The Adversity Chronicles I

I count myself very lucky that when I was studying for my A-levels, none of iPhones, Netflix, Instagram and Amazon Prime had yet been invented. With a limited attention span as an 18 year old, I had to find more creative ways to avoid my work which led to too much time on quiz website Sporcle learning countries and their capitals, trying to spin a football on my finger and failing to solve a Rubik’s cube without instructions after being inspired by Will Smith in The Pursuit of Happyness.

Studying during lockdown in 2020, it’s been far easier to put off work using all those above helped along by an ill-advised foray into the wildly addictive world of TikTok.

I initially passed a couple of days working my way through Brooklyn 99, Peaky Blinders and too many short TikTok videos of people who are either very funny, very good looking, very talented or, annoyingly, all three. But I didn’t feel like I was getting anything out of them beyond knowing why everyone keeps talking about Carole Baskin. Unlike my Sporcle days, I wasn’t coming out of watching Tiger King with the ability to identify the flag of Burundi or remembering Tegucigalpa is the capital of Honduras (both of which are of questionable use).

Instead of avoiding Netflix, Prime and co altogether, I decided I’d at least put them to good use and created my ‘Adversity Chronicles’ – a list of documentaries, films and videos centred on people overcoming adversity in a bid to generate a little inspiration to keep myself working through the corona crisis, to remind myself that life could be far, far worse than being sat inside and that going through harder times make the good times even better.

Top of the list so far is Resurfacing telling the story of Andy Murray coming through an injury which nearly forced him into retirement. The Chronicles have generated inspiration from sources far and wide - from Tom Hanks resilience whilst being held captive in Captain Phillips to Joe Pesci overcoming a lack of experience in My Cousin Vinny to the Bruce Springsteen-inspired Blinded By the Lights about a young British Asian kid desperate to get out of 80s Luton. Next on the list are the documentaries Skid Row Marathon, Gleason and Charged.

If you're interested, I've started off with a list of my top 10 sporting comebacks from YouTube at the end. If you're in need of a quick bit of motivation, the 2019 Cricket World Cup final, Man United's '99 Champions League win or Kris Akabusi's final leg heroics in the 4 x 400m relay are all surprisingly inspirational. For what it's worth, I deleted TikTok.

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One of the Netflix documentaries I have already watched is last summer's The Great Hack about the Cambridge Analytica scandal and how targeted social media advertising was used to influence the outcome of the US election using data harvested from millions of users. It was a pretty interesting insight into the power of data and was one of the reasons I chose to study the Managing Big Data Analysis elective this term.

The course was delivered by Dr David Stillwell whose name I recognised as it occasionally popped up in articles I’d read after watching. He and another of the researchers in the Psychometrics Department here were the pioneers of using social media likes to infer users’ personality traits. Both also forewarned of the danger of being able to do so. I should preface this with the fact that they gathered their data for research, didn’t commercialise it and weren’t involved in the scandal at all.

One of the interesting things they found in their initial research in 2013 was a link between liking the curly fries page on Facebook and having a high IQ. After they published their research apparently the number of likes on the curly fries page went through the roof though, sadly, I think this was a case of correlation not implying causation.

This is a graph showing the wine budget of each Cambridge College against the proportion of students who attain a first. It's a favourite of professors here to show that correlation does not imply causation.

Big Data was a very cool course that taught us all about the different types of machine learning, how algorithms are trained to predict outputs and also around the legality and ethics of doing so. Back in 2013 when Dr Stillwell's research was published, Facebook likes alone could predict political leanings with 85% accuracy, religion with 82% accuracy and sexual orientation with 88% accuracy in men and 75% in women. They even got half-decent results in more obscure factors like 60% accuracy in predicting whether a user’s parents had stayed together until they were 21 from Facebook likes alone.

Our assessment essay was based on a hypothetical photo sharing app whose CEO was planning to use machine learning to identify features within photos, use that to determine demographics & psychographics, and then use that to target adverts to users. We had to cover how it could be done and what sort of technological challenges would need to be overcome. A significant portion of both the essay and the module was dedicated to the legalities and ethics of targeting adverts from the invasion of privacy to treading the fine line between persuasion and manipulation of users.

Ethically, my conclusion was that it’s acceptable so long as users are aware or what’s happening and appropriate safeguards are in place to protect those most vulnerable to manipulation. There’s an interesting parallel here with the coronavirus situation. Even if it were positive for society as a whole to have targeted advertising (i.e. the app makes more money, advertisers are better able to target people and users have easier access to brand they want to engage with), it would be widely deemed as unacceptable if this came at the expense of a few people (think alcoholics being advertised a pub when near a pub or gamblers being targeted when near a casino).

This was similarly observed when the concept of herd immunity was floated and outright rejected by the public regardless of whether society would be better off economically overall (and that’s by no means certain anyway). It may make sense to view things from a utilitarian perspective but in practice people are typically unwilling to allow a few people to bear the brunt of any actions even if the rest of society is better off as a whole. If you're interested this article gives a fantastic overview of the different approaches taken to coronavirus.

It was a module that had a little bit of everything and generated a lot of debate as to what’s right and wrong when it comes to tech. It also opened my eyes as to where we may be going in the future. It’s as scary as it is exciting.

A few of the cool things we were taught along the way:

-         Did you know every time you fill in a Captcha to prove you're not a robot you’re actually doing Google’s grunt work and tagging pictures for them? Every click on photos with traffic lights or zebra crossings is actually helping to train self-driving cars.

-         If you’d like a visual overview of creating an algorithm this website has a great step-by-step explanation.

-         Check out Google’s Vision AI here. You can upload a picture of a building and it’ll tell you what it is, its address and generate some likely labels. Upload a picture of yourself and it’ll analyse your face and search the internet for the picture. Based on my LinkedIn profile picture Google’s 93% confident that I’m displaying joy in my photo (correct), thinks I am actually Welsh actor Matthew Rhys (not an insult, but not a compliment either) and successfully found my LinkedIn profile.

-         You can also see what your social media data says about you. You can download all your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter data and drop it in to this website created by the University’s Psychometric centre as part of a research project. It tells you what your data says about you and will explain why you see certain adverts on your timelines. It is anonymous and data isn’t stored.

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Work and viewing aside, I'm still up in Cam for lockdown. Though a few postgrads are scattered around, it’s almost empty of students and tourists so has turned into a bit of a ghost town. Being in a college means we have a small household of people and a lot of green space to work in when the sun's out. Along with my new watching schedule, running up and down the river Cam is also a welcome reprieve from the hours spent inside at the moment and the views have been world class.

I hope you enjoy the clips below. If they don’t float your boat then give Sporcle a go and buy a football. There is always someone in a friendship group who will argue that Lagos is the capital of Nigeria and, trust me, the looks of admiration you get when you’re spinning a football on your finger in Sports Direct are well worth it.

Happy Easter!

The Adversity Chronicles - Sporting Edition:

1. Man United scoring 2 goals in the last 3 minutes of the 99 Champions League. Goosebumps every time.
2. Stokesy in the Ashes - The Greatest individual performance of my lifetime
3. 2019 Cricket World Cup Final – The greatest sporting event of my lifetime
4. The Miracle at Medinah - Team Europe's 2012 Ryder Cup final day comeback
5. Kris Akabusi coming from behind to win gold in the 1991 World Champs 4 x 400m relay against the World Champion.
6. The only one that isn't a comeback but Wales refusing to backdown from the haka supported by 75,000 people in Cardiff.
7. Andy Murray’s tears in 2012 after losing Wimbledon followed by Andy Murray winning Wimbledon in 2013.
8. Mo Farah winning 2016 Olympic gold after falling
9. Man City winning the league in the 93rd minute on the last day of the season. Iconic commentary.
10. The slow clap in Cool Runnings - never fails to get me.
11. And finally, as a proud half-Gibraltarian, Gibraltar’s first ever home victory coming back from 1-0 down to win 2-1 against Liechtenstein in front of a packed crowd at Victoria Stadium in the Nations League. What dreams are made of.