headquarters — but limiting capacity at 10 percent to start. The company expects its largest offices to not reach 50 percent capacity until September, Bloomberg writes. In addition to limiting how many people are working in...
Facebook’s new oversight board isn’t looking at the platform’s core design. | Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Facebook’s oversight board is meant to take on the platform’s toughest content decisions. Should that include its algorithms?
All eyes are on Facebook’s oversight board, which is expected to decide in the next few weeks if former President Donald Trump will be allowed back on Facebook. But some critics — and at least one member — of the independent decision-making group say the board has more important responsibilities than individual content moderation decisions like banning Trump. They want it to have oversight over Facebook’s core design and algorithms.
This idea of externally regulating the algorithms that determine almost everything you see on Facebook is catching on outside of the oversight board, too. At Thursday’s hearing on misinformation and social media, several members of Congress took aim at the company’s engagement algorithms, saying they spread misinformation in order to maximize profits. Some lawmakers are currently renewing efforts to amend Section 230 — the law that largely shields social media networks from liability for the content that users post to their platforms — so that these companies could be held responsible when their algorithms amplify certain types of dangerous content. At least one member of Congress is suggesting that social media companies might need a special regulatory agency.
All of this plays into a growing debate over who should regulate content on Facebook — and how it should be done.
Right now, the oversight board’s scope is limited
Facebook’s new oversight board — which can overrule even CEO Mark Zuckerberg on certain decisions and is meant to function like a Supreme Court for social media content moderation — has a fairly narrow scope of responsibilities. It’s currently tasked with reviewing users’ appeals if they object to a decision Facebook made to take down their posts for violating its rules. And only the board’s decisions on individual posts or questions that are directly referred to it by Facebook are actually binding.
When it comes to Facebook’s fundamental design and the content it prioritizes and promotes to users, all the board can do right now is make recommendations. Some say that’s a problem.
“The jurisdiction that Facebook has currently given it is way too narrow,” Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School who analyzes social media content moderation policies, told Recode. “If it’s going to have any meaningful impact at all and actually do any good, [the oversight board] needs to have a much broader remit and be able to look at the design of the platform and a bunch of those systems behind what leads to the individual pieces of content in question.”
Facebook designs its algorithms to be so powerful that they decide what shows up when you search for a given topic, what groups you’re recommended to join, and what appears at the top of your News Feed. To keep you on its platforms as long as possible, Facebook uses its algorithms to serve up content that will encourage you to scroll, click, comment, and share on its platforms — all while encountering the ads that fuel its revenue (Facebook has objected to this characterization).
But these recommendation systems have long been criticized for exacerbating the spread of misinformation and fueling political polarization, racism, and extremist violence. This month, a man said he was able to become an FBI informant regarding a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer because Facebook’s algorithms recommended he join the group where it was being facilitated. While Facebook has taken some steps to adjust its algorithms — after the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, the company said it would permanently stop recommending political groups — many think the company hasn’t taken aggressive enough action.
That’s what’s prompting calls for external regulation of the company’s algorithms — whether from the oversight board or from lawmakers.
Can the oversight board take on Facebook’s algorithms?
“The biggest disappointment of the board ... is how narrow its jurisdictions are, right? Like, we were promised the Supreme Court, and we’ve been given a piddly little traffic court,” said Douek, while noting that Facebook has signaled the board’s jurisdiction could broaden over time. “Facebook is strongly going to resist letting the board have the kind of jurisdiction that we’re talking about because it goes to their core business interests, right? What is prioritized in the News Feed is the way that they get engagement and therefore the way that they make money.”
Some members of the board have also started to suggest a similar interest in the company’s algorithms. Recently, Alan Rusbridger, a journalist and member of the oversight board, told a House of Lords committee in the United Kingdom that he expected that he and fellow board members are likely to eventually ask “to see the algorithm — I feel sure — whatever that means.”
“People say to me, ‘Oh, you’re on that board, but it’s well known that the algorithms reward emotional content that polarizes communities because that makes it more addictive,’” he told the committee. “Well I don’t know if that’s true or not, and I think as a board we’re going to have to get to grips with that. Even if that takes many sessions with coders speaking very slowly so that we can understand what they’re saying, our responsibility will be to understand what these machines are — the machines that are going in — rather than the machines that are moderating, what their metrics are.”
In an interview with Recode, oversight board member John Samples, of the libertarian Cato Institute, told Recode that the board, which launched only late last year, is just getting started but that it is “aware” of algorithms as an issue. He said that the board could comment on algorithms in its non-binding recommendations.
Julie Owono, also an oversight board member and executive director of the organization Internet Sans Frontières, pointed to a recent case the board considered regarding an automated flagging system that wrongly removed a post in support of breast cancer awareness for violating Facebook’s rules about nudity. “We’ve proved in the decision that we’ve made that we’re completely aware of the problems that exist with AI, and algorithms, and automated content decisions,” she told Recode.
A Facebook spokesperson told Recode the company is not planning to refer any cases regarding recommendation or engagement algorithms to the board, and that content-ranking algorithms are not currently in the scope of the board’s appeal process. Still, the spokesperson noted that the board’s bylaws allow its scope to expand over time.
“I’d also point out that currently, as Facebook adopts the board’s policy recommendations, the board is impacting the company’s operations,” a spokesperson for the oversight board added. One example: In the recent case involving a breast cancer awareness post, Facebook says it changed the language of its community guidelines, as well as improving its machine learning-based flagging systems.
But there are key questions related to algorithms that the board ought to be able to consider, said Katy Glenn Bass, a research director at the Knight First Amendment Institute. The oversight board, she told Recode, should have a “broader mandate” to learn about how Facebook’s algorithms decide what goes viral and what is prioritized in the News Feed, and should be able to study how well Facebook’s attempts to stop the spread of extremism and misinformation are actually working.
Recently, Zuckerberg promised to reduce “politics” in users’ feeds. The company has also instituted a fact-checking program and has tried to discourage people from sharing flagged misinformation with alerts. Following the 2020 election, Facebook tinkered with its News Feed to prioritize mainstream news, a temporary change it eventually rolled back.
“[The board] should have the power to ask Facebook those questions,” Bass told Recode in an email, “and to ask Facebook to let independent experts (like computer scientists) do research on the platform to answer those questions.” Bass, along with other leaders at the Knight First Amendment Institute, has recommended that the oversight board, before ruling on the Trump decision, analyze how Facebook’s “design decisions” contributed to the events at the Capitol on January 6.
Some critics have already begun to say that the oversight board isn’t sufficient for regulating Facebook’s algorithms, and they want the government to institute reform. Better protection for data privacy and digital rights — and legal incentives to curb the platform’s most odious and dangerous content — could force Facebook to change its systems, said Safiya Umoja Noble, a professor at UCLA and member of the Real Facebook Oversight Board, a group of activists and scholars that have raised concerns about the oversight board.
“The issues are the result of almost two decades of disparate and inconsistent human and software-driven content moderation, coupled with machine learning trained on consumer engagements with all kinds of harmful propaganda,” she told Recode. “[I]f Facebook were legally accountable for damages to the public, and to individuals, from the circulation of harmful and discriminatory advertising, or its algorithmic organization and mobilization of violent, hate-based groups, it would have to reimagine its product.”
Some lawmakers also think Congress should take a more aggressive role in Facebook’s algorithms. On Wednesday, Reps. Tom Malinowski and Anna Eshoo reintroduced the Protecting Americans from Dangerous Algorithms Act, which would take away platforms’ legal liability in cases where their algorithms amplified content that interfere with civil rights or involve international terrorism.
When asked about the oversight board, Rep. Eshoo told Recode: “If you ask me do I have confidence in this, and that someone on some committee said that they’re concerned about algorithms? I mean, I welcome that. But do I have confidence in it? I don’t.”
Madihha Ahussain, special counsel for anti-Muslim bigotry for Muslim Advocates — a civil rights organization that has sounded the alarm about anti-Muslim content on Facebook’s platform — told Recode that while the “jury is still out” on the oversight board’s legitimacy, she’s concerned it’s acting as “little more than a PR stunt” for the company and says the government should “step in.”
“Facebook’s algorithms drive people to hate groups and hateful content,” she told Recode. “Facebook needs to stop caving to political and financial pressures and ensure that their algorithms stop the spread of dangerous, hateful content — regardless of ideology.”
Beyond Facebook, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has floated another way to change how social media algorithms work: giving users more control. Before the Thursday House hearing on misinformation and disinformation, Dorsey pointed to efforts from Twitter to let people choose what their algorithms prioritize (right now, Twitter users can choose to see Tweets reverse-chronologically or based on engagement), as well as a nascent, decentralized research effort called Bluesky, which Dorsey says is working on building “open” recommendation algorithms to provide greater user choice.
While it’s clear there’s growing enthusiasm to change how social media algorithms work and who can influence that, it’s not yet clear what those changes will involve, or whether those changes will ultimately be up to users’ individual decisions, government regulation, or the social networks themselves. Regardless, providing oversight to social media algorithms on the scale of Facebook’s is still uncharted territory.
“The law’s still really, really new at this, so it’s not like we have a good model of how to do it anywhere yet,” says Douek, of Harvard Law. “So in some sense, it’s a problem for the oversight board. And in some sense, it’s a bigger problem for sort of legal systems and the law more generally as we enter the algorithmic age.”
Open Sourced is made possible by Omidyar Network. All Open Sourced content is editorially independent and produced by our journalists.
Chicago police secure the area around the residence of a murder suspect in 2005. | Scott Olson/Getty Images
Murders surged in 2020. Here’s what we know.
The past year was a nightmare in many ways for the US, between Covid-19 deaths and the collapsing economy. But it’s now clear that 2020 was bad in yet another way: Over the year, America’s murder rate surged dramatically.
“It is the largest year-to-year increase we’ve seen in a very long time,” Princeton sociologist Patrick Sharkey told me.
The surge is from a relatively low baseline of murders, after a big drop in crime and violence America since 1990, known as the “Great Crime Decline.” But that’s one reason experts are concerned: This breaks a period of relative peace in the US.
Here’s what you need to know about the surge, broken down into three key facts.
1) There really was a spike in murders in 2020.
Data from the FBI, the Council on Criminal Justice, and crime analyst Jeff Asher shows that the murder rate surged by upward of 25 percent in 2020. Violent crime in general rose as well, though not as much as murders, with aggravated assaults and shootings up. But nonviolent crimes, such as those involving drugs or theft, fell — leading to an overall decrease of crime even as violent crime and murders rose.
The murder increase essentially set the US back decades on crime reduction efforts, putting total murders back at the levels of the 1990s.
The increase was truly nationwide, with the FBI data finding surges in places rural and urban, across every region of the country.
We don’t know yet if this increase will become a long-term shift in violent crime. Asher has found that murders were up in the first three months of 2021, but it’s too early to draw hard conclusions about the year or the future.
2) We still don’t know why the murder rate spiked.
Last year was extremely weird in a lot of ways, in large part due to Covid-19. It also, obviously, just happened. Both of those factors make it really hard for experts to isolate what led to a murder spike. So far there’s no consensus.
Still, there are theories.
Covid-19 could have led to more violence, perhaps by leading to the shutdown of social programs that could have prevented murders, or by eliminating the job or education opportunities that keep young people out of trouble.
The widespread protests around policing, following the death of George Floyd, could have played a role as well, leading cops to pull back from proactive policing they worry could get them in trouble, or fueling distrust in law enforcement and making it harder for them to stop violent criminals.
Or it could be none of the above. After such a weird year, and with the data so limited, there are still a lot of open questions to answer before we know for sure.
3) There are proven solutions to this problem.
The good news: Even without knowing why this is happening, we have evidence-based solutions to murders and violence.
Police could play a role as well, with promising strategies like “focused deterrence” that combine social services and the threat of punishment. But experts argue these strategies can only work if cops work to regain public trust — with real accountability efforts and reforms in how officers are deployed.
If done correctly, this would benefit America’s most vulnerable: low-income communities of color disproportionately hurt by gun violence. “Those are communities that have never received basic investments,” Sharkey said. “The consequences of that are clear.”
New Cisco networking, security, cloud and collaboration solutions help businesses reimagine how they work while keeping employees safe, connected and productive.
Solutions address fears over the return to the office, the demand for a safe workplace, and IT tools that connect hybrid workforces in new ways.
Builds on Cisco’s continued commitment to drive an inclusive recovery, including addressing the need for a secure and collaborative work environment that is accessible from anywhere.
SAN JOSE, CA – March25,2021 – From the beginning of the pandemic and throughout the recovery journey, Cisco has remained committed to helping people and communities around the world drive an inclusive recovery. As part of the ongoing effort, today, Cisco announced the availability of purpose-built technology and solutions that help companies reimagine how they work – and keep employees safe.
Whether an organization’s goal is to bring people back into the office, or to evolve support for a remote or hybrid workforce, Cisco’s new innovations – and the breadth of Cisco’s networking, security, cloud and collaboration portfolio – support multiple options to create a Trusted Workplace that helps enable a Safe-Return-to-Office and enables a Secure Remote Workforce: from automating, securing, and scaling network connectivity, to social density and proximity insights for employee health and safety, to securely bringing people together to work however and wherever they want through Webex and collaboration devices that leverage AI, sensors and alerts.
For a tour of these Cisco technologies, watch this video.
Recent research shows:
A real fear of returning to the office, with 95% of respondents are uncomfortable about returning to the office given the current health crisis1
The desire for more advanced tools, with 96% of respondents wanting intelligent technology to improve work environments2
More prioritization of the employee experience, with 86% of respondents stating that empowering a distributed workforce with seamless access to applications and high-quality collaborative experiences is important or very important – this jumps to 95% for companies with 1000+ employees3
In response, organizations are looking to transform their workplace for a hybrid workforce and create a more inclusive future of work for all. This transformation requires organizations to prioritize adaptable, engaging, and trusted work experiences for their employees, customers, communities, and ecosystems. Business agility and resilience are core to this transformation, with research revealing 90% of CIOs and IT decision makers saying that, in the future, business agility and resilience will be inextricably linked 4. This exemplifies the need for tools that connect, secure, and automate technologies and applications in order to transform at scale and bring the workforce and workplaces together – regardless of where employees work.
Cisco’s portfolio and deep expertise in helping customers navigate challenging technology transformations, provide the tools to:
Empower a workforce to securely work from anywhere, on any device, anytime.
Enable a safe return-to-office by transforming offices and facilities optimized for productivity into trusted workplaces connected for health and wellness.
Break down the barriers of different geographies, personality types (such as introverts and extroverts), language preferences, and tools to fully realize communication experiences where everyone is included.
“As we think about the return to office, Cisco is helping our customers find solutions that work best for their teams. Whether they are in the office, at home, or on the road, every employee deserves the best experience,” said Todd Nightingale, SVP and GM, Enterprise Networking and Cloud at Cisco. “We are committed to delivering solutions with the simplicity, agility, and resiliency businesses require to meet today’s needs and thrive in the face of tomorrow’s challenges.”
Highlights include:
Trusted Workplace and a Safe Return to Office
Cisco Webex collaboration devices enable a safe return to office with capabilities like wayfinding, digital signage, touchless calls and meeting joins, room capacity alerts, environmental sensors, and more. Read more detail in related blog and in this video.
DNA SpacesBack to Business suite of applications provides location analytics and insight into user behavior to support customers’ safe return to office strategies. With features including proximity reporting, and real-time and historical density and traffic monitoring, Cisco Catalyst and Meraki wireless customers can deploy DNA Spaces in less than 30 minutes for immediate business impact. Since their release, DNA Spaces Back to Business applications have been deployed in over 50,000 business locations.
Cisco Meraki cloud-first comprehensive platform includes MV smart cameras for reliable security monitoring to keep people, workplaces, critical infrastructure, and sensitive inventory secure. Using Meraki MV and Cisco DNA Spaces, building managers can see real-time footfall and presence, along with actionable analytics for safer, more productive spaces. New Meraki MT sensors provide more insight with real-time environmental monitoring, from temperature to humidity and leaks, to opened/closed doors and cabinets. Read more detail in related blog.
Cisco Industrial Asset Vision helps businesses simplify asset and facility monitoring with IoT sensors. To ensure workers are safe, remote monitoring provides real-time data from both IT and industrial environments and enables businesses to know workers’ locations and minimize contact. In addition, actionable data from office space and assets help to better manage network equipment performance and maintenance.
Workplace Zero Trust for Industrial Networks brings IT and Operational Technology (OT) security to the next level for organizations to protect operations while enabling more remote accesses and cloud applications in their industrial environments. It leverages Cisco Cyber Vision and Cisco ISE/DNA Center to create trusted production zones and ensure security policies are not disrupting industrial processes, ultimately providing consistent, identity-based, secure access to the network for users and devices. Read more detail in related blog.
Secure Remote Workforce Solutions
Cisco Secure Remote Worker is a simple, scalable, integrated security solution that delivers the strength and breadth of the Cisco platform approach to protect a remote workforce. Verify the identity of all users before granting access to corporate applications with Cisco Secure Access by Duo; enable secure access to the enterprise network for any user, from any device, at any time, in any location with Cisco AnyConnect Mobility Client (VPN); and coordinate defense against threats with Cisco Umbrella for internet security, Cisco Secure Email for email protection and Secure Endpoint for endpoint security. This solution is part of Cisco’s cloud-native and integrated platform, SecureX.
Cisco Managed Remote Access from Cisco Customer Experience (CX) provides businesses with the expertise needed to ensure long-term remote or hybrid workforces are secure. With Cisco Managed Remote Access, businesses can leverage Cisco CX experts to not only build and scale up VPNs across their entire ecosystem, but leverage management and oversight services handled entirely by Cisco.
Seamless Collaboration for Secure Remote Work solutions enable a hybrid workforce and the flex worker with seamless calling, meeting and messaging. Organizations can empower their teams to securely communicate, ideate and iterate – working in sync with the apps they love. The latest advancements to Webex create more personalized experiences with customized layouts, advanced calling features and Webex Assistant intelligence for real-time translation, automated note taking, action items and more. Read more detail in related blog.
“Organizations are facing the need to transform their workforce and workplace amid unprecedented change, while maintaining productivity and avoiding complications. Those who didn’t already have a plan to digitally transform have moved rapidly toward prioritizing one, and those that did have accelerated those plans. The need for a workforce that’s protected and connected from anywhere, on any device requires businesses to be more agile and prioritize digitization, automation, security, and collaboration in order to create trusted work experiences for employees and customers,” said Maribel Lopez, Founder and Principal Analyst at Lopez Research.
Join Cisco Live! next week to learn about the latest innovations from Cisco in shaping the future of work.
1 Cisco Global Workforce Survey, October 2020; 2 Cisco Global Workforce Survey, October 2020; 3 Accelerating Digital Agility, March 2020; 4 Accelerating Digital Agility, March 2020
In many places, you can call up a neighbor or local pizza parlor just by dialing seven numbers, as long as you have the same area code — but that ability will soon be going away, in order to make the National Suicide Prevention and Mental Health Crisis Lifeline easier to reach. If you live in one of the areas where the change is taking place, you’ll soon have to dial 10 numbers whether you’re making a local call or not.
Each cellular carrier has a support page explaining the change (we’ll link to all of them below, and a list of the area codes will be included at the end of the post), but the basic gist is that, starting October 24, 2021, anyone trying to call a local number using only seven digits will be met with a recording telling...
DALLAS, TX – – Mitel®, a global leader in business communications, announced today the appointment of Arvind Raman as Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). Raman will lead all aspects of the company’s information security strategy, architecture, operations and governance. He will also be responsible for continuing to drive industry best practices for security compliance to support and enhance Mitel’s wider business objectives and the needs of its customers and partners.
Raman joins Mitel with more than two decades of experience within the financial services, retail and product development industries. Most recently, Raman served as Global Head of Security and Risk Advisory Services at Scotia Bank where he oversaw the development and implementation of a new cybersecurity strategy and framework, and integrated elements of NIST and COBIT into enterprise risk management.
“The past year has demonstrated just how unpredictable the world can be and the impact that external factors can have on businesses, making risk management more critical and relevant than ever,” said Jamshid Rezaei, Chief Information Officer for Mitel. “Arvind’s extensive experience working with global organizations to architect advanced security and compliance models will deepen Mitel’s continued commitment to risk management and cybersecurity best practices and enable us to further strengthen the relationships we have with our partners and customers.”
“It’s an exciting time for the communications and collaboration industry as organizations continue to adapt to a ‘work from anywhere’ environment and accelerate their adoption of cloud technologies,” said Arvind Raman, CISO at Mitel. “Mitel has established itself as a long-time leader in digital transformation. Together with the team, I am excited to continue delivering and supporting best-in-class communications solutions that our customers can trust to not only help them stay connected but that provide peace of mind when it comes to ensuring security and mitigating risk.”
Additional Facts
Mitel is a leading provider of cloud communications, enabling more than 5 million users, including 1.5 million UCaaS customers (Source: Synergy Research Group).
About Mitel A global market leader in business communications powering more than two billion business connections, Mitel helps businesses and service providers connect, collaborate and provide innovative services to their customers. Our innovation and communications experts serve more than 70 million business users in more than 100 countries. For more information, go to www.mitel.com.
By Zeus Kerravala The co-branded offering can help address IT-related hybrid work challenges, like application performance and home network visibility.
“It took ten years for enterprise spending on cloud services to catch up with enterprise spending on data center hardware and software, then in 2020 the market for cloud services again soared, while spending on owned data centers dropped by 6 percent,” said Synergy Research Group Chief Analyst John Dinsdale.
When AWS CEO Andy Jassy announced in an email to employees yesterday that Tableau CEO Adam Selipsky was returning to run AWS, it was probably not the choice most considered. But to the industry watchers we spoke to over the last couple of days, it was a move that made absolute sense once you thought about it.
Gartner analyst Ed Anderson says that the cultural fit was probably too good for Jassy to pass up. Selipsky spent 11 years helping build the division. It was someone he knew well and had worked side by side with for over a decade. He could slide into the new role and be trusted to continue building the lucrative division.
Anderson says that even though the size and scope of AWS has changed dramatically since Selipsky left in 2016 when the company closed the year on a $16 billion run rate, he says that the organization’s cultural dynamics haven’t changed all that much.
“Success in this role requires a deep understanding of the Amazon/AWS culture in addition to a vision for AWS’s future growth. Adam already knows the AWS culture from his previous time at AWS. Yes, AWS was a smaller business when he left, but the fundamental structure and strategy was in place and the culture hasn’t notably evolved since then,” Anderson told me.
Matt McIlwain, managing director at Madrona Venture Group, says the experience Selipsky had after he left AWS will prove invaluable when he returns.
“Adam transformed Tableau from a desktop, licensed software company to a cloud, subscription software company that thrived. As the leader of AWS, Adam is returning to a culture he helped grow as the sales and marketing leader that brought AWS to prominence and broke through from startup customers to become the leading enterprise solution for public cloud,” he said.
Holger Mueller, an analyst with Constellation Research, says that Selipsky’s business experience gave him the edge over other candidates. “His business acumen won out over [internal candidates] Matt Garmin and Peter DeSantis. Insight on how Salesforce works may be helpful and valued as well,” Mueller pointed out.
As for leaving Tableau and with it Salesforce, the company that purchased it for $15.7 billion in 2019, Brent Leary, founder and principal analyst at CRM Essentials, believes that it was only a matter of time before some of these acquired company CEOs left to do other things. In fact, he’s surprised it didn’t happen sooner.
“Given Salesforce’s growing stable of top notch CEOs accumulated by way of a slew of high-profile acquisitions, you really can’t expect them all to stay forever, and given Adam Selipsky’s tenure at AWS before becoming Tableau’s CEO, this move makes a whole lot of sense. Amazon brings back one of their own, and he is also a wildly successful CEO in his own right,” Leary said.
While the consensus is that Selipsky is a good choice, he is going to have awfully big shoes to fill. The fact is that division is continuing to grow like a large company currently on a run rate of over $50 billion. With a track record like that to follow, and Jassy still close at hand, Selipsky has to simply continue letting the unit do its thing while putting his own unique stamp on it.
Any kind of change is disconcerting though, and it will be up to him to put customers and employees at ease and plow ahead into the future. Same mission. New boss.
RingCentral has acquired cloud encryption start up Kindite for an undisclosed sum.
Tel Aviv-based Kindite was founded in 2018 and specialises in cryptographic technologies that mitigate and reduce security and privacy risks to applications in the cloud. Its security capabilities will be integrated into RingCentral’s platform.
RingCentral’s Chief Information Security Officer, Heather Hinton, stated: “Security and reliability are paramount in enabling employees to work from anywhere.
“With this team’s leading-edge security technology, we will accelerate our ability to deliver end-to-end encryption and continue to enhance our commitment to deliver the highest level of security capabilities for our global communications platform, benefiting customers everywhere.”
Kindite’s platform ncludes a unique set of cryptographic key orchestration technologies which deliver enhanced, security, privacy and compliance, enabling cloud applications to process encrypted data without decryption.
Kindite CEO and co-founder, Maor Cohen, added: “We established Kindite to bring the very latest technological capabilities to address security and privacy in the cloud.
“It’s fantastic we can bring these security capabilities to customers around the world while enhancing the RingCentral platform with the next generation of security technologies.”
Pistols for sale at Target Masters, an indoor shooting center, in Garland, Texas on March 3. | Cooper Neill for The Washington Post via Getty Images
In the developed world, these levels of gun violence are a uniquely American problem. Here’s why.
After a mass shooting in Boulder, Colorado, on Monday, Americans are once again confronting the country’s unique relationship with guns.
America is certainly an exceptional country when it comes to firearms. It’s one of the few countries in which the right to bear arms is constitutionally protected. But the relationship is unique in another crucial way: Among developed nations, the US is far and away the most homicidal — in large part due to the easy access many Americans have to firearms.
These maps and charts show what that violence looks like compared with the rest of the world, why it happens, and why it’s such a tough problem to fix.
1) America has six times as many firearm homicides as Canada, and nearly 16 times as many as Germany
Javier Zarracina/Vox
This chart, compiled using 2012 United Nations data collected by Simon Rogers for the Guardian, shows that America far and away leads other developed countries when it comes to gun-related homicides. Why? Extensive reviews of the research, compiled by the Harvard School of Public Health’s Injury Control Research Center, suggest the answer is pretty simple: The US is an outlier on gun violence because it has way more guns than other developed nations.
Another way of looking at that: Americans make up less than 5 percent of the world’s population, yet they own roughly 45 percent of all the world’s privately held firearms, based on 2018 data from the Small Arms Survey.
3) There have been more than 2,500 mass shootings since Sandy Hook
In December 2012, a gunman walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and killed 20 children, six adults, and himself. Since then, there have been more than 2,500 mass shootings as of July 2020.
The number comes from the Gun Violence Archive, which hosts a database that has tracked mass shootings since 2013. But since some shootings go unreported, the database is likely missing some, as well as the details of some of the events.
The tracker uses a fairly broad definition of “mass shooting”: It includes not just shootings in which four or more people were murdered, but shootings in which four or more people were shot at all (excluding the shooter).
Even under this broad definition, it’s worth noting that mass shootings make up less than 2 percent portion of America’s firearm deaths, which totaled nearly 40,000 in 2017 alone.
4) On average, there is around one mass shooting for each day in America
Whenever a mass shooting occurs, supporters of gun rights often argue that it’s inappropriate to bring up political debates about gun control in the aftermath of a tragedy.
But if this argument is followed to its logical end, then it will just about never be the right time to discuss gun control, as Christopher Ingraham pointed out at the Washington Post in 2015. Under the broader definition of mass shootings, America has around one mass shooting a day. So if lawmakers are forced to wait for a time when there isn’t a mass shooting to talk gun control, they could find themselves waiting for a very long time.
Using data from a 2016 study in Injury Prevention and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Mother Jones put together the chart above that shows states with more guns tend to have far more gun deaths, including homicides and suicides. This has been found across the empirical research: “Within the United States, a wide array of empirical evidence indicates that more guns in a community leads to more homicide,” David Hemenway, the Harvard Injury Control Research Center’s director, wrote in Private Guns, Public Health.
6) It’s not just the US: Developed countries with more guns also have more gun deaths
Javier Zarracina/Vox
7) America is an outlier when it comes to gun deaths, but not overall crime
It would be one thing if the US happened to have more crime than other nations, but the existing data shows that not to be the case. America is only an outlier when it comes to homicides and, specifically, gun violence, based on 2000 data from Jeffrey Swanson at Duke University.
As Zack Beauchamp explained for Vox, a breakthrough analysis in the 1990s by UC Berkeley’s Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins found that the US does not, contrary to the old conventional wisdom, have more crime in general than other Western industrial nations. Instead, the US appears to have more lethal violence — and that’s driven in large part by the prevalence of guns.
“A series of specific comparisons of the death rates from property crime and assault in New York City and London show how enormous differences in death risk can be explained even while general patterns are similar,” Zimring and Hawkins wrote. “A preference for crimes of personal force and the willingness and ability to use guns in robbery make similar levels of property crime 54 times as deadly in New York City as in London.”
This is in many ways intuitive: People of every country get into arguments and fights with friends, family, and peers. But in the US, it’s much more likely that someone will get angry at an argument and be able to pull out a gun and kill someone.
8) States with tighter gun control laws have fewer gun-related deaths
When economist Richard Florida took a look at gun deaths and other social indicators in 2011, he found that higher populations, more stress, more immigrants, and more mental illness didn’t correlate with more gun deaths. But he did find one telling correlation: States with tighter gun control laws have fewer gun-related deaths. (Read more at Florida’s “The Geography of Gun Deaths.”)
This is backed by other research: A 2016 review of 130 studies in 10 countries, published in Epidemiologic Reviews,found that new legal restrictions on owning and purchasing guns tended to be followed by a drop in gun violence — a strong indicator that restricting access to guns can save lives.
9) Still, gun homicides (like all homicides) have declined over the past couple decades
The good news is that firearm homicides, like all homicides and crime, have declined over the past several decades.
There’s still a lot of debate among criminal justice experts about why this crime drop is occurring. Some of the most credible ideas include mass incarceration, more and better policing, and reduced lead exposure from gasoline. But one theory that researchers have widely debunked is the idea that more guns have deterred crime — in fact, the opposite may be true, based on research compiled by the Harvard School of Public Health’s Injury Control Center.
10) Most gun deaths are suicides
Although America’s political debate about guns tends to focus on grisly mass shootings and murders, a majority of gun-related deaths in the US are suicides. As Dylan Matthews explained for Vox, this is actually one of the most compelling reasons for reducing access to guns: There is a lot of research that shows greater access to guns dramatically increases the risk of suicide.
11) The states with the most guns report the most suicides
12) Guns allow people to kill themselves much more easily
Estelle Caswell/Vox
Perhaps the key reason access to guns so strongly contributes to suicides is that guns are much deadlier than alternatives like cutting and poison.
Jill Harkavy-Friedman, vice president of research for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, previously explained that this is why reducing access to guns can be so important to preventing suicides: Just stalling an attempt or making it less likely to result in death makes a huge difference.
“Time is really key to preventing suicide in a suicidal person,” Harkavy-Friedman said. “First, the crisis won’t last, so it will seem less dire and less hopeless with time. Second, it opens the opportunity for someone to help or for the suicidal person to reach out to someone to help. That’s why limiting access to lethal means is so powerful.”
She added, “[I]f we keep the method of suicide away from a person when they consider it, in that moment they will not switch to another method. It doesn’t mean they never will. But in that moment, their thinking is very inflexible and rigid. So it’s not like they say, ‘Oh, this isn’t going to work. I’m going to try something else.’ They generally can’t adjust their thinking, and they don’t switch methods.”
13) Policies that limit access to guns have decreased suicides
Estelle Caswell/Vox
When countries reduced access to guns, they saw a drop in the number of firearm suicides. The data above, taken from a 2010 study by Australian researchers, shows that suicides dropped dramatically after the Australian government set up a mandatory gun buyback program that reduced the number of firearms in the country by about one-fifth.
The Australian study found that buying back 3,500 guns per 100,000 people correlated with up to a 50 percent drop in firearm homicides and a 74 percent drop in gun suicides. As Dylan Matthews explained for Vox, the drop in homicides wasn’t statistically significant (in large part because murders in Australia were already so low). But the drop in suicides most definitely was — and the results are striking.
Australia is far from alone in these types of results. A study from Israeli researchers found that suicides among Israeli soldiers dropped by 40 percent when the military stopped letting soldiers take their guns home over the weekend. The change was most pronounced during the weekends.
This data and research have a clear message: States and countries can significantly reduce the number of suicides by restricting access to guns.
14) In states with more guns, more police officers are also killed on duty
Given that states with more guns tend to have more homicides, it isn’t too surprising that, as a 2015 study in the American Journal of Public Health found, states with more guns also have more cops die in the line of duty.
Researchers looked at federal data for firearm ownership and homicides of police officers across the US over 15 years. They found that states with more gun ownership had more cops killed in homicides: Every 10 percent increase in firearm ownership correlated with 10 additional officers killed in homicides over the 15-year study period.
The findings could help explain why US police officers appear to kill more people than cops in other developed countries. For US police officers, the higher rates of guns and gun violence — even against them — in America mean that they not only will encounter more guns and violence, but they can expect to encounter more guns and deadly violence, making them more likely to anticipate and perceive a threat and use deadly force as a result.
15) Support for gun ownership has sharply increased since the early 2000s
Over the past two decades, Americans have shifted from mostly supporting the concept of gun control to greater support for protecting “the right of Americans to own guns,” according to a 2017 Pew Research Center analysis of its surveys. This shift has happened even as major mass shootings, such as the attacks on Columbine High School and Sandy Hook Elementary School, have received more press attention.
16) Specific gun control policies are fairly popular
Although most Americans say they want to protect the right to own firearms, most also back many gun control proposals — such as stronger background checks, a database to track gun sales, and banning assault-style weapons, according to Pew Research Center surveys.
This type of contradiction isn’t exclusive to gun policy issues. For example, although most Americans in the past said they don’t like Obamacare, most of them also said they like the specific policies in the health care law. Americans just don’t like some policy ideas until you get specific.
For people who believe the empirical evidence that more guns mean more violence, this contradiction is the source of a lot of frustration. Americans by and large support policies that reduce access to guns. But once these policies are proposed, they’re broadly spun by politicians and pundits into attempts to “take away your guns.” So nothing gets done, and preventable deaths keep occurring.
A mass shooting happened at a King Soopers on Table Mesa in Boulder Monday afternoon.
Amy and I are safe. So are our friends and family. But 10 people in Boulder, including one police officer, are dead.
The King Soopers was the one that Amy and I shopped at from 1996 – 2014 when we lived in Eldorado Canyon. I’ve been there hundreds of times. It was at the six-mile mark of my ten-mile run to town. Many friends live within minutes of it, including my brother and his family, my partner Chris Moody and his family, Amy’s current assistant Rebecca and her family, and Amy’s prior long-time assistant Naomi and her family.
Amy’s nephew Jason had gotten his groceries there fifteen minutes earlier. A friend of a board member worked there and snuck out the back. So did a neighbor of my brothers.
Whenever something tragic happens, the quick rationalization is “Well, at least that won’t happen here.” Boulder has always felt incredibly safe to me. I won’t even read a popular crime/thriller novelist whose books are set in Boulder because I don’t want anything to damage my calm.
My calm is very damaged right now. I was going to head out for a long run at the end of the day but couldn’t leave the house. I just sat with Amy, while she doom scrolled through Twitter and texted with friends and family. I ate something but don’t remember what it was. Upon reflection, that sounds a little like a shock response to me.
Last night, an endless set of IMs and emails rolled in checking on us. That calmed my nerves a little, to be loved, but I kept realizing how fragile and arbitrary things are. The phrase “the victims are in our thoughts and prayers” is nice, but it seems so inadequate. We find ourselves in 2021, still in a pandemic, with extraordinary heath, financial, and emotional stress everywhere, and then this.
Boulder has been a special place for me and Amy since we moved here in 1995. Evil showed up in our town yesterday.
We’ve all been in situations where we’re double-booked or joined a meeting late. You don’t want to interrupt the flow but need to catch up quickly. Or, for accessibility reasons or ambient noise situations, you need help following the conversation and understanding who’s speaking. Wouldn’t it be great to have transcription with speaker attribution built into the meeting?
We’re excited to now offer live transcription in Microsoft Teams meetings for English (US). Live transcription is a written record of the spoken text that occurs during a meeting. It identifies each speaker, is captured automatically in near real time, and is available during and after the meeting.
Delivering live transcription with high accuracy, minimal latency, and cost efficiency at enterprise scale has been one of the toughest challenges in the industry. Over the last two years we’ve made significant strides in solving this problem and have dramatically improved our models for accuracy using meeting context in real time and cutting edge AI.
Live transcription in Teams uses a meeting's invitation, participant names, attachments, etc. to improve the accuracy and recognize meeting-specific jargon for each transcript automatically, without any human involvement. This means no one at Microsoft ever sees the meeting’s content, and the models are automatically deleted immediately after each meeting. In addition, Microsoft doesn’t use or store this data for improving its own AI.
In terms of privacy, live transcription is similar to recording a meeting. Participants are notified that live transcription is on and have the ability to hide it from their meeting view with just a click. If they choose not be identified, attendees can also turn off speaker attribution in their profile settings.
After the meeting, the saved transcript is available for reference and download in Teams for desktop and web.
The transcript is also immediately available in the meeting event in Teams calendar, as well as through the transcript tile in the chat.
Teams live transcription files are stored in the meeting organizer's Exchange Online account and only the organizer and tenant admin have permissions to delete it.
Teams meeting recordings that are saved in OneDrive for Business and SharePoint (ODSP) use Teams live transcript to display captions in recordings, so we recommend turning on live transcript to ensure captions are present in post-meeting recordings.
Note that live transcription is not guaranteed to be 100% accurate and so should not be relied upon in life-altering situations.
Cloud Video Interop customers:
If you are using Cloud Video Interop (CVI) to join Teams meetings, please contact your CVI provider to ensure that your CVI participants get the transcription notification when transcription starts.
Who can start using live transcriptions?
As of 6/29/2021: Live transcriptions is available in English (US) on Teams Desktop for scheduled meetings under the following licenses: Office 365 E1, Office 365 A1, Office 365/Microsoft 365 A3, Office 365/Microsoft 365 A5, Microsoft 365 F1, Office 365/Microsoft 365 F3, Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Microsoft 365 Business Standard, Microsoft 365 Business Premium SKUs.
Live transcription has previously been available for licenses: Office 365/Microsoft E3, Office 365/Microsoft E5, Microsoft 365 Business Standard, and Microsoft 365 Business Premium customers.
Delivering highly accurate, AI-based live transcriptions for Teams meetings has been a massive and rewarding effort across the company. With this powerful foundation built at scale, we’re ready to tackle the next set of challenges to keep improving inclusivity, accessibility, and productivity in Microsoft Teams meetings. Stay tuned…
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