Links for May 4th

The Tune Zoo & Other Stories – Extraordinary Facility Excellent stuff – as always – from Matt B; I'm somewhat envious of his focus and the quality of his output. Nodded along heartily throughout. (tags: music design mattbrown interaction play )

Brand positioning: how to find your marketing mantra

Attracting customers can often feel like an uphill battle. Here’s how to improve your brand positioning and find your marketing mantra.

Awkward

Sometimes a passing remark tells you everything you need to know about a particular person, or a particular way of looking at things. This is The Guardian's European affairs editor Jon Henley, reporting on the debate between Macron and Le Pen: "Le Pen brings up Macron's clumsy remark about France having committed crimes against humanity in Algeria."

This was not a "clumsy remark". It was one of the few entirely, uncontroversially accurate things that Macron has said in his whole campaign. Not only is it deadly accurate, it is also vital to understanding today's France. You cannot understand the France that allows police to rape a teenager with a baton, then declare it "accidental", without understanding the France that, for example, tortured and murdered captives in Algeria. What is more, you cannot understand fascism, or the campaign of Marine Le Pen, without understanding this context.

Macron doesn't know this, of course. Why would he? But Jean-Marie Le Pen was a Lieutenant in the French paratroopers who helped suppress the Algerian independence struggle. And in the course of that task, he was directly involved in the torture and extrajudicial execution of prisoners. This included electrocution, battering with truncheons, and being force-fed soapy liquid before having a towel stuffed in one's mouth while soldiers jumped up and down on one's stomach. This was a crucial part of the subjectifying experience that galvanised the fanatical nationalist and racist Le Pen, sparking his dreams of fascist revolution, and that provided a base for a fascist movement discredited by the Second World War. Much as the National Front and then BNP emerged from beleaguered and embattled empire loyalists, so today's Front national is a legacy of the French empire.

What is more, the rise of fascism in the first instance could hardly be explained without reference to the colonial experience and its huge, often hidden, crimes, and the racist dreams driving them: Italy in Libya, Germany in south-west Africa, France in north Africa and Indochina, Spain in the Rif, and so on. One could hardly talk fascism without talking about the history of bombing, the history of gassing, the pioneering of efficient methods of genocide, all in the colonies. One could hardly talk about Nazi Germany's campaign for Lebensraum without addressing its ideological inspiration in the British Empire. One could hardly talk of the vicious doctrine of Aryanism, without talking about the British colonial philologists and others who invented it as part of the subjugation of south Asia.

"Clumsy" is an interesting English locution, a way of saying that one doesn't talk about such things. It is also euphemistic, because what is being warded off with such polite coughing and hand-waving is the ghost at the feast -- the mutilated body of the slain who kills the buzz. What is "clumsy," from any other perspective, is being unable to talk about this history. What is awkward is the extent of circumlocution necessary to have a discussion of fascism that omits colonial history entirely.

Above all, clumsy is any attempt to discuss presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, without mention of the palpable, bragged-of atrocities of her father, and their role in the formation of her own politics.

Want to Know What’s Happening in a Building? Listen in at the Breaker Box, Says Startup Verdigris

Silicon Valley startup Verdigris’ cloud-based analysis can tell whether you’re using a Chromebook or a Mac, or whether a motor is running fine or starting to fail

Facebook to Add 3,000 Workers to Fight Streaming of Live Violence

SAN FRANCISCO—Facebook Inc. will add 3,000 people over the next year to monitor reports of inappropriate material on the social media network and removing videos such as murders and suicides, Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said on Wednesday.

Zuckerberg, the company’s co-founder, said in a Facebook post the workers will be in addition to the 4,500 people who already review posts that may violate its terms of service.

The hiring spree represents an acknowledgement by Facebook that, at least for now, it needs more than automated software to improve monitoring of broadcasts on Facebook Live, a service that has been marred since its launch last year by instances of people streaming violence.

Last week, a father in Thailand broadcast himself killing his daughter on Facebook Live, police said. After more than a day, and 370,000 views, Facebook removed the video. Other videos from places such as Chicago and Cleveland have also shocked viewers with their violence.

Zuckerberg said: “We’re working to make these videos easier to report so we can take the right action sooner—whether that’s responding quickly when someone needs help or taking a post down.”

Facebook is due to report quarterly revenue and earnings later Wednesday after markets close in New York.

Bloomberg Law Brief: Discriminatory Lending Practices (Audio)

David Gans, Director of the Human Rights, Civil Rights & Citizenship Program at the Constitutional Accountability Center, discusses a Supreme Court ruling on whether the city of Miami can sue Wells Fargo and Bank of America for alleged discriminatory lending practices. He speaks with June Grasso and Greg Stohr on Bloomberg Radio's "Bloomberg Law."

This map shows what white Europeans associate with race – and it makes for uncomfortable reading

This new map shows how easily white Europeans associate black faces with negative ideas. Since 2002, hundreds of thousands of people around the world have logged onto a website run by Harvard University called Project Implicit and taken an “implicit association test” (IAT), a rapid-response task which measures how easily you can pair items from different categories.To create this new map, we used data from a version of the test which presents white or black faces and positive or negative words. The result shows how easily our minds automatically make the link between the categories – what psychologists call an “implicit racial attitude”.Each country on the map is coloured according to the average score of test takers from that country. Redder countries show higher average bias, bluer countries show lower average bias, as the scale on the top of the map shows.Like a similar map which had been made for US states, our map shows variation in the extent of racial bias – but all European countries are racially biased when comparing blacks versus whites.

In every country in Europe, people are slower to associate blackness with positive words such as “good” or “nice” and faster to associate blackness with negative concepts such as “bad” or “evil”. But they are quicker to make the link between blackness and negative concepts in the Czech Republic or Lithuania than they are in Slovenia, the UK or Ireland.

No country had an average score below zero, which would reflect positive associations with blackness. In fact, none had an average score that was even close to zero, which would reflect neither positive nor negative racial associations.

A screeshot from the online IAT test.

IAT, Project Implict

Implicit bias

Overall, we have scores for 288,076 white Europeans, collected between 2002 and 2015, with sample sizes for each country shown on the left-hand side.

Because of the design of the test it is very difficult to deliberately control your score. Many people, including those who sincerely hold non-racist or even anti-racist beliefs, demonstrate positive implicit bias on the test. The exact meaning of implicit attitudes, and the IAT, are controversial, but we believe they reflect the automatic associations we hold in our minds, associations that develop over years of immersion in the social world.

Although we, as individuals, may not hold racist beliefs, the ideas we associate with race may be constructed by a culture which describes people of different ethnicities in consistent ways, and ways which are consistently more or less positive. Looked at like this, the IAT – which at best is a weak measure of individual psychology – may be most useful if individuals’ scores are aggregated to provide a reflection on the collective social world we inhabit.

The results shown in this map give detail to what we already expected – that across Europe racial attitudes are not neutral. Blackness has negative associations for white Europeans, and there are some interesting patterns in how the strength of these negative associations varies across the continent.

North and west Europe, on average, have less strong anti-black associations, although they still have anti-black associations on average. As you move south and east the strength of negative associations tends to increase – but not everywhere. The Balkans look like an exception, compared to surrounding countries. Is this because of some quirk about how people in the Balkans heard about Project Implicit, or because their prejudices aren’t orientated around a white-black axis? For now, we can only speculate.

Open questions

When interpreting the map there are at least two important qualifications to bear in mind.

The first is that the scores only reflect racial attitudes in one dimension: pairing white/black with goodness/badness. Our feelings about ethnicity have many more dimensions which aren’t captured by this measure.

The second is that the data comes from Europeans who visit the the US Project Implicit website, which is in English. We can be certain that the sample reflects a subset of the European population which are more internet-savvy than is typical. They are probably also younger, and more cosmopolitan. These factors are likely to underweight the extent of implicit racism in each country, so that the true levels of implicit racism are probably higher than shown on this map.

This new map is possible because Project Implicit release their data via the Open Science Framework. This site allows scientists to share the raw materials and data from their experiments, allowing anyone to check their working, or re-analyse the data, as we have done here. I believe that open tools and publishing methods like these are necessary to make science better and more reliable.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Edit 4/5/17. The colour scale chosen for this map emphasises the differences between countries. While that’s most important for working out what drives IAT scores, the main take-away from the map is that all of Europe is considerably not neutral. That conclusion is supported by a continuous colour scale, as used in this version of the map here