July 27, 2019 – For those of you unfamiliar with the wheat and the chaff reference in our posting title, farmers to this day in various parts of the world toss harvested grain in the air (see image above) with the heavier grains falling to the ground and the chaff, the non-grain stuff, blowing away in the wind. It is a simple way to ensure that your wheat, oats, bran, rye, and other cereal crops are relatively free of contaminants.
Well, it seems that the New York Times is on a wheat and chaff exercise using blockchain technology to do exactly what farmers do to separate misinformation from real news. The Times is working with IBM Garage, a blockchain project designed to ensure transparency and trust in any media content, spotting fraud whether it be in printed words or images.
Why now? The New York Times describes the problem it is attempting to solve in its launch of The News Provenance Project:
“There is a gap between the vast amount of information news organizations possess about the media they publish (photos, videos as well as articles and other forms), and the subset of that information to which their users have ready access. That’s especially true when that media travels around the internet, largely stripped of its original context.”
“Into that gap, trolls and bad actors have established many tools for misleading people, generally using authentic photos and videos as source material. Some of the techniques are simple: recycling old images, selective cropping and editing, slowing down and speeding up videos, and so on. Other techniques are more sophisticated, involving the creation of ‘synthetic’ media such as deep fakes.”
How would applying a blockchain to information reporting ferret out the fakery and create certainty in the information we read and see each day?
Blockchain transactions contain a core of key elements:
The initial focus of the project will be the use of blockchain for the publishing of photographs to determine the legitimacy of the source, and whether an image has been edited before or after publication. From photojournalism the project hopes to eventually expand to the written word to determine the validity of material sources, facts, and stories.
So how will using blockchain technology prove the accuracy and validity of a photograph?
If photographs submitted for publication come to the paper with verifiable metadata secured in a blockchain transaction, it will be possible to ferret out fakes. Each blockchain transaction containing the photograph will capture the assocaited metadata including who took the picture, the time and place, any editing and revision history, watermarks, and copyright. photographs not containing metadata would not be accepted.
The New York Times intends to build an industry-wide “ecosystem in which news and information” are shareable with all news organizations that join the blockchain. Any blockchain transaction involving contributions to the newspaper will be able to be published anywhere in the digital realm with the assurance it is legitimate.
This quote comes from Ramez Naam‘s book, The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet. I thought of this as I read the latest findings by Earth scientists as reported in today’s New York Times.
Our ancestors experienced a more predictable world when it comes to global temperatures. Our children who will inherit the world we create will live on a changing planet with an uncertain future. Based on the latest global warming data Earth has recorded higher temperatures, each a record, for the last three years. As the Times states, “The data show that politicians cannot wish the problem away. The Earth is heating up, a point long beyond serious scientific dispute, but one becoming more evident as the records keep falling. Temperatures are heading toward levels that many experts believe will pose a profound threat to both the natural world and to human civilization.”
In 2015 those who questioned the data ascribed the warming to an El Nino event in the Pacific Ocean. But in 2016 there was no El Nino. Temperatures just continued to inch upward over most of the planet. In the Arctic, however, temperatures soared. Sea ice reached the lowest level observed since records have been kept. The American east coast experienced increased incidents of tidal flooding caused by ocean thermal expansion and the melting of Arctic sea ice and glaciers. And in one city in India, on one summer day the thermometer rose to 51 Celsius (123.8 Fahrenheit), a temperature never seen before.
The data on 2016 temperature records was issued by two United States organizations, NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and NASA. The findings represent global data collection, that for the former, goes back to 1880, and for the latter, the 1970s, with the launch of the first generation of geostationary weather satellites.
The new American administration under President-elect Donald Trump, has appointed cabinet secretaries who, like their boss, is a climate change denier. I suspect that NOAA and NASA will be redirected in focus to not report global warming statistics. After all, the ostrich with its head buried in the sand never sees what is going on in its immediate surroundings, not until a predator comes and bites its tail or kills it.
Our children deserve better than this.
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The film is to be out on May 19th along with The New York Times VR app which can be downloaded for free from the Google Play and iOS App Stores. The app supports video streaming. Users can also go to The New York Time YouTube channel and view the video or visit youtube.com/360 for more immersive virtual reality content.
The film follows the journey of the New Horizons spacecraft as it makes its rendezvous with Pluto and its system of moons. Watchers will experience the dwarf planet as never before soaring over its rugged mountains and icy plains. They will even experience landing on the surface where they will be able to view Charon, the system’s largest moon hovering on the horizon.
The use of VR will give viewers a sense of presence not possible through traditional film media. To be one of the 300,000 who received a Google VR Cardboard Viewer you needed to be a digital-only subscriber to the paper. But if you weren’t one of the lucky 300,000 you can buy the viewer from the paper’s website. The headsets are easy to assemble but you need either an Android smartphone or Apple iPhone.
Why pick the Pluto mission to make a VR film?
The NASA New Horizons mission got the public excited again about planetary exploration. Of the original nine, Pluto was the last planet to be visited. When conceived it was still a “planet” but that designation altered to include the word “dwarf” during the time from inception of the mission to the subsequent launch, long flight, and, final rendezvous.
Scientists expected to see an icy primordial remnant of the early Solar System but Pluto surprised them with its complex, diverse and geologically active features. The film will give viewers a ride over icy mountain peaks, nitrogen ice flows, valleys carved from the surface by some viscous icy substance, and dunes bearing a striking resemblance to those seen by the Cassini spacecraft on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. Expect the VR experience to be quite the ride.
Some scientists believe that the future of space travel to exotic locales will be one where no human will actually go. Instead it will be robots who visit and we, the humans, will experience these places through VR. Maybe this is the first step on the way to many future encounters.
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