This story is the introduction to MIT Technology Review’s series on AI colonialism, which was supported by the MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellowship Program and the Pulitzer Center. Read the full series here. My husband and I love to eat and to learn about history.

This story is the introduction to MIT Technology Review’s series on AI colonialism, which was supported by the MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellowship Program and the Pulitzer Center. Read the full series here. My husband and I love to eat and to learn about history.

Sometime last week, an editor who semi-ghosted me on an article I wrote several months ago texted me saying she wanted to talk. I didn’t want to talk to her because my mild annoyance had faded to almost nothing and the idea of hearing an apology felt wearying.

Around the world, two billion people eat insects regularly. In the US and Europe? Not so much. But, some entrepreneurs think it’s time. We take a tour of the startup cricket farms trying to kickstart a new industry, and sample some insect snacks ourselves.

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This story is part of our special coverage, The News in Crisis. When Republican Steve King beat back Democratic challenger Kim Weaver in the race for Iowa’s 4th congressional district seat in November, The Washington Post snapped into action, covering both the win and the wider electoral trend.

Theory for the Anthropocene Roy Scranton, Stephanie Wakefield and McKenzie Wark

Our world is changing. Rising seas, spiking temperatures, and extreme weather imperil global infrastructure, crops, and water supplies. Our greatest enemy, it turns out, is ourselves. The warmer, wetter, more chaotic world we now live in—the Anthropocene—demands an intensive rethinking of the project of our species-being.

Might the various traditions of critical theory be a resource for thinking the Anthropocene? This is the topic that Roy Scranton, Stephanie Wakefield and McKenzie Wark attempt to broach in this event.

Author, journalist, Iraq war veteran, and Princeton Ph.D candidate, Roy Scranton's journalism, essays, and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Boston Review, Contemporary Literature, and elsewhere. His book, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene has just been published by City Lights.

Stephanie Wakefield is co-founder of Woodbine, in Ridgewood, Queens, and a geographer at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is currently finishing a book on oysters and the 'becoming infrastructure of nature/becoming nature of infrastructure,' and teaching Urban Environmental Studies at Queens College.

McKenzie Wark is the author, most recently, of Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (Verso Books), and teaches in Liberal Studies at the New School for Social Research

This event was sponsored by Liberal Studies, The New School for Social Research

Video by Public Seminar www.publicseminar.org | @PublicSeminar

Friday, October 23, 2015 Wollman Hall, Eugene Lang College 65 West 11th Street Room B500, New York, NY 10003

Photojournalism can be like “trying to play Rachmaninoff while wearing boxing gloves,” as former photojournalist Simon Norfolk put it.

Gerard Baden-Clay

Mr Baden-Clay's lawyers say he is devastated and will vigorously defend the charge.

— ABC Online, 13 June, 2012

The ABC's lawyers insisted on pixelating Mr Baden-Clay's image after he was charged with murder, when many other media outlets didn't. But if you sincerely want to protect someone's identity, that device won't wash any more.

Welcome to Media Watch, I'm Jonathan Holmes.

First tonight, an issue that is going to force media companies in Australia, and perhaps worldwide, to change the way they do things.

About a year ago, Google introduced a new feature to their desktop search engine. They called it Search by Image. And it sounded harmless enough...

Wouldn't it be great if you could use an image to start your search on Google? Now you can, with Search by Image. Whether your image is from the web, or your last vacation. You can search places, art, and even mysterious creatures, by just one picture.

—google.com/insidesearch

Basically, you just drag an image from the web, drop it into Google Images, and it will do its best to identify it. And its best is very good indeed.

When the tool first came out, a few people pointed out how these reverse image search engines - and Google's isn't the only one - could be useful to journalists.

For example, Briton Paul Bradshaw in his

ONLINE JOURNALISM BLOG

The service should be particularly useful to journalists seeking to verify or debunk images they're not sure about.

— Online Journalism Blog, 15th June, 2011

Read Paul Bradshaw’s blog

Bradshaw gave this example:

OSAMA BIN LADEN IS DEAD

— Online Journalism Blog, 2nd May, 2011

This gruesome image was used by many mainstream media outlets on the day Bin Laden was killed. But, said Bradshaw...

It took me all of 10 seconds to verify that it is a fake - by using TinEye to find other instances of the image,

— Not the Online Journalism Blog, 2nd May, 2011

Read Paul Bradshaw’s blog

Tin Eye is another reverse image search engine - but it's nothing like as widely used as Google, and it's not as powerful either.

And because of that, Google's Search by Image has a much more serious downside for the media: it makes this convention almost meaningless...

Australian man Paul 'Doug' Peters arrested...over Madeleine Pulver collar bomb hoax

— Telegraph Online, 16th August, 2011

That was in Sydney's Daily Telegraph last August. This was in the Sydney Morning Herald...

Arrested...Paul "Doug" Peters. The image has been pixelated for legal reasons.

— Sydney Morning Herald, 16th August, 2011

A bit of a formality. Peters's image had been all over the papers for days.

But he'd just been charged, so to publish his picture from then until his trial might have been in contempt of court.

But anyone who wanted to could have taken either of those online stories... clicked on the image...dragged it into Google Images...and up would have popped numerous unpixelated images of Peters, complete with texts identifying him.

In that example, the media were doing the minimum to stay within the law.

But sometimes they genuinely want to conceal someone's identity.

We were tipped off to this problem by a couple of viewers who'd read a story last week in The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald online.

Both websites published a pixelated image of someone who'd given them information, but who didn't want to be identified.

But it took our tipsters just seconds to find the source's identity using Google's Search by Image.

As one of them said, the informant is...

...not exactly Deep Throat, but it nevertheless seems anyone who has photos online with their real name attached ... ought nowadays think twice before speaking to the media "anonymously"

— Media Watch Tipster, 3rd July, 2012

We sent some questions to Darren Burden, National Editor-in-Chief of Metro Fairfax Media. He was alarmed...

This is a search feature which has some serious implications for the digital news industry and pixelation techniques.

— Darren Burden, Editor in Chief, Metro Fairfax, 5th July, 2012

Read Darren Burden’s response to Media Watch’s questions

And in a later email...

I would think that barely any publisher know(s) about this worldwide - it was the first time I had seen this issue.

— Darren Burden, Editor in Chief, Metro Fairfax, 6th July, 2012

Google's algorithms are amazingly powerful. Its image search doesn't rely on the metadata - the invisible coded tags that are attached to most images on the web. And it works with very little visual information.

For example, here's a heavily pixelated image of me, stripped of metadata. There's not much background to go on. But Google effortlessly matches it to the picture on the Media Watch website - and up pops my name and biography.

We've tried the technique on pixelated pictures of all kinds of people whom media outlets - including Media Watch - have agreed not to identify.

So long as the same or a similar picture has appeared somewhere on the publicly-accessible internet before, Google will find it, along with any information that might have gone with it.

So what are the consequences for the media? Darren Burden tells us that as far as Fairfax Media is concerned...

Fairfax has added processes to check this, but I wonder how much responsibility Google should also take?

— Darren Burden, Editor in Chief, Metro Fairfax, 9th July, 2012

The answer to that, it seems, is none. We asked Google to comment.

Our question was sent to Google HQ in Mountain View, California. And what we got back was regurgitated PR guff

Think about all those vacation photos you have of buildings or monuments whose name you can't remember when you get home...

— Google spokesperson, 9th July, 2012

Read Google’s response to Media Watch’s questions

Gee, that's helpful, isn't it?

The courts and the mainstream media will have to work out what all this means for cases where the law is involved.

But the media is now on notice: if it really wants to conceal someone's identity, it can't just lightly pixelate a picture that's already appeared anywhere on the web.

It’s an age of unprecedented, staggering technological change. Business models are being transformed, lives are being upended, vast new horizons of possibility opened up. Or something like that. These are all pretty common assertions in modern business/tech journalism and management literature.

Then there’s another view, which I heard from author Neal Stephenson in an MIT lecture hall last week. A hundred years from now, he said, we might look back on the late 20th and early 21st centuries and say, “It was an actively creative society. Then the internet happened and everything got put on hold for a generation.”

As part of our research on explanatory journalism, we’re interviewing experts in fields outside journalism about their approaches to explaining complex systems to non-specialtists.

Our first expert is cognitive linguist George Lakoff, who did groundbreaking research on the embodiment of thought and language and the way people think using metaphors. For Lakoff, language is not a neutral system of communication, because it is always based on frames, conceptual metaphors, narratives, and emotions. Political thought and language is inherently moral and emotional. The basic phrases journalists use every day—words like “liberty” “freedom” “immigrant” “taxes”— are essentially contested concepts that have radically different meanings for different Americans.

Lakoff came up with a widely influential framework for understanding American politics, contrasting the “strict father” morality of conservatives with the “nurturant parent” morality of liberals.

Journalists are coping with the rising information flood by borrowing data visualization techniques from computer scientists, researchers and artists. Some newsrooms are already beginning to retool their staffs and systems to prepare for a future in which data becomes a medium. But how do we communicate with data, how can traditional narratives be fused with sophisticated, interactive information displays?

Watch the full version with annotations and links at datajournalism.stanford.edu.

Produced during a 2009-2010 John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University.Cast: Geoff McGhee

What bad writing has to do with war casualties and traffic over North America.

It’s no secret we have a data visualization fetish, but that’s not just because we like looking at pretty pictures; it’s because we believe the discipline is an important sensemaking mechanism for today’s data deluge, a new kind of journalism that helps frame the world and what matters in it in a visual, compelling, digestible way. Stanford’s Geoff McGhee, an online journalist specializing in multimedia and information design, tends to agree. His excellent Journalism in the Age of Data explores data visualization as a storytelling medium in an hour-long film highlighting some of the most important concepts, artists and projects in data visualization from the past few years.

Journalists are coping with the rising information flood by borrowing data visualization techniques from computer scientists, researchers and artists. Some newsrooms are already beginning to retool their staffs and systems to prepare fo

It Felt Like a Kiss started life as an experimental film I made for the BBC last year. My aim was to try and find a more involving and emotional way of doing political journalism on TV. I decided to make a film about something that has always fascinated me - how power really works in the world. To show that power is exercised not just through politics and diplomacy - but flows through our feelings and emotions, and shapes the way we think of ourselves and the world...

It Felt Like A Kiss - the show - will be a walkthrough experience. Groups of nine people will go to an office block in central Manchester. They will then get in a lift. They will step out and then walk through the world and the ideas of the film. They will then go beyond that into the dark - but I don't want to say too much about that.

This is a short introduction to the world the audience will enter. It is like a background or a pre-story to the world of both enchantment and menace that they will discover.