Your round-up of the latest, greatest data stories

Hello ODI Supporter,

This week, in a neatly self-referential story, an algorithm has been developed to help workers ascertain if their jobs are at risk of automation by… an algorithm. Researchers compared robotic and human abilities to identify the most at-risk jobs (meat packers and slaughterers are high risk; astronomers and neurologists are low risk) and also used the comparison to work out which lower-risk jobs people could safely and easily jump to. Thankfully for the researchers, ‘education, training and library’ ranks low on the robot-revolution risk register…

In other AI-defying news, people are using ‘algospeak’ – language that will not be picked up by AI content moderation systems – to ensure their (sometimes dubious, sometimes legit) content remains live and uncensored. Examples include using ‘unalive’ instead of ‘dead’ and the corn emoji instead of ‘porn’. As well as screening out properly dodgy content, moderation algorithms have been found to censor already marginalised groups, demonetising and down-ranking posts that include words such as ‘gay’, and ‘racist’. To sidestep the filters, people use the palm of a hand to signify white people; sex workers refer to themselves as accountants; and women’s health sites resort to using ‘nip nops’ instead of nipples, and spelling vagina using symbols within captions.

Sticking with the theme of skirting around the rules, documents reported in The Guardian show that the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has worked with private data brokers to find loopholes around sanctuary policies (designed to protect immigrants regardless of their status) to access data aiding the search for immigrants marked for deportation.

In news from ODI Towers, we’ve published our report mapping the UK government’s activity on data literacy. Our findings include that there is a lack of clarity in definition; a risk of duplicated effort; and that more support is required for data literacy both within and outside of the UK government.

Until next time,
 

Becky and the ODI Communications Team

From the outside world

Algorithm to help users at risk of losing their jobs… to an algorithm

Singularity Hub

Concerns that machines could take over human jobs has prompted the development of an algorithm to ascertain the risk to jobs and the best switch workers can make

People are using algospeak to bypass profanity filters

Washington Post

To avoid profanity filters and AI moderators, people are finding alternatives to censored phrases – from ‘corn’ instead of ‘porn’, to ‘nip nops’ instead of ‘nipples’

ICE finds legal loopholes to obtain deportation data

The Guardian

Documents show that the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has worked with private data brokers to find loopholes in sanctuary laws

The origins of football's data analysis

BBC

A long read about how the origins of data analysis in football – one video tape recording via long-distance airmail with a 12-month turnaround

Lack of school attendance data related to Covid is 'deeply troubling'

TES

The Department for Education has released the first attendance data since telling schools to stop recording Covid-related absence

Spatial data from the Crown Estate Scotland

The Construction Index

Crown Estate Scotland has made its spatial data freely available, and is sharing datasets including offshore wind farms, wave and tidal sites, aquaculture sites, and cable and pipeline agreements

‘Human Footprint’ dataset from 2000 to 2018

Scientific Data

Analysis of this dataset found that 2 million km2 of wilderness were lost over the past two decades

From the ODI

Data infrastructure for 'Delivering a Digitalised Energy System'

We respond to the six recommendations in the Energy Digitalisation Taskforce’s report ‘Delivering a Digitalised Energy System’, and explain what a data-driven approach would bring to the sector

Data literacy and the UK government [report]

This report aims to map the UK government’s activity on ‘data literacy’, as part of the ODI’s work supporting the development of the UK’s data economy

Reflections from our second peer-learning network with Microsoft

As part of our partnership with Microsoft, we ran a second peer-learning network with seven established organisations whose primary purpose is to steward open data that anyone can access, use, and share

ODI Canalside Chats: Data sharing and the need for new business models

Watch back Miranda Sharp (CEO, Metis Digital) and Emma Thwaites (Director of Communication and Marketing, ODI) discuss data sharing, business models and the value of data as part of our ODI Canalside Chats series

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