#Data manipulation

[odinsblog]

LMAO. When Grok got too woke, Elon had his minions at Twitter alter the algorithm to make it not include Musk and Trump.

Twitter is a propaganda + disinformation machine owned by an authoritarian, Nazi-saluting, Apartheid-loving snowflake.

[scipunk]

Person of Interest (2011-2016)

[moontyger]

Sue sobbed as she entered her patient’s personal information into the state website: Date of birth, county of residence, last menstrual period. The Texas Department of Health and Human Services even wanted to know whether the woman was married, and how many children she had.

“Reporting every detail of that woman’s information, the fact that I was putting any of it in...it was devastating to me as a physician,” she says.

Sue, a pseudonym, is an emergency medicine physician at a major Texas city hospital. Ever since Roe was overturned and the state’s trigger law went into effect, Sue and other Texas doctors have been required to submit patients’ private medical information into a state-run website without their knowledge or consent—adhering to a mandate that forces them to report women as suffering from abortion complications even when they’re not.

This rarely reported on section of Texas law lists 28 medical issues as abortion complications—conditions that reproductive health experts point out often have nothing to do with abortion. Still, doctors are required to tell the state about any woman who develops one of these issues if she happens to have had an abortion at any point in her life. 

Doctors who don’t make these reports can be fined for each ‘violation’; after three violations, they could lose their license. Sue, who got conflicting and often confusing guidance from the large health system that runs her hospital and dozens of others in the state, was terrified not to comply. “For all I knew, I could be one that [Attorney General] Ken Paxton made an example of,” she says. 

This reporting mandate is a central and insidious part of Republicans’ strategy to paint abortion as dangerous despite decades of evidence to the contrary. It’s a policy that forces doctors, under threat of losing their license, to lend their name and medical credibility to the collection of false data—‘research’ that will be used by the state to claim abortion is unsafe.

“They want to force us to report a complication so they can submit and advertise bad data,” Sue says. 

The list of ‘complications’ that Texas doctors are forced to attribute to abortion are vague and nonsensical. Some, like “adverse reactions to anesthesia,” are risks associated with having any medical procedure. (As Sue points out, it’s not as if there’s a state commission on adverse reactions to colonoscopies.) 

Others, like “infection,” could develop in a patient for a reason completely unrelated to abortion or predate the procedure, yet would still be counted as a complication. The law also lists complications like “pelvic inflammatory disease,” which is a type of infection and therefore could be double-counted.

Other ‘complications’ would require reports to the state yearsafter a patient had an abortion. I’ll use myself as an example: My daughter was born three months early after I developed severe preeclampsia. If I delivered her in Texas tomorrow, and happened to mention that I ended a pregnancy a few years previous, my doctor would be required toreport my daughter’s early birth as a complication of abortion. Never mind that there’s no link between preeclampsia and abortion; because “preterm delivery in subsequent pregnancies” is on the law’s list of reportable conditions, my physician would have no choice. 

What’s more, it wouldn’t be just one doctor reporting my supposed complication to the state. Texas law requires that every single physician involved in a patient’s care fill out the state’s abortion complication form. Even the hospital itself, as an entity, has to file a report. It’s a policy that encourages double, triple, even quadruple duplicate reports for a single person. (Again, a patient who may not have an abortion complication at all!)

So in this hypothetical where I’ve given birth in Texas, I’d be under the impression that I’m at the hospital to deliver a baby and get treatment for preeclampsia. But something very different is happening behind the scenes: The birth of my daughter is being recorded, reported, and counted three or four times as proof that abortion is dangerous—‘data’ that will be published in Texas’ annual abortion complication report.

And though Texas’ law on abortion reporting says that the annual report “may not include any duplicative data,” Dr. Ushma Upadhyay, professor and public health scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, tells me there’s no real way to prevent such a thing. “There’s no guidance or standards,” she says. 

The state’s abortion complication form doesn’t include a patient’s name, or any unique identifier, for officials to cross reference. Even if the health department managed to match another piece of information, like date of birth, with multiple reports coming in on the same day from the same hospital, there’s another issue: That same patient’s data will be counted again if she sees another doctor down the line, months or even years later.

...

Carrie (a pseudonym), an emergency medicine physician at a large academic training center in the state, has a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy. “I don’t ask any of my patients if they’ve had an abortion, and I make sure to tell my medical students and residents not to ask,” she says. 

Carrie tells me that abortion is so safe, she has never felt the need to know if a patient had one in order to give proper treatment. “When you look at the legislation, it was clearly not written by a physician or someone in healthcare,” she says.

And she’s right. The list of abortion ‘complications’ in Texas’ law wasn’t created by doctors or experts, but by Americans United for Life, an anti-abortion group that drafts model legislation for Republican politicians. Arguably the most powerful legislative organization in the movement, AUL insists that abortion complications are vastly underreported—so they’ve created laws that churn out false reports to be used as evidence that abortion should be banned.

Most states, even those that protect abortion rights, have some kind of abortion complication reporting law. But the reporting mandate by AUL was deliberately crafted to create bogus data—and it’s gaining traction beyond Texas. Idaho, Indiana, South Carolina and Mississippi all have laws with identical or similar language, as does legislation introduced in Georgia and Tennessee last session. And just yesterday, North Carolina Republicans proposed a bill that uses the AUL complications list—including “psychological complications.”

It’s a brilliant move, really. The anti-abortion movement wants to prove that abortion is harmful, but they don’t have the statistics to back it up. Laws like this allow states to simply make them up.

Most importantly, the policy forces doctors to attach their names and reputations to these supposed complications, giving anti-choice activists and politicians something they’re absolutely desperate for: medical and scientific credibility.

After all, it’s difficult to claim that abortion is harmful to women when all evidence proves otherwise: Decades of research shows that abortion is safe; 1 in 4 women will have one in her lifetime; and you’re more likely to have a serious complication getting a wisdom tooth pulled.

Unable to use legitimate research to argue for the end of abortion, activists have resorted to creating their own science. They’ve opened up anti-abortion centers modeled to look like health clinics, despite having no medical staff on site. They’ve founded organizations posing as independent research groups—like the Charlotte Lozier Institute, which is actually an arm of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. And they’ve cultivated a group of activists pretending to be researchers. These are people who testify in support of anti-choice legislation, publish bad data, and present themselves as experts despite having questionable qualifications. (The man behind much of the movement’s research on abortion complications, for example, David Reardon, has a degree from an unaccredited online university that was shut down as a diploma mill.)

[b-e-l-l-a-g]

Mandala designed with footfall data

[about27th]

i use it only when it's free..

use jasp already🌚

[jbfly46]

Oregon, and Portland especially, has lower literacy rates than they let on through the data they publish that is relevant to literacy and educational metrics.

[moontyger]

The government produces many of America’s most important economic indicators. And that data influences the media’s coverage of the economy, which likely colors voters’ views of the president.

These facts have long led partisans to fear presidential manipulation of economic data. Specifically, during Democratic presidencies, conservatives have often sought to dismiss positive economic trends by alleging data manipulation. Last August, Donald Trump accused the Biden administration of “manipulating jobs statistics” to make unemployment look artificially low before Election Day.

Such allegations have always been baseless. Presidents might have an incentive to tamper with economic data reported by the executive branch. But they have always been constrained from doing so by respect for the independence of data-gathering agencies like the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Bureau of Economic Analysis, fear of scandal, and a desire to provide the private sector with clear and accurate information about economic conditions.

But Trump appears uniquely unencumbered by such constraints. His administration is openly contemptuous of agency independence, arguing that the president should boast unitary authority over all of the executive branch’s activities. It also evinces no concern for giving off the appearance of corruption (before taking office, the president established a memecoin that enables any interest group to directly burnish his net wealth). Trump’s constantly shifting tariff threats indicate an indifference to providing business owners with clarity about the economy’s future trajectory, while his entire history as a public figure suggests an indifference to the truth.

All this gives us some cause for fearing that Trump might tamper with government economic data, should it become politically inconvenient. And over the weekend, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested that he intends to do just that, by altering how the government calculates gross domestic product (GDP) — the total value of goods and services produced in the economy.

“You know that governments historically have messed with GDP,” Lutnick said during a Fox News interview Sunday. “They count government spending as part of GDP. So I’m going to separate those two and make it transparent.”

Lutnick’s remarks came days after Elon Musk argued that “A more accurate measure of GDP would exclude government spending” since “Otherwise, you can scale GDP artificially high by spending money on things that don’t make people’s lives better.”

In other words, Musk believes that the US government has been producing useless goods and services just to inflate GDP numbers.

This argument is substantively unsound. And it also appears politically motivated: Musk’s comments came in response to a new projection from the Atlanta Federal Reserve, which showed GDP on pace to decline during the first quarter of this year. Musk’s implication was that this projected decline is entirely attributable to his elimination of wasteful government activities that had been distorting growth statistics.

Stripping government spending from official GDP data would not be the most corrosive form of data manipulation. Such tampering would at least be transparent; the administration would not be producing fabricated economic statistics, but merely seeking to redefine an existing measure. But the administration’s desire to alter the content of GDP — seemingly, due to political concerns — makes the threat of more covert and destructive data manipulation more plausible.

[b-e-l-l-a-g]

[recenttrendingtopics]

Pandas, today's powerful data analysis library acts up to facilitate enhanced data manipulation. Want to know how? Read to comprehend its minutest manouvers and diverse usage with USDSI®. Click link: https://bit.ly/4hhHDBs

[zombolouge]

okay wait reblogging this again because @rederiswrites pointed out in the replies that this fucking graph ends in 2020, which means it's saying something ENTIRELY DIFFERENT than I originally thought without noticing that context.

Always contextualize the data, kids. Always question the context in which the data was collected. Just because it's math doesn't mean it's not painting a biased picture.

While there is a downward trend prior to that 2020 date, there's a reason everything converges on that point the way it does, and is very much going to skew any graph results. Additionally, the graph ending in 2020 does NOT show if the downward trend corrected at all AFTER 2020, which means it could be withholding part of the data in order to reinforce the narrative that couples only meet online now.

Thanks Red for pointing that out, gave me a good think this morning!

[mitsdedistance]

SQL & Power BI Certification | MITSDE

Enhance your career with MITSDE’s Online Power BI Certification Course! This comprehensive program equips you with essential skills in data visualization, analytics, and business intelligence, helping you make data-driven decisions. Learn to create interactive dashboards, generate insightful reports, and analyze business trends effectively. Designed for professionals and beginners alike, this course offers hands-on training and expert guidance to boost your expertise. Stay ahead in the competitive job market—enroll today and transform your data analysis skills with Power BI!

[gedzolini]

Uber’s Greyball Program: How Data Misuse Undermined Fair Information Practices

Picture a world where your data is not used to enhance your user experience, but rather help companies evade regulations. Sounds concerning, right? But that is exactly what happened with Uber’s Grayball program. The company that revolutionized the way public transportation works today have often been a center of global regulatory conflicts. Governments from various different cities and countries opposed Uber’s service, attempting to restrict or prohibit its activities. In 2014, Uber responded by developing the Greyball program approved by Uber’s legal team. This invisible mechanism leveraged user information to escape authorities and law enforcement. By doing this, Uber violated several significant data ethical and privacy rules, which infuriated many people and led to legal investigations. We'll discuss how Uber's Greyball campaign violated several important Fair Information Principles in addition to undermining local laws. Let's examine Greyball's characteristics and operation in more detail before exploring the moral repercussions of Uber's activities.

What Was Uber’s Greyball Program? Uber's Greyball program was a hidden scheme the firm employed to find and evade authorities, law enforcement, and other people trying to enforce regional laws against its ride-hailing services. The concept was created to assist Uber in getting around legal restrictions in nations and localities where its activities were either prohibited or restricted. Uber used Greyball to prevent regulators from booking trips on the app. The program worked by manipulating the app’s interface to display fake ride options to suspected authorities. In some cases, it would also prevent the ride from being booked altogether or show a "ghost" car on the map to create the illusion of service availability without actually providing any rides. It used location data to detect users near government buildings or restricted areas and monitored high-frequency ride requests in these zones. Credit card information was also analyzed, flagging users whose payment details matched known regulators or authority figures. Additionally, app usage patterns such as the speed of ride bookings, frequency of app usage in restricted areas, and attempts to book rides in banned zones were tracked, helping Greyball identify suspicious users and prevent them from accessing Uber's service. When the public learned the truth, these tactics ultimately backfired, even though they might have protected Uber's drivers and increased earnings. Businesses like Uber face greater accountability for how they manage personal data as customers grow more conscious of their rights. This leads us to the ethical standards that Uber transgressed when it used Greyball, emphasizing how crucial openness and ethical data handling are to preserving trust among clients.

Data Ethics and Uber's Greyball: Where Did Uber Go Wrong? A set of guidelines known as "fair information practices" defines how an data-driven society may handle, store, manage, and move around information while preserving security, privacy, and fairness in an increasingly changing worldwide technological environment. Uber’s Greyball program violated several of these principles by using personal data to avoid regulators, bypassing ethical standards for accountability. Next, we'll explore how Greyball directly violated these principles and the ethical implications of such breaches.

Uber misused user-provided personal information, in abuse of several fundamental ethical data usage standards. Contrary to its initial goal of offering ride services, Uber collected data without user consent and utilized it anonymously to elude authorities in defiance of the Collection Limitation Principle. The data was altered to identify regulators, which distorted its accuracy and undermined users' expectations, in violation of the Data Quality Principle. By repurposing the data for legal evasion—a goal not revealed at the time of collection—the corporation also broke the Purpose Specification Principle. Additionally, Uber violated the Use Limitation Principle by using personal data for an unlawful and unethical purpose—to avoid regulatory enforcement—instead of the original purpose. By hiding the existence of the Greyball program and denying any responsibility for it, Uber broke both the Openness Principle and the Accountability Principle. There was a severe lack of transparency about the handling of users' data because they were unaware that it was being utilized in this manner. Furthermore, Uber demonstrated a lack of accountability by refusing to acknowledge the acts committed under Greyball. The public's faith in the business was further damaged by this failure to resolve the problem and be transparent.

Uber faced strong public criticism for its actions with the Greyball initiative, which was a clear violation of fundamental data ethics rules. The legal repercussions, however, were much less harsh than many had anticipated. Uber's evasions prompted investigations, including one by the U.S. Department of Justice, despite the ethical offenses. The company's use of Greyball to evade regulators was the main focus of the investigation. Surprisingly, though, not much legal action was taken, maybe as a result of Uber's calculated change of system after the New York Times revealed its tactics, along with the company's use of excuses such as driver security to justify its actions. This lack of strong legal obligation highlights the broader consequences of corporate data exploitation; when immoral conduct is covered up and later revealed, the company's liability is often delayed or diminished. It serves as a reminder that, despite the importance of data ethics and standards, they are nevertheless difficult to regularly and openly enforce.

Conclusion Uber's Greyball program brings up significant issues regarding data ethics and corporate responsibility. Is self-regulation sufficient, or should businesses be legally obligated to adopt moral standards like the Fair Information Principles? Many businesses make the claim that they follow their own codes of conduct, but as Uber has shown, they frequently find ways to get around the law to further their own agendas, even when they justify practices like ride cancellations under the pretext of "driver safety." Can we really be sure that our personal data is being treated ethically if there isn't a single, global standard that all businesses must adhere to? When will we be able to tell if our personal information is being utilized against our will? This poses the more important question - how can we safeguard our privacy in society when data is being exchanged and used for profit all the time? We must figure out how to hold businesses responsible and ensure that user rights are upheld in the digital sphere as technology continues to advance.

[solasistim]

d e c a y

photoshop + audacity

other versions on my instagram

[suzilight]

Elisabeth Margaretha Harbers-Bik is a Dutch microbiologist and scientific integrity consultant. Bik is known for her work detecting photo manipulation in scientific publications, and identifying over 4,000 potential cases of improper research conduct.

Meet this super-spotter of duplicated images in science papers | Nature

every time I see some bigshot scientist revealed as a fraud my knee-jerk reaction is "hell yeah elisabeth bik got 'em good" AND IM RIGHT

SHE NEVER QUITS!!!!

ICONIC!!!!

[plainselfraisingflour]

One time I used one of those style AdvIsors to show me the best colours that I should wear because I'll look better.

I didn't like what it said so I went to a room with different lighting, re-did it and liked those results.

Real results.