Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more.
Blocked
The phrase “you couldn't come up with it,” says Feedback, is often misunderstood. This doesn't mean that imagination is limited, but rather that there are some events that you can't include in a fictional story because people will say, “Oh well, that'll never happen.” The problem is that these people are wrong because real life is often ridiculous.
In the world of codes and ciphers, one of the most important organizations is the International Association for Cryptological Research, which is called “non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the advancement of the science of cryptology“IACR recently held elections elect new officers and directors and amend its bylaws. Being cryptographers, they did it in a clever way: they used Helios, an online platform that promises “verifiable online selections.”
Helios is really very smart. Every vote is tracked so you can verify that your vote was received and not changed, which obviously makes tampering impossible. Moreover, each vote is completely secret. System “uses advanced cryptographic techniques to combine all encrypted votes into an encrypted tally, and only that tally is decrypted.“.
But how to decipher these numbers, you ask? Well, the organization must appoint several trustees. The IACR selected three, each of whom was given a third of the cryptographic key. To decrypt the data and see the results, all three trusted parties had to enter their part of the key. It was an all-or-nothing process: one or two bits of the key would prevent you from even partial decryption.
And then the inevitable happened. “Unfortunately, one of the three trusted parties has irretrievably lost their private key, an honest but unfortunate human error, and is therefore unable to calculate their share of the decryption,” wrote IACR November 21. “As a result, Helios is unable to complete the decryption process and it is technically impossible for us to obtain or verify the final result of these elections.”
IACR had to emptiness elections and start off the whole process again. This time, the document says, “we will adopt a 2 of 3 threshold mechanism for managing private keys and promulgate a clear written procedure that all trustees must follow before and during elections.” Feedback seeks to examine this “clear written procedure”, if only to find out whether the first page says “DON'T LOSE THIS” in big bold font.
We're also fascinated by the ability of what IACR calls “human error” to overcome even the most ingeniously designed system. Every time some Silicon Valley hype man tells us that human-level AI is inevitable, we internally groan because the first human-level AI will apparently be on par with the average human – and, well, have you met the humans?
Swim like a raisin
The ability of science journalists to come up with new and interesting units of measurement never ceases to amaze. November 17, New York Times frog story about a “tiny solar-powered radio tag that weighs just 60 milligrams and sells for $200” that entomologists use to track monarch butterflies during their migrations across North America.
Anthony Weaver noted a sentence that tried to convey how much a tag weighs compared to its carrier: “Most monarchs weigh between 500 and 600 milligrams, so each tag-bearing migrant making the transcontinental journey is equivalent in weight to half a raisin carrying three uncooked grains of rice.”
Feedback thinks we can all agree that this makes things much clearer, in the sense that saying “about a tenth of your body weight” is simply not possible. Or, as Anthony says, “When I imagine myself as half a raisin on a transcontinental journey, carrying rice to Mexico, I finally understand first-hand how butterflies feel about science.”
No, this is not an invitation to send similar examples from the pages New scientist. Don't even think about it.
Boys Club
Feedback isn't posted on social media because, frankly, we don't have the mental energy to figure out how to get attention on half a dozen different sites that use radically different algorithms. Still, we're keeping an eye on things, so we were intrigued to learn about an impromptu experiment on LinkedIn. Women on the site modified their names and pronouns looked masculine, and then saw their engagement rocket.
For example, social media consultant Simone Bonnett changed her pronouns to “he/him” and her name to “Simon E” and then saw her profile views increase by 1,600 percent. according to The Guardian. Others have seen similar thorns. As a test case, Daniel Hires, who by the way has the perfect LinkedIn name, tried the opposite. “I changed my name to Daniela for 4 days.“,” he wrote. “Result? Day 1: reduction -26%.”
Now Feedback should tell you that, according to Sakshi Jain of LinkedIn, “the site’s algorithm and artificial intelligence systems do not use demographic information (such as age, race, or gender) as a signal that determines the visibility of content, profile, or posts in the feed.” We don't doubt it, but we also thought there were unintended effects that emerged main driver algorithmic bias.
In the meantime, Feedback is building our new LinkedIn page. We will call ourselves Mansplain.
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