Open Password – Wednesday, January 12, 2022
#1015
2022/2021 – Trend of the Year – Institutions of the Year – People of the Year – Books of the Year – Corona as a great accelerator – Resistance front with alternative facts – Integration of research and InfoPro functions – BioNTech – U?ur ?ahin – Willi Bredemeier – Development and degeneration of social Media – Fake News – Edward Snowden – Whistleblower – Mark Zuckerberg – Facebook – Infodemic meets pandemic – Mandatory vaccination – Lockdown – ZB MED and Corona – Frances Haugen – Maelle Gavet – Big Tech – Joe Miller – Özlem Türeci – Threat to democracies – Home Office – Sascha Lobo – OCLC – Library management day – Compatibility of work and family – Internet affinity – Technical infrastructure – Hybrid learning – Hybrid working – Virtualization – New digital services – Artificial intelligence – Project Lightspeed – Research and development – Virologists – Bild-Zeitung – Vaccines – Pfizer – Comirnaty – Omicron – Sabotage bots – Telegram – Silicon Valley – FAZ archive – Klaus Makoschey
Berlin Working Group Information – Development – Artificial Intelligence – Sven Giesselbach – Lennard Bodden – Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems – Tania Estler-Ziegler – Hate messages – Calls to kill – Telegram – NDR – tagesschau.de – Chat groups – Michael Kretschmer – Marco Buschmann – Andres O. – Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer – ZDF – Lies Press – ZDF – Tagesspiegel -Süddeutsche Zeitung – Josef Holnburger – Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy
- Title
Trends of the Year: Corona as the great accelerator, how do we counter it, what do we redesign? – An irrational resistance front with “alternative facts” – Integration of research and InfoPro functions: The wonderful story
of BioNTech and U?ur ?ahin
- Berlin Working Group Information
Comprehensive development with artificial intelligence
III. Hate messages
Hundreds of calls to kill in Telegram chats in two months alone
- FAZ archive: job advertisement
2022/2021
The elections
for the trend of the year, the institutions of the year, the people of the year and the books of the year
Corona as the great accelerator:
How do we counteract it, what do we redesign?
An irrational resistance front with “alternative facts”
Integrating Research and InfoPro Features: The Wonderful Story
of BioNTech and U?ur ?ahin
By Willi Bredemeier
Trends for 2021/2020: Corona
Trend of the years 2020 – 2011: The development and degeneration of social media
Trend of the year 2016: Fake news or: What do we need for a concept of truth?
Man of the Year 2013: Edward Snowden, whistleblower
Man of the Year 2010: Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook
“Industrial spread of fake news threatening global democracies – “Infodemic” hits pandemic,” Open Password, January 10
“On the corona pandemic – before the general vaccination requirement and the third lockdown”, Open Password, November 30th
“Working under Corona conditions: Discovering the possible – ZB MED in times of the COVID-19 pandemic – How the COVID-19 Hub came about,” Open Password, November 5th
Since 1986, Open Password, formerly Password, has chosen a trend of the year that does not have to be the same as the calendar year. Over the years, elections for Institution of the Year, Person of the Year and Book of the Year were added. For the period 2021/2022, Open Password has once again made its choices. Here are the results:
Trend of the year: Corona as the great accelerator, digitizer and virtualizer
Facilities of the Year: BioNTech
Facebook
People of the Year:
Frances Haugen, whistleblower
U?ur ?ahin , BioNTech
Books of the year:
Maelle Gavet, Trampled by Unicorns – The Devastating Side Effects of Big Tech – A Call to Action
Joe Miller, U?ur ?ahin and Özlem Türeci , Project Lightspeed: The Path to the BioNTech Vaccine – and a Medicine of Tomorrow
These choices are justified below. The topics addressed will be discussed in future editions of Open Password. Among other things, the books of the year are reviewed. The topics discussed continue to be part of Open Password’s core reporting.
_____________________________________________________
Trend of the year:
Corona as the great accelerator, digitizer and virtualizer.
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“Corona” was already the topic of the year in 2021/2020. In 2022/2021 there was once again no alternative to “Corona”. Corona has changed all of our lives too much and determined our consciousness and our decisions for us to disagree. There was only comparable unanimity in 2013, when – as the result of a small survey – the whistleblower Edward Snowden was named “Man of the Year”.
However, our view of Corona is different today than it was a year ago. 2021/2020 was a time of shock, losses, improvisations and hopes for an effective vaccine. In 2022/2021 Corona will have a Janus face.
On the one hand, it has been a year of great disappointments so far. Politics has not delivered or has delivered insufficiently. See my previous comment “On the Corona Epidemic – Before General Vaccination and the Third Lockdown” from November 30th. “Fake news” and the associated radical questioning of a common platform based on human reason and empirically verified data was already the trend of the year in 2016. Fueled by populist movements and authoritarian regimes, they have grown into a global threat to democracies. See the article in Open Password, “Industrial spread of fake news threatening global democracies – “Infodemic” hits pandemic” from January 10th. The failure of politicians to take a clear stance on Corona policy early and in a timely manner may have accelerated the formation of an irrational resistance front made up of lateral thinkers, populists, conspiracy theorists, right-wing radicals and misled citizens against all Corona measures. Once created, if the fight against Corona is won, this resistance front will turn to another topic that upsets or can upset people.
On the other hand, 2022/2021 is the year in which the fruits of improvisation, innovation and experimentation have ripened and will be reaped. Corona has proven to be a great accelerator for measures that you may have had in mind or already written down on paper, but which would otherwise have taken years to implement. According to Sascha Lobo at the OCLC Library Management Day, a decade has even been skipped in the “home office” area. These, like other developments brought about by Corona, will largely prove to be irreversible and will lead to more time sovereignty for working people and a better balance between work, family and other lives. Citizens, employees and customers who had previously stayed as far away from the flow of digitalization as possible began to use additional digital tools such as live interactions via screen or even to develop demands for the perfection of digital services. In general, internet affinity increased and the technical infrastructure at home, in offices and in educational institutions improved (with the ambivalent result that the tech industry, which now really needs further regulation, was further strengthened).
The potential that electronic media had made available for location-dependent, location-independent, cross-institutional, national and international communication, cooperation, collaboration, workflows and networking with many was used far more than before the pandemic period. Many people’s self-confidence and belief in their ability to overcome challenges increased, as did their willingness to endure imponderables and experiment. Models of “hybrid learning” and “hybrid working” were developed and further developed. Many of them will endure in the post-pandemic period and make their facilities more future-proof. People who found themselves left behind by home offices, lockdowns and contact restrictions may have received insufficient help, but help was given. Digitalization and virtualization received a big boost. There was an acceleration in the introduction of new digital services and more sophisticated digital services based, among other things, on artificial intelligence.
The awareness of having arrived in a new world and the will to welcome it spread. In the near future, despite all the abuse that has become visible, electronic media will make significant contributions to information and media literacy, the perception of participation opportunities, the use of networks and swarm intelligence, the expansion of civil society and the functionality of democratic systems.
These are at least plausible theses, supported by personal conversations, anecdotal experiences, plausibility considerations and initial case studies. They support the view of Corona as a major accelerator of the 2022/2021 period. A case study on this has already been published in the case of ZB MED (“Working under Corona conditions: The discovery of the possible – ZB MED in times of the COVID-19 pandemic – How the COVID-19 Hub came about”, Open Password, November 5th). Further case studies will ask: How did we resist when Corona hit us? What are we designing and what are we redesigning?
Ugur Sahin and Uzlem Töreci
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Man of the Year and Book of the Year:
U?ur ?ahin and “Project Lightspeed”: Triumph of research, development and implementation of InfoPro functions.
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The further Open Password elections should be seen in close connection with “Corona as a major accelerator”. Science, research and development, including users on the health front, have worked well, in several respects, very well during the pandemic. The virologists and representatives of other disciplines provided politicians with appropriate advice with their suggestions for combating the pandemic and fulfilled their obligation to provide information to the general public. Apart from the scandalous scandal sheet Bild-Zeitung, parts of social media and peripheral media, the media generally reported seriously, responsibly and differentiatedly about the current status of the pandemic. They entered into a variety of collaborations with science and other experts. The efforts of pharmaceutical companies to develop, produce and distribute an effective vaccine can largely be read as a single success story.
This is particularly true for BioNTech, which began its development work when the virus was still largely confined to the Wuhan area in China and the alarm systems went off almost nowhere in the world. He was supposed to keep all the promises that the co-founder of BioNTech, U?ur ?ahin , made in the following months to an initially disbelieving public that was used to false promises. When BioNTech, in cooperation with Pfizer, was the first to bring a vaccine, Comirnaty, to market in December 2021, it promised to be the turning point in the development of the pandemic. In fact, BioNTech and other vaccine providers have prevented many infections and, with second and third vaccinations, have helped ensure that many corona diseases are mild. Today, vaccine producers would be able to ramp up production capacity and vaccinate all of humanity. This is in our own interest, as otherwise there is a risk that new corona variants will emerge that may be even more dangerous than the previous ones, especially in countries with low vaccination rates. For March, ?ahin promised that Comirnaty would be adapted to the highly infectious Corona variant “Omicron”.
?ahin and his co-researcher and wife Özlem Türeci are co-authors of the book “Project Lightspeed: The Path to the BioNTech Vaccine – and to a Medicine of Tomorrow”, which is as exciting as it is serious, a triumph of research, development and, no, not information professionals , but nevertheless the perception of InfoPro functions and describes this again and again against all resistance and probabilities. While information professionals are expanding into related areas such as consulting and market research, InfoPro functions have always been performed by researchers and other holders of specific domain knowledge and can change the boundaries between information professionals, researchers, consultants and other specialists from project to project and also within Postpone project phases. It would be time to give these connections more space in our discussions. One of Sahin’s special achievements was that he let Ms. Türeci and the employees of BioNTech do this when they had superior skills and then limited himself to coordination services.
For these reasons, U?ur ?ahin is the “Man of the Year” and “Project Lightspeed” by Joe Miller, U?ur ?ahin and Özlem Türeci is one of two books of the 2022/2021 period.
Frances Haugen
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Woman of the Year and Book of the Year:
Frances Haugen versus Facebook and Maelle Gavet on the tech companies.
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When Open Password chose Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg as its “Man of the Year” in 2010, public opinion was fascinated and positive about him, as well as all social media. The Sunny Boy, who brought significant parts of humanity to his platform and gave everyone the opportunity to communicate and publish with a chance of a worldwide response and to practice coexistence that transcended physical boundaries, was admired and welcomed. When demonstrators against authoritarian regimes coordinated via social media, Facebook and Co. not only seemed to improve the functioning of democracies, but also to promote the spread of democratic forms of government.
In 2020, Open Password took stock of the decade 2020-2011 and summarized it under the title “The evolution and degeneration of the social web”. Facebook and other social media continued to perform their positive functions. However, this was overshadowed by the fact that parts of social media were hijacked by lateral thinkers, populists, conspiracy theorists, right-wing radicals and other irrationalists and were misused by sabotage bots of authoritarian systems to influence elections and to undermine democratic discourse in Western countries. In addition, social media did very little, if anything, to combat these abuses.
2022/2021 could mark a turning point after which the tech industry will be viewed almost exclusively critically by the public in the long term and for good reasons. Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee, went public with thousands of internal documents showing that Facebook deliberately set up its algorithms in such a way that fake news, polarizing opinions and hate messages and thus promoted psychological instability, at least among young people became. This was done in order to keep Facebook users on their website for as long as possible and thus generate more advertising revenue.
Frances Haugen was named “Person of the Year” for the second time after Edward Snowden. With her clear moral compass and a clever campaign to bring the truth to light and disseminate it in a politically relevant way, she is a role model for us. As with Snowden, we also have to ask ourselves how many at Facebook and the NSA knew about the unspeakable things going on there, but there was only one whistleblower in each case.
With the revelations about Facebook, the entire tech industry and Silicon Valley have fallen into disrepute. This is rightly happening if the following facts could be generalized: Telegram is currently receiving at least one call to kill every day, preferably from people who bear a special responsibility for the fight against Corona. On the other hand, that doesn’t mean that Silicon Valley’s managers, entrepreneurs and financiers are any more immoral than executives in other industries. With their profit maximization calculation, regardless of side effects, they “merely” cause greater social damage.
Maelle Gavet’s book “Trampled by Unicorns – The Devastating Side Effects of Big Tech” is the second “Book of the Year” 2022/2021 because it deals with the tech industry, a topic that has become more economically and socially relevant than almost any other , because Gavet, although a staunch critic of the Internet companies, does not forget that they could create a better world after growing the gross domestic product, reducing poverty, life expectancy and literacy, because the author, as an insider, manages to eliminate the extensive lack of transparency about the industry in critical areas and to create a coherent overall picture and, above all, because it makes differentiated and practical suggestions for regulation and the setting of incentives towards responsible action.
These could lead to a desirable social taming of Internet companies without impairing their innovative strength. More on this soon in Open Password.
Read the upcoming issue of Open Password: Review and Outlook 2021-2022 from Open Password’s international partner, Outsell (London).
Berlin Information Working Group
Comprehensive development
with artificial intelligence
Dear ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues,
The board of BAK Information wishes you a happy and healthy New Year and cordially invites you to our first online event in 2022, which deals with the following topic:
Comprehensive development of different media with artificial intelligence –
a lecture by Sven Giesselbach, Natural Language team leader Understanding (NLU) and Lennard Bodden, Research Engineer (NLU), Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems IAIS
The web makes an immeasurably large amount of media available to us in the form of texts, images, audio and videos. Companies also have large, partly analogue, databases that are only being exploited to a limited extent today. Artificial intelligence enables automated analysis and information extraction from data of any form. This makes it possible to derive recommendations for action from large data sets and automate data-driven processes.
In this lecture, which follows on from the lecture ” Analyzing documents faster with artificial intelligence” held at the BAK in February 2021 , Sven Giesselbach and Lennard Bodden present examples from selected domains in which artificial intelligence is used to analyze texts, speech, images and videos is being used. They give short introductions to text and image processing, use project examples to show how it is implemented in practice and take a look into the future about current research topics such as the automated generation of images. Example: AI models from the IAIS allow e.g. B. journalists at ARD have to analyze large amounts of video material.
The lecture will take place on Thursday, January 20, 2022 at 6:00 p.m. via Zoom. The event is free. Please register by January 19, 2022 at bak@ub.tu-berlin.de. We will send you the access details for the Zoom event by email one day before the event.
We look forward to welcoming you to our event.
Kind regards, Tania Estler-Ziegler (Chairwoman of the Board), Berliner Arbeitskreis Information (BAK), c/o University Library of the TU Berlin, Fasanenstr. 88, 10623 Berlin,
http://bak-information.de/
Hate messages
Hundreds of calls to kill in Telegram chats
in two months alone
(NDR) In Germany, alleged individual cases of calls to kill from the lateral thinker scene have been discussed for days. Research by tagesschau.de in secret and open Telegram chat groups now shows that there have been calls to kill every day since mid-November – against people from politics, science, medicine, authorities and the media.
In an evaluation from November 1st to December 31st, 2021, there were more than 250 calls to kill in the chat rooms examined. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg, as Telegram – unlike Twitter – cannot be searched completely, only the channels and chats in which you are a member. Most chat groups are secret and can only be entered with an invitation link. Only on three days at the beginning of November could no call for killing be found in the chat rooms examined where a gallows, a guillotine or a rope was not requested for politicians, scientists, doctors, police officers or journalists.
The calls to kill were spread in both secret and open chat groups, often even under the presumed real name. There was almost never any contradiction, even in large chats with more than 50,000 members. On December 31st, for example, it was said about Saxony’s Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer: “Kretschmer and his mercenaries [editor’s note: police officers] should be executed [sic!] for high treason against the people!!” In another chat on December 21st, a user asked whether he could “shoot” Federal Justice Minister Marco Buschmann (FDP). Bavaria’s Prime Minister Markus Söder (CSU), CDU leader Friedrich Merz, Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD), former Health Minister Jens Spahn (CDU) and the incumbent Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD) are also mentioned several times.
A Telegram chat in which alleged soldiers and reservists exchange information is notable for its frequent calls to kill. The almost twenty calls to kill other people show that the call by mountain soldier Andreas O., which became known at the end of December, is not an isolated case. In a video, the soldier from Bad Reichenhall threatened: “Your bodies will be spread out in the fields.” In the “Soldiers & Reservists” group on Telegram, for example, it was said on November 15th about the then Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer (CDU): “The old woman should be shot down.”
But it’s not just politicians who are threatened. A Telegram chat group also says about a science journalist who was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit last year: “We will hang her too one day […].” In a post that was attached to the threat, the journalist and presenter spoke out in favor of compulsory vaccination.
Just on Monday evening, hundreds of people gathered in front of the ZDF capital studio in Berlin and shouted “lying press” slogans. According to a reporter from the newspaper “Der Tagesspiegel”, the building had to be protected by a police cordon. The hatred towards the media can also be found on Telegram. A user wrote on November 5th: “Maybe we should really burn down ARD and ZDF to destroy their media propaganda machine.” Another user asked on December 11th: “Why isn’t the media burning yet, I mean the buildings […] where the dirt is broadcast?” An article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung is commented on with: “Raise the propaganda shop to the ground. Traitors to the gallows.”
Political scientist Josef Holnburger from the Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy (CeMas) considers the calls for murder to be dangerous. In an interview with tagesschau.de, he says: “People with a conspiracy-ideological worldview are more willing to use violence – we know that from previous research, and have done so for several years.” There is rarely any contradiction in the scene, “also because you want to convey the image of a unified movement.”
FAZ archive
Please forward it or post it
Dear colleagues,
I am sending you our current job advertisement with the request that you forward it or post it (PDF file attached).
Here is the direct link to this job advertisement:
Volunteers (m/f/d) wanted: FRANKFURTER ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG GmbH in Frankfurt am Main (faz.net)
And here is the link to the “Jobs at FAZ” overview page:
https://verlag.faz.net/unternehmen/jobs-bei-der-faz/
Best regards Klaus Makoschey, FAZ archive
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