Ungell dyn ni, Genedex, yn ydy'r gyfariad yw'r iawn yn ystod y dyn ni, yn y dyn ni ddim yn ei gael, a'i neud yng Nghaerfforddwn. Maen nhw ddau. Yn gynnwysu gweld ar hyn ar gyfer y dweud, mae'n ddiwrnod ymlaen o bwysig o bobl sy'n papur o'r un o'r dynnu. A rwy'n ffath gweithio'n ddigon o'r gofod yn gwlad yma'r gwahod dynnu am rwynt ymlaen o bwysig. A'r gw quarter i ni'n gweld du o'r llun cymryd, and we're going to do some of the research that's taking place with it. It's great to see a lot of students using the data. We actually have fewer students using our data for reasons Katie can get into, but basically the access process is much more difficult in the United States. In a way that's not good. I'm not saying that we're not proud of it, but it's slawl and kind of hard. So that's pretty easy to get this data as far as I can tell. Okay so this is the... Social NATO. This is a joint academic government collaboration. Michigan. We've been working together for 12 or 13 years and we've been working together on this for the last week or so. Up until a year ago, it was flipped. Katie was at University of Minnesota and I was going at the Census Bureau and now we're still yma, ond rwy'n gweithio fydd yr unrhyw bwysigol hyffordd o'r swyddad i dyn nhw yw, oherwydd yn i'r llyffr o'r dyddion, os wedi gynnwys ar y dychydig yn ystodau, ac yn y ffordd o'r dynnu'r gweld ym 1 yr 2 bias pan oedd y Ystod iawn yn Ystod, yna'n ei gweithio ar y gennyn gyfrif senseid, ond mae'n defnydd whyddur sy'n ei gwybod yn ysguadau, ar y interpretabwyd yn ei cyfrifio o'r peth o'r Swyddad i dynnu'r fyfan. Basically we use some administrative data in service of our linkage that I think is pretty different from what happens here that I wanted to talk about. And then Katie's going to jump in and talk about the specific infrastructure that we're building. I'll sort of give you the spoiler alert. Our goal for I don't know five years, maybe ten years is to have as close to 100% of every census from 1850 to 2020 link that we can. This is going to be a multi-generational longitudinal infrastructure. And we're, I don't know, three years ago that was just kind of a hope. I think we're actually on the path to where we're going to succeed, but we, there's a lot of work before us. So Katie's going to talk about the state of the infrastructure right now, how people get it. So we are, even though it's a patchwork right now, we don't have all the censuses linked yet. We have quite a few of them. People are using it. And so that's where you can really sort of see how our data access protocols compare to the ones that you already did. And then our goals to finish it. Okay. Oh, so I went to graduate school at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the 90s. I was a data guy. So just, I want, I've been hearing a lot about how hard it is to get and use the data. I want you all to think back. It used to be harder. This wasn't even linked data. This was just micro data. This isn't me, but it may have well been. That's a really awesome computer where he could load those real-time tapes himself. At Pittsburgh in the 90s, I had to send a mount command over the unit's mainframe and then call someone over in a different building and say, I sent a mount command and he would go mount it on it. Anyway, that was how it worked. Oh, and I had a five gigabyte allotment on the server, which was a huge deal. Like they would call me every month and say, are you done yet? We need that space. Anyway, I was actually using that in the 1980 census pumps. Katie on the 90s. But she used the time you surveyed in a similarly difficult way. It was hard. It was torture. Getting this data, finding the space to put it somewhere, analysing it. Overnight, you get a certain number of cycles and it was hard. But it was also hard because this was just cross-sectional stuff. A lot of people have talked about using the cross-sectional data. Because each file had its own layout, its own coding scheme and some files. Men had a sex value of zero and others had a value of one. That's a really easy one. Occupational codes change radically over time. Everything changed over time. And it was hard. It was really hard. And it's something I spent a lot of time doing the grunt work of just getting a string of censuses that I could do cross-sectional analysis over time. And a lot of content. I wasn't alone. Oh, those are the code books from the different. Our Census Bureau made, using confidential data, public use micro data samples from 1940, 50, 60, all the way through the present. I used those, but every code book was different. Every file was different. Getting it on-load onto the server and getting it to analyse it was all a huge challenge. When I finished graduate school, I went to the University of Minnesota. You may know this, but it's called the SAR, here, the sample of anonymized records. These are called PUMS files in the United States, public use micro data samples. It's the same thing. It's anonymized micro data that you can use on your own computer. And I went to work on a project in Minnesota where the I stands were integrated. Where we integrated all the data, we gave the variables the same names over time. So it was called sex in every sample, never gender. We gave the codes as much as possible, the same values over time. And then we're always a one, and then we're always a two. We did integrated occupation codes when possible, although something like that introduces a certain amount of sloppiness that we could just document and make the originals available for whoever wants that original, sort of unharmonized data. So this, I mean, I worked here for 10 years. Cami was there for part of that time as well. And this was, I mean, I think really the process of doing this kind of work in the 90s was so traumatic that it was like there were a bunch of us. This was sort of a mission for us to make this data easy to get and easy to use. And I say that because a lot of people here have been talking about using cross-sectional data. But also I think it's relevant to what we're doing now and what I think you're doing now, which is trying to accomplish the same thing with longitudinal data. It's really hard to use longitudinal data responsibly. And we're trying to make it easier, much like what's done in the past with cross-sectional data. You should know you can go to ifms.org. All of this data is freely available to anyone in the world. And also, ifms International has almost 100 countries that they're a micro-data. I hope you all know.  Never mind. You did it! Look at that! Ifms.org. I'm actually going to talk about that for a second. So this data, a lot of it not only is just kind of hard to use because you had to get the wheeled ships to you and the codes were weird. And a lot of it was completely inaccessible. And this is so, as Katie said, we did this not just for the United States, but for a lot of countries around the world. This is Sudan. I can't remember which year this is. But this is how it works to work. Nobody was using the data. It was completely inaccessible and it was degraded. So we, University of Minnesota employees went there, helped to get this ready, shipped it to a firm in New York City that specializes in recovering data off of old media, sent the data to University of Minnesota, integrated it over time. We have multiple years disseminated freely now. This is public use micro data. This is Bangladesh. It looks like 1980. Same thing, that's mold. This was in very bad shape, but it was all recovered. And this isn't just countries around the world. This is a picture of a project that I carried out in 2007. This is where the US census original data is stored. And we, in the mid-2000s, the Census Bureau had made pump slots, which I already described, that have not retained the original micro data, not all of it.  And we said, hey, can you try to recover it 100% data? Because there's a lot of stuff people are going to be able to do inside the Census Bureau that they can't do with the pump's files. And you can monitor their access. And they have a great system for providing secure access to researchers' data. And nobody had the question yet. So for 1960, 70, 80, 90, the data was on reals. It wasn't even on a disk anywhere. And some of it was degraded, just like the Bangladesh state that you saw. So we got a grant to go down into, this is a cave in Kansas. We worked in the cave for several months for covering old data. Scanning it, it was on microfilms. Scanning the microfilms using, I'll show you. Oh, so there's a microfilm. That's the inside of the cave. Look at that gate. That's where we store our stuff. This is how the microfilms were originally processed. This is the 1960 Census. The Fozdic machine, this was a bubble form. This is how those bubbles were read. They were read optically with this thing that would shoot lights through the microfilm. And this was the modern Fozdic machine that we set up in 2007. Where we would scan the data, get digital images, process it to make a data set. We did that with the 1960 Census. The other files were fully recoverable without this kind of intervention. But for 1960, in the United States, we were down in a cave making a new data set because the original had degraded. In 2010, I went to the Census Bureau. I left Minnesota and I worked on the American Community Survey. It largely replaces the interesting parts of our decennial census. It's an annual survey of one and a half percent of the population. That's got a ton of questions and our decennial census now has very few questions. It's a short form only. I started to work on the kind of things we're going to talk about. Which is linking data and providing link data and secure facilities to researchers. Any questions so far? Sure. I'm going to explain to you that it's hard for us that it access the data but you in America cannot have the legacy that you can't make the data available for 100 years. 72.  So the 1940 Census was released in 2012. We're actually waiting for that. Any other questions? Okay. So there's kind of a big break in... Of course people are linking all kinds of data to everything all the time. I'm going to have a couple slides just focused on linkage projects using decennial census data in the US. So it's narrow. There's a big break in how this is done related to the question you just asked. Everything from 1950 to 1940 is public. Again, I don't want to make it sound simple. It was released as microfilms just like the one that I showed you from 1960. Katie and I were involved in many projects at Minnesota where we typed in samples from those microfilms and made available public use microdata samples. It's great. People use that to do all kinds of things. It's largely in the process, however, I don't know if we're stated or being superseded by full 100% files produced by genealogical companies for genealogical research that, after I left Katie and some of her colleagues wrote for access to her research purposes. So they heard the files largely to make money and they provided them for research purposes to the University of Minnesota. Even with names, they can be shared under usage agreements with data security plans. So that's only been three or four years that's been available and there's really exciting research coming out using, not only using 100% cross-sectional data, because there's a lot you can do that you can't do with the 1% samples we originally made, but linking it. This kind of is preceded to our historian. Even in the 60s, before people were really using computers for this work, there was manual linkage of decennial census data taking place where you would take everyone in Boston in 1850 and try to find them all in 1860. First, by looking at Boston, maybe looking a little further afield. So there was already some of the best research in U.S. social history that was based on linked data, but there were tiny samples, not links very systematically. Just in the past few years when we have the genealogical data, this complete count, it's open the door for automated. Even these automated efforts with complete data, very low linkage rates, maybe say between 1860 and 1870, you might expect to get maybe 10% to 15% linkage, even with the best linkage technologies that we have. And that's because there are so few linkage keys to work with in those old censuses, like we don't have data birth. I'm not sure people knew their data birth. We have age. So it's basically age, name, and state of birth. Some of our states are really big. So the number of unique cases you can get is small. So if you really want high quality links that you trust, you don't get many of them. And that is kind of a nutshell of what is up with linkage during this period until the past maybe year, which is that it's out there, people are doing it, they have the data, they have the tools, and they're linking maybe 10%.  And that's it. So the first part of every article is like, here's why it's okay that I lost so many people in trying to explain and represent this is who you've got, and only been getting to your analysis and understanding the data. Oh, and then also the other approach is to not even try to do everyone, but to do people who are easier to link, like married couples, because you have the linkage keys, you have both of their names. So you can look for them together in multiple censuses and do a lot better. But then you're writing an article about married couples, which is a new kind of problem, because it probably wasn't what you wanted to study. There was here in business, because you can link them really well. But if it wasn't, no. If you want to link women from childhood forward, impossible. Their names changed very hard. So it's only been in the past couple of years now that are bigger and more systematic trying to use more administrative records, so it's easier to do something like link women. Because you can observe them in their birth record and their marriage record and see their name change. Once you have that information, then you can really do it pretty well in the census. The marriage record, you've got that couple, so you have an opportunity again to use more linkage keys and get much better linkage rates. This is just going. Katie and I are both on the board of a project that I think shows a lot of promise for us to finally get to much denser link samples for these years. That's the status of that research. Now, from 1950 to the present, it's pretty different. This all has to happen. This is private data. It all has to happen within the Census Bureau on census computers, census employees, according to the rules of the Census Bureau, which is great. They have a great computing environment, but it's harder and slower, and it's harder to disseminate when you're done. And census, they have a great linkage program, very high linkage rates, usually from one census to another. From the 2000 to 2010, we linked maybe 90% of the cases. And the reason isn't really that it's space age technology, the record linkage. It's more that the linkage keys are better. We do have things like data birth. And we, something I'll talk about a little more, we use administrative records to facilitate the linkage, sort of like they're beginning to do with the older historical data in a way that changes the whole bulkhead. One more point about this linkage here. The Census Bureau started this before I got involved, or Katie got involved, with 2000 and 2010. Those are the, prior to maybe two years ago, those are the only linked decennial census that the Census Bureau, and they didn't do this to facilitate the research. They put linkage keys on these files so they could carry out the census more effectively, so they could use it for missing data allocation, basically for programmatic purposes. They want to link income data from a tax service, from the Internal Revenue Service to the American Community Survey, or to the 2000 census, not so they can do a research project, but so they can allocate the income value so it's much more operational purposes rather than research. So they had a great linkage program they have for many years, but it's not to support people like us. It wasn't until very recently. Did you want to add something? Okay, the last thing I want to talk about is how we do it. So this is focused on that 1950 to the present, the stuff that happens inside the Census Bureau that's really good, where it gets really high linkage rates. I'm going to read all this. This is more relevant in a U.S. context where the question is always kind of close to the surface if it doesn't come up. Like, why do you think you can have all my data? What makes you think you have the right to do this? Because most federal agencies don't. The privacy laws in the U.S. are such that through the data to be shared. For one agency to share it with another, you have to consent this person. You know, that's difficult. There are a lot of people who want to. And a lot of people don't want to. The Census Bureau has an exception to that called the Privacy Act. They have an exception to the Privacy Act where data with fully identifying information can be shared with them if it's in service of their goals. The goals of the Census Bureau which are to produce statistics about the population and the economy. So it's kind of that simple. If they can justify a statistical need for the data, they can request it from any agency in the government, from any state. They can request it, but it's not guaranteed. No one has to give them their data. When our government, even the ability to request it, it's not entirely unique. There's a couple other agencies with this kind of right, but it's pretty special. And what this says is basically the reason they can request data is to make it so they don't have to bug the public quite so much. If we can use this data to create products or to improve value, to improve missing data to add value to our data products in a way that reduces burden from the public, we're allowed to. So we have a ton of administrative data and they started by saying it's mainly for these kinds of purposes, for operational purposes, for making the agency more efficient. Just recently, so we need to use it to conduct research, important social and economic research, which is what we're going to be talking about a little more. This is a sample of the data that the Census Bureau holds. This is in addition to census data and survey data. This is our tax data. This is like housing subsidy data, tenant rental assistance data, childcare support, Medicare is everyone over age 65 and the US gets Medicare, so we have a lot of information about who they are and what kind of services they receive. Medicaid is data that empowers people under age 65 in the data services that they have access to. So you can see there's a ton of data sources that the Census got, almost all of these, originally to support their surveys and make them more efficient and reduce burden on the public. Nevertheless, it's all there and can be used for research that's related to the mission of the Census Bureau. So Kate and I are going to be describing a frame of census records that we've created, but the frame I think it's just that. It's sort of a trunk. These are going to be the branches of the tree where there's so much more you can do when you link it all in. This is all linked to every census that we're going to describe already. So here's how we link. So we have a homegrown software that has a name, but it's like a bunch of SAS programs and a C4 grant and things like that. We call it the person identification validation system. It assigns a unique number to each person. We call it a pick. A protected identification key. And every file where I show up, I have the same pick if we did it right. Unless we didn't stick. That's how that works. So you can easily, it's trivial when the work is done, to find me at every file we have. Because I have the same, I'm assigned the same value on this variable. This is the Census Bureau initially developed this to unduplicate records. So in the 2010 census we had a lot of people to fill it out more than once. And we needed a way to identify duplicates. That's how this started. It's grown from there to be used to support programmatic research and also programmatic purposes and also research. And how we pick data. How we put these keys on data. This is based on the social security number. It's our social welfare program. Everybody is assigned an SSN at birth now. Anyone who comes to the country is assigned one if they have a work permit. Basically if they enter the labor force, if they receive any kind of benefits from a state governor or local government, they receive an SSN. This is not complete coverage, but it's pre-dark close. And that's our frame. If you don't have an SSN, we're not putting a pic on you. So I'll talk about that. That does create a little bit of bias. So we have this big file for SSN holders that has their name, their date of birth, their state or country of birth. To that, we get tax data. And we add their street address, the place where they live, which we have every year because we get tax data every year. So a year specific street address. And then we do some name standardisation and some address standardisation so it's easy to work with this file. We call that the reference file. Every file we get, including the census, we link to this, this thing that's built of social security data and tax data. Because that links you to a social security number and there's a one-to-one between every pic and every social security number. Does that make sense? All right, I'll just maybe go through this kind of quickly. This is how we link. We can't compare every record to all the other 300 million records when we do this. We don't have good computing power. So we do blocking, which is what most people do when they do record linkage. Where you say, well, I'm just going to look within these groups. But we do five different blocks. So the first thing we do is we say, if we get your data with an SSN, which we often don't, like we don't, on the census, we don't see what the SSN is. So we don't always have this as linkage key. But if we do, it's great. Because it usually works. So within that block, within the SSN, we'll go and look at the social security data and say, does the name match? Does the age match? Does the place of birth match? And we'll declare that works really well. Then we'll look within the address, so we'll compare the 2000 census address we have for you to the address we observed in tax data from the year 2000. We'll look at that and then say, does this person have the same name, the same date of birth, the same place of birth? If that fails, then we sort of look nearby. If that fails, you'll look through everyone with the last name that begins with A. For me, we have an A block. So this is how we do. We use all the data we have every time, but it's just a matter of which variable you privilege to reduce the sort of comparisons space. Because we can't just look for every record and compare it to every other record. Too much computation. Okay, I'll try to go through the real class. So this is Medicare data. Like I said, this is a social program that everybody over age 65 can roll in. It comes with social security numbers. And with that data, when I try to put a pic on it, it always works. Almost all the time, I find my pic based on the social security number that I received with my Medicare data. Because those are good SSMs, because you get benefits from this program. People say the thing. They give the program good data because they get something from it. The 2010 census, however, we don't ask SSM but it's that address variable here. Your 2010 census address to the 2010 tax address that we have. And look at the people and see if they're the same. They almost always are. 94% of the time, is that block that's the key to our being able to assign a pic. It's not always the same. It's whatever. Not everyone. People know things happen. But you can see we get everyone, most everyone else, in a comparison space to their first initial at their last name. So we'd pick, as I said, about 90% of the records and these files. These are just surveys that we could look at the census to the decennial censuses that have the whole population. So I'll kind of cut to the chase on this. The pics we assign, we use very conservative techniques. They don't really have errors. They're very small. The links we make are very good links. That is not our problem. Our problem is bias because the links, we only make a link if you have a social security number. If you don't have a work permit, you don't have a social security number. So we do really well with these groups. Good for us. Not as well with these groups. In fact, this group, we don't pick a single one of them. We use our data, our longitudinal data. They're excluded from your analysis because we have no way of linking them reliably. Okay? And this is my last figure. Kind of forget about don't try to read the small words. Here's the takeaway. For us to link a case, we basically have to observe it in our administrative records. If we don't, we're not linking them. This is administrative records coverage. Purple Coverage is extremely high. People who live in these areas we will be able to pick because they exist in our administrative records. People in these areas more immigrants, less English speaking. Much lower levels. They're still high. So this is mostly somewhere around 80 to 90% of the population we can see in our administrative records. This is based on a match between the census data and administrative records data. But I guess my point is that this bias I was describing isn't just by individual level variables. It's a clear geographic bias in who we're able to link because of the way we link. So I'm going to leave it there. Should we get any? Unless there's any questions. I'm going to be difficult. We're supposed to write two sentences then time to file a link. You said about using the same thing. And do you do any other side of the process way? Where they would be still same. I remember. I'm not a fan of that. I'm not a fan of that. The time has been amazing because actually it would be happy to know that this is about one man on a boat with a different concept. So I think we have to work on that. Work on the concept. And we're going to create a new concept. Katie, you want to say that one? I don't know. I was like, great! Yeah, but no. I don't know. No use of response rates. I don't know. There's an undercount. There's also an overcount though, right? There are also people counting twice on that. I don't think it would be a sentence if they don't respond. No, no, no, no, no. It's really high. It would be really small. It's a small. They go after everyone. The sentence is very, very expensive because if you don't respond we go after you. And we kind of know where we are because of the administrative record. I mean that's the deal. 67% is self-responsible. So you welcome the rest of these both? Tons of people are hired. Lots of people you talk to will have been like, oh, I've worked for the census for you. I went to people's houses. They needed a job. They were young. They go and do it. They try to get local people. So you're in your neighborhood. So it's under your neighbors that did it. Yeah, it's really high. It's close to longer. I'm working on the vibe. So it's a basic thing that in the come time it's going to be a little warm. One of the things that you think that would be very favorable for those people is that it's going to be very interesting to the census to be aware of the counts of violence. What did you say? And from that if I understand it correctly those particular areas that I thought the census would be most interesting to open up are those ones that are under representing the administrative records. Yeah. But different than what you just explained that it's very expensive is that we cannot be looking at those at all. I mean, it's just a general question of like surely it must be physically possible to get the other. So what's going on here is that we're not linking and going over time because we don't have them in the administrative records. Some of them are in the census records. They're in the American Community Center. We do not ask directly the citizenship question since I've been here is being added to the short form. We know and on our yearly American community survey they do ask if you're a citizen. We don't ask like but are you here legally? That's not a thing. We do estimates of it in every place. I mean, it's kind of there and it's whether that's important to the Census Bureau or not I don't know. I won't speak for them right here. Don't tweet anything about that please. So I'm going to Yeah. I'm glad Trent introduced us. This is good as you can tell we have a long history. I'm pretty new to the Bureau. Trent hired me and then he left me much like he did at Iphums as well. But we still work together right? A long drawn out history of doing very cool stuff and I'm excited to talk more about it. Like I think we're making our way and doing a lot and that's partly what we're going to talk about. We've been collaborating in different ways through university and government partnerships for a long time. So it's just sort of fortuitous actually how it all worked out timing wise. So and one of the things that we have been working on a lot that we've talked about right, we have this 2010 but the other big innovation was adding is 1940. So the 1940 data became public in the US in 2012. This is an image of it. All of the images went online. This was a pretty big deal. We had a big party when I was at Minnesota right? I mean obviously we all dressed from the 40s because it was cool. So Minnesota has the 1940 data. They worked with Ancestry.com to get it. There was money exchange, there was entry and then the Census Bureau worked with them to get it and then Trent tried to link it into our infrastructure. So link it in, get these pics on it. However right, we definitely don't have us as then back then. And we don't have birthday, which is kind of a big deal on the individual level. So what we use are names and then sex, age, spate and county birth and parents names which is a really big deal for children and where people live. It's a little bit different than these other ones because we, that are classic, it's really different than using 2010. So we had to really change how we do things to try to identify people in 1940. We also really hope that we could do better than some of that historical linkage that Trent was referring to where we get about 10%. Sometimes even down to seven. They're also messy, those older files, they're hard to read, it's really inconsistent that you get names right. So we've changed stuff here to make it work for us. And this is what we got in 1940. So we have everyone in 1940. On average, we got 42% of the population. So not like in these 90s of modern data. So you can see for the children, for the young people, we're getting to about 75%. So it doesn't look like we'll push that there but that's what it is. So it's 75% because we have those parents names. So we're able to use their parents and them to find them. So we are linking 40% of these people into our system. And then we can link them forward. And then as it gets older it gets lower. So here are the numbers. In 1940, we have 53 million cases. So this is a little different than where like your study, which is about 5 million, we have 50 million we can link in. Where that now a pick. When we link them up to 2,000, we get about 26 million who are still alive there. 15 and 20, 10 and 3 million into our American community series. So this is pretty exciting. This was really exciting for us but also really excited in the US because there's a big renewed interest right now in the United Nations. Later life outcomes, social mobility, things like this. So this is going to facilitate a lot of research and that's what we wanted to do. So now we're talking about 2,000 right in 1940, we have a big gap.  We have a big gap. So as Trent mentioned we digitized data for 60 to 90. We have the full long form termos years. In the early 2000s it's restricted data, I'll talk about researchers can use that, I'll show you how. But we don't have names on the digitized data. In most cases we don't address even all that well. Like 30 digitized. It's really difficult and expensive to add names by hand. I mean just doing like, which is why they were not added. When we have names though, then we can put a pick on these and link them to other things. Ding ding ding. What's next? So what's next first is the 1990 census name recovery project. 1990 is sort of the next one, it's the easiest one and I'll show you why. Partly because names were hand written on our forms. We'll show you it. And we have these forms on microfilm reels right now. And most of the other variables are already in the microdata file. So this is what it looks like. This is the form people filled it in. All the names are there. So we need to capture all of those names. And the big key here is that they also have a person number. You can see up top it says person 1, person 2, person 3. That we put in the microdata. So we have that order in the household in our microdata. And the other thing we have is this household ID. So if we can capture the names, the person number in the household ID, we can link them to the microdata we already have. So we did a test to do this and see how much it would cost to see what would happen. So this is, we did a test of two scanners. This is the one that Trent showed you before over there, like the same as the positive and then a new one. The eclipse one, old technology. And what we did is we took 40,000 cases across multiple reels and had people hand enter them into this app. So that was our truth data. So we had just people at the Census Bureau hand entering them. And then we tested out two optical character recognition companies. So right, this is where the image of the computer is grabbing the name and then turning it into letters for them. So we gave them 20,000 cases as training data. And then we took it and we ran it on our other 20,000 cases to test that. This is what we got. We think this is pretty good. I was not optimistic about this. I will admit that.  I mean like I think we got like 6% and we were like screw it and we stopped, right? That's the thing that worked. So these we gave to some like pretty high tech level companies and they got household ID 85% of the time, first name and last name close to 70%. So we think this is pretty good. In the end something else happened that makes this extra good. And that's that we found a digitized list of addresses for every house in the 1990s. So we have street addresses, rural routes, department numbers and we think we can actually use this without any use to identify anyone. So we have a project right now Trent and I with some other people where we're not even using like the names at all and we're identifying people using our administrative holdings there. So using the tax data in 1989 to get with people. So this is really exciting for us. We're really hopeful that in the next couple years we'll be able to share with people. Again it probably won't be where we are with 2000 and 2010 in terms of percent wise but people are really excited about this right? We have another time point. So that's sort of our big infrastructure stuff. I'll talk about our next round and future plans because that's what we've done so far. But now sort of about how we get this data right? So now we have all this data, we've talked about the Bureau can use it, can researchers use it. Well the researchers have been using linked census data for a while. So we actually have linked employer or employee census data coming from the state, our state, the 50 states on employment files linked to business data. So the Census Bureau in the U.S. actually does a ton of business stuff, not just demographic and those have been available to researchers for a long time. Also it's pretty common to use linked data across surveys. Things get a little funnier with the census in the U.S. because they're mandatory to fill out. Which they probably are here too right? Our surveys are optional. They feel like so people opt in to being linked to even let they even have to uncheck if they don't want to be linked across time. That's a really easy thing. Mandatory surveys of census is much more like they're very serious about it. Even though this is completely protected, their names are stripped off, the addresses are gone. You need a lot of permission to use them even within the Census Bureau. Obviously there's some technical issues that I believe to hear which we don't have all of them. But even with the ones that we have they've never been available to external researchers at all. So you had to be a Census Bureau employee to use them. However, it then came along the Census Longitudinal Infrastructure project. So Trent was on the team that created this and what it did is it worked on linking the mandatory response and survey data, just like we did in 1940 there. It integrated this with extra data, the list that Trent showed you. And then using it to sort of create this panel and it's supporting research projects through Census Bureau and academic collaborations to do this. So to do research using it. So this is pretty, it's very this one too. So this is why it's good. Yay, this is great. We had to sell this as good to the Bureau. So actually all research I'll talk about that that goes on with the restricted data has to benefit the Census Bureau. People write like 10 page statements about how their research is going to benefit the US Census Bureau. And basically what we're saying as Census Bureau employees is that we would do this research but instead this academic collaborators are going to do it for us. So it's a pretty big, it's a big ask. So this is why we sort of sold this to the Census Bureau to help them and help with linking. And that started, Census approved it in 2014. That right away there's a group there's a governance board that runs it. Our first projects were approved early 2015 and there were publications out by 2016. So people are clamoring to get this data in the US. I get probably, I don't know, an email every other week asking for it. So this is the core. So you saw that 2010 and 2001 through President in 1940. This is sort of our core of CLIP, the Census Longitudinal Infrastructure Project. But as Trent mentioned this is where what else sort of happens is that we can link in other Census surveys so other surveys that we do at Bureau and we can also link in our administrative records like Medicare, Medicaid and then other data sets as well. So this is even like we have long running panels run by universities. Anywhere where there's like PII we can bring it into the Bureau and link it in. So if you have a small different schools things like that. Also we're hoping and planning to link in that 1850 through 1930 data. So Minnesota recently got a grant to finish or to work on that project to link across Trent and I are involved with that as well. So we will this is sort of our big full CLIP infrastructure that we're building. We have nine collaborative research projects and they're working out of seven federal statistical research data centers and I'll talk about what that is so that's how people are accessing this data. These are the projects you can see in them a lot of mobility migration, immigration so as we talked about immigrant intergenerational incorporation gentrification stuff we've actually heard about here right things that we're doing you guys are doing with the data here as well the samples this is what's sort of going on with the full data we have some different policy impacts loads of people want to do stuff all different across fields across all sorts of social clients. Here was our first NBR working paper on intergenerational mobility that came out in 2016 and it got covered in the news and then Trent and team just had a demography paper published on second generation outcomes of movers in the great migration great migration covered in the news there so this is really exciting for us so part of this pilot project we should show this was feasible and that good researchers coming out of it and that researchers are really responsible and can handle this data and that the Bureau can handle it that's a big part of what we're doing as well so how people access this data and other restricted data it's slightly different than you guys what's going on here but similar as well so a federal statistical research data center is probably like you have here it's a computer lab and there's no internet in there and there's computers that you can work on the data and a pretty difficult units environment but there are US Census Bureau facilities hosted by research institutions so hosted at universities and universities pay a big part of the fee cost for it but the Census Bureau directs all the work in there and there's a Census Bureau employee at all of them that's running them so here's where they all are around our country which is kind of vague I'm the middle one so I run the Boulder REC and work in the middle of America but there are lots on the coast you can see I use to have people out there that would travel all the time fly to California, fly to DC would drive to Kansas City all the time so people go to these places and work with the data there we do not have an option like you have this is very encouraging and interesting to hear where you can like send them code later my people have to go and do all of their work with their body cells we don't do anything as on-site employees we don't get their data ready for them you just get access to the big data files that you have approval to use and you have to run wild with it on your own so it's a little bit different model than here and every project has to have a formal approval process and so as I mentioned most people have a big thing about how it benefits the Census Bureau you also just have a big research proposal like you with the Census Bureau and any other agencies whose data you're using so the IRS or whoever has to approve your project so it takes people like six months to a year to get and part of that time though is also doing going through a thorough background investigation so you mentioned like you had to do like three trainings I tell people to do like a half day a day there's training, you have to get fingerprints there's a background check so you're basically becoming an unpaid federal employee and so it's a costly investment this is like a Census Bureau's making investment this also means we want you to have a big of project so people come in there most people do their research out of there for at least five years plus they get a bunch of papers out there's some pretty high level work that comes out they usually place really well it's good stuff all results are formally reviewed just like they are here it sounds like there are people here on the disclosure review teams we also do that too so everything goes through disclosure there's no intermediary output here you're not allowed to do output analysis outside so it all has to be in the form of final tables so what are we doing now what are we getting excited about well these pilots have been awesome kind of excited but want to do that I mean if you guys know that this is cool so we're trying to get them formalized so that anyone can do it and we can expand access to anyone we're also improving the 1940 data Trent and I have a project recovering some historical tax records in the middle of this period so from 1969 to 1989 so that's pretty exciting we would like to recover the 1960s or 1980 decennial data as well so we're in talks with foundations to get money to go in and scan those images again get names, whatever we can to link those to the data we already have and as I mentioned link in the historical data going back to 1850 1850 was our first micro data in the US it's our first individual level micro data before that the census was just household level with counts of people on household so that's our first sort of individual line one I think you guys 71? 41 41 data delivery improvements public metadata, improved documentation helpful data processing tools we're trying to make it easier for people to get access and then once they get access to the data pretty hard to use it's really difficult in our computing environment since I've been sitting in this room I already leaned over and I was like wait a second once we have all the data on the public file of link data that's anonymous it's been kind of inspiring that's not on the back of my mind it's a little further out but that's there so that was like a big one you said the projects have to benefit the census view one of the conditions we have for you to hear it gives reasons for doing research and it says you can challenge official statistics so you could do research with the LS legitimately to demonstrate problems in the LS would challenging census view be in order to improve in the long run your statistics without common benefiting kind of so we have 13 criteria so we sort of give it to you we say we have these 13 things and we like you to pick some so one of them is like improving our data improving our waiting methods um telling helping with yes like if something is wrong or there's a whole project that's telling us how we like do our geography incorrectly that they think that and that is really their whole project is talking about how the geography is they don't think it represents well like how we do our census geographies is wrong um so yes I think that is in there but we do give we have a list of and one of them is making input like giving information by the population there are some lines that are pretty easy to get and then there are some other things that are a little harder and we that's what we also that's part of the role these FSRDCs and the people working them is to support researchers doing it and help them write these statements yeah I'm not sure which one you're referring to but sure big the well so that the math that I have and that was bad and something purple and I was good what that that was the result of a project like you're describing it took the 2010 census and actually it's desperate to our admin data in those yellow areas where where we had a bunch of people in the census who weren't in the admin data we have no way to represent other than to conduct a census now we can work harder to get more admin data so some states say yes a lot of it is at the state level so we could probably do better and you might be in position to do a lot better than we are if you have more of a better life system of administrative records but right now in the United States we need a census do you find it also to be in the way around that you've got people in the admin data that are not in the census there may be a little bit of that but it's a great question I just watched the IRS give a talk and they didn't get much they didn't find a lot of people paying taxes that were in the census I think there's another thing going on that didn't come up there that could be for you too which is that I don't think so right now our census is a short form so it asks very few questions that's one thing to replicate it's another thing like the long format at ECS which also comes out too to get all the questions there I think from administrative sources not all of them but a lot I think that actually the Nordic countries that do all admin records when you talk to their researchers it's sort of amazing but then sometimes they hate it so like they're talking I do some research on contraception stuff and birth infertility and you can see in their stuff who's going to get contraception if they get it from certain places then they have the records and you're not getting fertility they're frustrated they wanted some survey questions and I can see that that's where also things I think that it could be a loss of research if we get away from all of our surveys it sounds like they're facing that up there right now there's some really great things about it and then there are some really good questions this is part of that because of the cost and the number that they're working on what I'm getting rid of it it's mandated they have to do it it's in our constitution it's a pretty big deal can we switch to sampling if they can't I think they're counting everyone they're not getting away from it there are some cost issues that's another the long form six of the population are long form which was 28 pages of detailed questions we did away with that in 2010 it's just 10 questions to everyone so that's part of what we were referring to but ending of this annual census I don't think it's in the cards in the short term I guess in the UK we had a sort of feasible spine from the national health service so everyone you're a medium of a new side of the national health service if you were born here you were born in the national health service there's not that many people I think we get on so I'm not from national health service I don't know about that which is maybe why I mean you guys have really high linkage rates it looks like I mean we don't know any of that on us the people that do the linkage now it just looked from your numbers like whoa that's you guys have a lot of people yeah just all of them to take as much in the avenue for a time note on so now is it playing this for the 2031 that O&S will use as much as they can for the admin but they'll have a separate survey to sort of calibrate for all the other things stuff and then that survey might be say by percent I'm not sure I can't do the number but just in the same way that the census amount of three didn't make that certainly amount of three and then all the stuff that comes from the admin scales that was feeding to the sort of people in the census didn't that's the current plan but who knows any one more quick question I have just one quick question as in UK such a best way so the linked data right now we're not taking any more pilots if you're in the US we say wherever it doesn't matter right now until we have in terms of getting the restricted data in general you can be you can be anywhere from anywhere but you have to be working in an RDC in the US so if you're associated with one of those universities you can or have a research partner there you can so I definitely I've said this to I have US citizens that live over here that are still on projects right and like come back and have people there I have four nationals that live in the US in our out of university and go in and use the data too so it's like very I mean I think if you really want to do this to find a partner yes it's actually three it's actually not consecutive either it's three years in the last five so that is that is a rule but I okay so it's a rule for you to like go in and access the data so if you really wanted to do something which I can see like or something if you had you can definitely be on a research team with someone who else who goes in and does the data so they do the data work you can talk to them about it without talking about numbers they can do all the analysis and bring it out and you can like write a paper on it and you can be involved in that way too so I have a couple people like that that they're on research projects and they live over here but they're not right there on the papers we're not like telling the Bureau like who can be on the papers but they have a partner over there that's doing their work no a list of eligible partners and we're not a dating service well then if you google Census Bureau researchers or something there is a website that lists everyone who an email all staff at Census and say hey if you're a researcher sign up for this thing and it says your background and you're interested in what you do that's the closest thing you can do yeah like a Census Bureau one because what we say is if people want to be on base they're not in UK or they're not in a that's the public sector or when I say the public sector and actually we'll try and we might do this once and you know and that has got a grant right to me because it's the idea of me acting as staff and it's thinking it's thought because really I like it


That's a cage for your mom.  I don't know what you're talking about. I literally never said that. Literally. Literally. Bovoroniko, you just said it just now. Whatever. Are you even kidding me? Are you trying to mock me? No. When I went like Bovoroniko, you just said it just now. That was definitely mocking you. You're right. You're feisty today. I know. One day. Like someone pours sriracha in your latte or something? I had so much sriracha at lunch, guys. There you go. Now we know. Really a lot of sriracha. Sriracha popcorn. Clear it out my sinuses. There you go. Good for what ails you. I like sriracha noodles. I'm hungry now. I went, I had delicious. Have you guys been to House of Pancakes? The International House of Pancakes? Or all the canal. The Chinese House of Pancakes. Oh, yes. No, I've not, no, I don't, no. No? I've never been there. I know exactly what you're talking about. And I think I went there once. Oh, it's not like out by Stone's Town. Yeah. I went to, no, I've only been to the Milbury House of Pancakes. It's so good. Lots of pancakes. It's not that kind of pancakes. It's Chinese pancakes. I know. It's a joke. Oh. All right. That's the noise that says it's time to start the show. All right, I'm going to hide. Here we go. The Daily Tech News Show is brought to you by listeners like me. To find out more, visit dailytechnewshow.com slash support. This is The Daily Tech News for Monday, November 21st, 2016. I'm Tom Merritt joining me as she does Mondays. Ms. Veronica Belmont, how are you? I'm fantastic. How are you? I'm doing well. Thank you for asking. This is The Daily Tech News Show. The color commentary to your technology life, helping you understand a little more about the technology and the world around you, maybe provoking a few discussions of your own out there. And Veronica is fired up today. Hot like an oven. Hot like we are going to talk about ovens, as a matter of fact. We've got a Fast Company article that provoked a bit of thinking, a bit of thinking, and possibly some ranting on our parts today. But let's start with our top stories. Instagram decided to rip off Facebook Live, its own parent company, and Snapchat with its new features this time. New features starting to roll out Monday for Android and iOS involve the ability to send a direct video or photo message that disappears after the second viewing. So when you post to Instagram Stories, the Snapchat like interface, you can now choose to just like in Snapchat, send those videos directly to friends. And then when they watch them, then they go away. I can't keep up with all the stuff, man. I can't, like I don't know what any of my apps do anymore. But you use Snapchat, right? Not anymore, I kind of stopped. But you know how you can send a video and then also include people as well as send it to your story. It's exactly what Instagram's doing now. Okay. Exactly the same thing. The second thing they're doing is a little more interesting called Instagram Live. Let's you broadcast live video to anybody who follows you. Stream goes away when it ends. There's no saving the stream, no watching the stream later. It is totally ephemeral. Instagram will only send notifications that you're live to some of your friends, the ones that they guess will be interested. And everyone else would need to notice a live tag on your Instagram story bubble to get in there. Instagram will also highlight the most interesting live streams in the explore tab of the stories section. So there's another way you could find it. Features are going to arrive for users over the next few weeks. If you don't see it right away, that's why. I'm curious to know how they decide who they think will want to view your live stories versus not. It's the same way they decide who's people to put up at the top of your feed. You know how it's not chronological anymore? It's like, oh, these are the people you like most often. These are the people you interact with. It's like that. So if people are interacting with you a lot, especially once you've done a few live streams, if they're always watching your live streams, then they'll be sure to get the notification. That makes sense. I guess that makes more sense than just kind of blanket notifying everybody. I remember Periscope used to do that and I found it pretty annoying because I didn't really, yeah, I didn't really want to have to watch every single one of those, but it did actually lead me to discover a lot more than I probably would have otherwise. So maybe you can turn it on somehow and get all the notifications. That would be nice. Yeah, I mean, I would like the choice, I guess, although I probably wouldn't turn it on. I wonder if they're, you know, now that Meerkat is gone, the need for a stream that you can't save was open. Is that something we need, though? Because Periscope members started with a 24-hour period and then eventually added the ability to save the stream in the cloud forever. Feels like I know Instagram's trying to combat the perception that you must be perfect and beautiful to use Instagram and that's part of the reason here, but I'm not sure, I don't know. I'm not sure that there's a ground so all the people who were dying for this feature. I would like to be able, at least personally as the creator, to want to be able to save those videos, just for my own reasons, I guess, but I do kind of like knowing that someone else can't save them, perhaps. That's something that video-wise, I think I liked about Snapchat. Obviously, you can take a screen grab pretty easily, but it was a lot more difficult to go through the process of saving a video. So yeah, it doesn't strike me as crazy, but I always like to have as many options as possible. I like to decide what I want to turn on and off versus having an app decided for me. As you were sort of indicating with the ephemeral messages earlier, it does make it hard to keep up with what Instagram can do and it's a little bit convoluted to figure it out and explain to people like, oh, okay, so these pictures go into your stories, these go into your regular feed, these videos are videos that you upload, they're not live and you can save them, but these videos are live, we can't save those. It's just kind of all over the place now. And maybe that's why I've kind of just shut down and I don't use anything anymore, or I'm just doing less interesting things. Who knows? Well, moving on, Bloomberg reports, Apple has disbanded its division that develops wireless routers like the airport express. Engineers have apparently been moved to other teams, including the Apple TV group. Routers have not made up a significant part of Apple's revenue, so that might have something to do with it. Not Reuters routers. No, Bloomberg reported this one time. This came from Bloomberg, not from Reuters routers. Yeah, I believe that Apple probably wouldn't want to spend a lot of time making routers if they're not selling a lot of them, that makes perfect sense. The only thing that struck me about this is time capsule and its backup service seemed to be at one point something that Apple was very proud of. And granted, you can use time capsule with other devices. You don't have to use it with an airport express or with a time capsule, particularly, but the time capsule has the router built into it. So I'm not surprised that they're getting out of the router business. There's plenty of people making routers. And in fact, I see it as a positive for Apple to say, hey, you know what? We don't need to own every single link in your ecosystem. Yeah, yeah. But I do wonder what happens to some of those services and some of the music services that worked with the airport as well. What happens to those? Will they liberate them or make it easier for us to use them on other devices? I think what it comes down to is just people, there are so many inexpensive options out there that cover routers at this point. And if you buy an external hard drive, that cover things for time machine specifically. Time capsule, is that, I can't remember now how that was different. Was that a separate unit for time machine backups? It's basically an airport with a hard drive built into it so that you could use time machine to back up to it seamlessly. Okay, well, yeah, that's nice to have. But at this point, external drives are so cheap, so inexpensive, it doesn't make a good case for itself. And maybe nobody's using time machine anymore.  You can use crash plan to back up to local drives. Yeah, I do both. Carbonite, et cetera. So yeah, I mean, you don't really need to use it. And maybe Apple's willing to just let that go. No, no, no, no, no. Number one, redundancies. Number two, you have a cloud backup and you have a physical backup. You always have to bubble up. Oh, no, of course. But crash plan can do your physical backup as well as your cloud. Can it? Yeah. It can back up to a hard drive in your house as well as to the cloud. In fact, it does that for free. You don't have to pay for crash plan and do that part. And other things like carbonite and services. We'll also do that. So you don't necessarily have to use, and maybe that was the problem, is people are like, oh, I'm paying for carbonite. So I'll use that to do a local backup. And it's just another feature that Apple might not necessarily need to use. However, the fact that they put some of these people on Apple TV makes me wonder if we'll see Apple TV supporting some kind of Eero-like or Google Home-like device that is going to work as a network hub. Maybe not particularly as your router. Maybe assuming your router is gonna be fine, but some sort of home device could be. I mean, in light of the news today that Eero's going to be working with Amazon's Alexa, that could, there could be some validity to that.  I know, it's like, why did we do this? I'm sure there'll be more. I'm sure there'll be more. What's this for? Symantec plans to acquire identity theft prevention service life lock for $2.3 billion. Both boards of both companies have approved the deal. It's expected to close in Q1 2017 pending regulatory approval. Of course, you best know life lock as the service which alerts customers about attempts to use their identity and the guy who put a social security number in the ads and then got hacked. But it also does training. They train police, governments, non-governmental organizations, retail organizations and identity protection techniques. So this will fold into Symantec's cybersecurity portfolio quite nicely, I would think.  Should, I mean... Yeah, I don't know. Who wants to know? Should we say that? Who wants to know? Yeah, I don't like to say things. I'm not. Yeah, I mean... That? No, it has been debatable whether that is a useful service or not or if it's just credit monitoring on steroids. And that's certainly an argument to have. I think what it has shown is that life lock as a company on its own felt best like a tribute to a wider security portfolio and I would 100% agree with that because do I take security precautions? Absolutely. Well, speaking of security type things, Oracle has acquired DNS provider Dyn which was most recently in the news for suffering a denial of service attack in October. Oracle had been in talks to buy since August and intends to roll it into its cloud computing platform. Dyn handles DNS and other services for 3,500 customer sites including Twitter, Netflix and Pfizer among others. Dyn will keep its employees, products and customers though Oracle said it will review Dyn's product roadmap. Yeah, I feel like this is the kind of story that doesn't really make the top of the top like it is today if Dyn hadn't been DDoSed. Right. Everybody learned about Dyn who didn't already know about Dyn in October when Twitter went down. You know, when you couldn't get to Netflix suddenly everyone went to figure out what was going on and was like, oh, there's this company and they do domain name serving for the big companies. So the fact that Oracle swoops in and buys them looks like Oracle either picking up a bargain because they got hacked or making an unwise choice because this is a company that got DDoSed when actually it has nothing to do with either of those things. Oracle was, as you said, talking to this company back in August, right? I think it's actually more interesting if this has continued to go through in light of that. I imagine there were some pretty tense meetings after that went down. Yeah. And honestly, Oracle probably looked at what Dyn did and said it must have said satisfactory, that's fine. We think you reacted well, we don't think you devalued the acquisition. I mean, we don't even know what the actual amount is officially for this acquisition. So maybe it changed the price but it certainly didn't turn Oracle off of buying them. And I don't think it should. A study called Broadband Competition helps to drive lower prices and faster download speeds for US residential consumers pretty much setting up its findings in its title. It was conducted by the economics consulting firm Analysis Group. This is a group that is very literal apparently because they're group of analysts. And that was the title of their fund study. Their study was funded by a consortium of companies that make fiber network equipment. So I mean, it is in the interest of the people who sell fiber network equipment to have studies that come out that say, hey, people should build more networks so we can sell them equipment. But none of the findings are going to shock you but they do have some numbers here. Gigabit service in a market is associated with a $27 decrease in the average monthly price of Broadband of 100 megabits per second or greater. So they're saying when you get competition, the price goes down. Gigabit prices themselves declined 34 to 37% when there are two companies offering gigabit service in a particular market. And introduction of a fast speed by one company in a market does bring the speeds up. It makes it four to 17% more likely that competitors will offer service that matches that speed. And they certainly start to offer higher speeds in any case. So again, this is not something I would not have expected. But sometimes you need the studies to show like, well, no, we looked and it turns out yes, competition does increase speeds and lowers prices in US markets. I was actually surprised by the four to 17% more likely that competitors will offer service that matches the speed. I would feel like it'd be higher. Yeah, that's a good point. It isn't a huge number. And maybe it's because of the markets they surveyed. Maybe it's because of the time involved because if you do want to try to play catch-up with somebody who's offering gigabit, it could take a couple of years if you don't already have DOCSIS available and if you're a cable company or something. So maybe that's why. I would have liked to see that number be higher too. I cannot believe that their group is called analysis group and they conducts analytic studies. Yeah, well, and their study is called broadband competition helps to drive lower prices and faster download speeds for US residential customers. Like, I don't really need to read your story unless I want to see your methodology, which you probably, somebody... It's like the opposite of bearing the lead. Yeah, they're elevating the lead to the headline. And this is gonna be useful for people who are trying to make the argument that there needs to be some kind of municipal internet or some kind of encouragement of people to bring gigabit to their town because when you do get one service, whether it's the city running it or somebody else, when you do get one service in your town, it helps everybody out whether they want that service or not. Newtonomy has signed an agreement to expand its autonomous car tests from Singapore to Boston. Newtonomy will begin testing self-driving Renault Zoo Electronic Vehicles in Raymond L. Flynn Marine Park and Industrial Park in South Boston. Unlike the tests in Singapore, the Boston tests will only have engineers in the car not pick up the public. And Newtonomy spun out from MIT in 2013. I don't know Boston well enough. Do you know that part of South Boston with the Marine Park? Is that a place where people would need rides? I don't think so. If it's the place I'm thinking of, no. So it's probably for the best that it's just engineers. Yeah, it used to be called Boston Marine Industrial Park, apparently, before they renamed it. And yeah, it sounds like not a ton of people would need rides, but it is Boston, which means it's going to be challenging to drive no matter what. So that's a good place to test some cars, I would think. I think I shot a student film there, actually. Oh, really? I think I had to do the audio on a student film there and it was so noisy, because if I remember correctly, it's under the flight path of Logan Airport. Oh, wow. And it was just very windy and watery and airplany and it was a nightmare. Now in Singapore, they're picking up passengers, but it is in a very small area. It's in one little office park area. I do think that it's harder to get US cities to agree to that, although Pittsburgh did. But maybe that's the plan, as Neutonomy thinks, if we can take care of things near Logan Airport, then it's easy enough to expand to Logan Airport and start giving people rides there. Someone tweeted or mentioned the other day that they requested an Uber and an autonomous vehicle came and also an Uber driver came at the same time. So it was like seeing both ends of the spectrum and the human driver was like, I don't think they came for the same person, but they both arrived at the same time, to the same event. And it was kind of- The human driver went out and slashed the tires. Yeah.   We've got a long ways to go before that becomes common place, but even if there's a person in there just sitting there not touching the wheel and it drives on up, yeah, that's pretty crazy. And it's happening. We get people emailing us like, hey, I saw one and even a few people who've ridden in them. It's great, it's amazing. So yeah, keep an eye on it, just another one. Another one. And Neutonomy, making the return, obviously. They started at MIT in Cambridge right near Boston, have been doing most of their testing overseas and now making it back. So happy homecoming to Neutonomy. And thanks to all those who participate in our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Mark Wilson had a story out last week for Fast Company using his experience with a smart oven called June as a metaphor for problems in Silicon Valley. Now, to be clear, and I think Mark makes this clear in his story, he's not criticizing June as a product in particular. In fact, they found, he was using a prototype and so there were some bugs and not all of it is really working exactly as it was meant to and there was one piece of user error that was his fault. But the short version of his story is it's supposed to make things easy but he was uncertain about when cooking was ready or done and constantly getting notifications that were changing the time left in the cooking made it more complicated. His estimated time of finishing went from 10 minutes at the beginning of his cooking of some salmon to 20 minutes and ended up taking almost 40 minutes which essentially is like watching a progress bar in a software installer or a download where it's like three minutes left, oh wait, six minutes left, oh no, it's five minutes left, like it's just bouncing all over the place. And Wilson points out that most kitchen appliances are one button. You got a knob to turn on your oven, you got a pulse button for chopping, et cetera. If it doesn't work, it just doesn't work. That's all there is to it. June, like so many other things from technology, full of prompts, full of options, he was unclear how to start his toast one time because he had forgot to press a check mark to confirm. And so here's the thing that kicks off for discussion. Wilson writes, June is a product built less for you, the user, and more for its own ever impending perfection as a platform, because the whole thing's based on machine learning, right? It gets smarter the more things it cooks. Is this a common problem in tech? I feel like we are trying to, and I say we as people in the technology industry, are trying to solve some problems that maybe don't need solving. And I think this goes way back too. I mean, really kitchen appliances and kitchen technology have kind of been the go-to to show how far mankind and humankind and women kind have come in terms of our progress. Like if you go back and look at, when you go to world of, what's the Epcot presentation they do tomorrow, the world of tomorrow? The world of tomorrow, yeah. Like all of the technology is centered around making the woman's life more easy by having microwaves and automated toaster ovens and things that are supposed to make you spend less time in the kitchen. And so it's funny that that's become the standard of technology progressing in a civilization in many ways. But at the same time, it's really just easier to develop these soft skills as he says in the article, to know when a piece of food is done. Like actually being able to tell by sight and by smell and by touch and by taste, instead of depending on a machine to tell us when it's done. This sounds very obvious, but at the same time, like a lot of the products that are coming out right now are trying to automate things to a level of complexity that I think makes them kind of ridiculous. And this is kind of one of those defining examples. You're supposed to be able to walk away from it and let it finish cooking for you. But if you don't trust that it's actually going to do that with any level of certainty, then you're actually devoting more brain cycles to wondering if it's working properly. And again, I don't think the June smart oven is unique. Almost every piece of technology that I own has this issue. Every time I turn on a new device, it has to update itself, right? Which is good. We say that. We want it to auto update. But at the same time, you can't just turn a thing with an operating system on and use it anymore. You have to wait for the update. You have, I have had things where I turn on my smartphone and I want to go to an app and it's like halfway through an install because it timed it wrong. And then that install gets paused. And then I have to go in to the app store or the Google Play Store and stop it and restart it. And we're troubleshooting everything. And I think it's an underlying problem with design of electronics and technology is that we haven't fixed a lot of the basics ways they work, but people who make them, the engineers, the designers, all of us, right? I'm pointing the finger right back at myself are so excited and so used to dealing with it that we wave that away. Like, oh, well, yeah, you'll get a couple of buggy notifications. No big deal. But we're used to that. And at a certain point, you don't want everything to act that way. Yeah, this kind of goes back to that protopia conversation we had a couple months ago. Technology makes our life easier, but the problems it creates kind of take that one step back at the same time. So we kind of end up incrementally improving over time, but not as much as we would if the technology didn't cause us so many issues. I had this problem this weekend, the Windows Defender update that I think we talked about last week came onto my gaming PC and broke six. So I had to spend an hour out of my potential gaming time on Sunday fixing my computer and turning off, adding dependencies to Windows Defender so I could use civilization again. So it's just like, I mean, I love technology, obviously, but there's things we need and things we don't need and varying degrees to which we need them. And we still need to learn basic skills. Another thing we talked about, I think in the past was the idea of like, is technology turning us into man babies where we can't do and lady babies. I could be a lady baby. It goes both ways where we can't do, we can't do our laundry anymore. We won't take things out for dry cleaning. We can't go grocery shopping anymore. Now apparently I can't put a piece of salmon in the oven without getting 50 notifications. So life skills are still important. On the one hand, I'm sympathetic with what Wilson's saying about, hey, knowing how to cook and knowing that the sizzle on the steak means that the pan is good enough. Yeah, no, that's important if you want to cook. There is also a legitimate goal of I don't want to learn to cook. I don't have time to learn to cook. And part of the modern convenience is, you know what I don't have to do? I don't have to go down to the stream and get water anymore because I have indoor plumbing and I don't have to get the washboard and the lye soap out anymore. I don't have to take a poop in the woods. Don't have to take a poop in the woods. Those are significant advances that save us time and cause us to be more productive. And so I think it's reasonable to say I would like to have good nutritious food prepared fast and the microwave has brought us part way there, although good and nutritious can be debatable a lot of the times. And it's certainly a legitimate field for someone to try to innovate in, but we're bringing along all of these problems that make it, as you say, erodes the benefits of being able to have that convenience. And I'm not trying to be a crybaby about it. I'm like, if it's not actually more convenient, then it's not useful to me. And I wonder if there isn't just some underlying hardening of operating systems and software that still needs to be achieved before we can really spread a lot of the benefits of technology into other things. I agree with that. And I don't wanna be a hater either. Like I obviously like, I'm not the greatest cook on the planet, trust me. Like I had to like really go out and learn how to do this stuff, but $100 it's a lot of for a toaster oven. It is a smart toaster oven to be sure, but you'd probably save yourself a lot of time and money just learning a few basic skills in this particular case. But it does, if this thing breaks down, what are you gonna do? Like if you become dependent on this device, I'm giving like a real black or white kind of scenario here. And I understand that. I just, I get frustrated sometimes. Yeah, and I think it's because it's not wrong to want technology that makes things better, but there's this, there's a dissonance on the marketing side of, hey, this device will do all these amazing things. Well, and then you get it and it sort of does, but it doesn't really. And then there's the engineering side where it's like, hey, this thing can do all of these amazing things as long as you're willing to troubleshoot every once in a while and set up the proper settings and make sure the configurations are appropriate. And that's also not what most people want. People just want stuff to work. I used a smart grill for a shoot that I did with CNET one time and this was recently actually. And the grill was hilarious. Like it did, it said it would do so many different things. And just the sheer, like not being, we couldn't even turn it on.  We could not get the grill to turn on. And it just kept giving us these voice prompts over and over again. And we're like, sometimes you just want to set fire to something and have it work. And I blame two things. One is operating systems by their design are fault tolerant. And that's why they're great. That's why Windows was an amazing innovation and why I know windowed operating systems wasn't first to Microsoft, but it's why Windows conquered the world because it was fault tolerant and could allow a lot of things to happen at once. But we don't want fault tolerance and a lot of things happening to once in our toaster. We just wanted to do the one thing. Toast the thing. Yeah, or even in our oven. And so we need to get better at single purpose operating systems, single purpose software, as well as networking. I think networking is a whole other issue where networking is, again, fault tolerant, right? When all you need to do is make sure the packet gets there within a reasonable amount of time, it can fail a bunch of times and you can still deliver the packet. When you're relying on networking, to do something like deliver video is the most familiar example to people. That kind of fault tolerance becomes a bigger problem because the packets need to all be there for the video to play. Indeed. Yeah, there's a lot of improvements to be made before we can start walking out of the kitchen completely and having our meal be prepared for us. Yeah, but it's achievable. And maybe the problem isn't that June is making these mistakes. Maybe the problem isn't that these other smart ovens and smart devices are making these mistakes. Maybe they have to make these mistakes. That's how we get there, right? Is you have to put these things out and go back to the engineers and say, no, this is not okay. This is all kind of irrelevant because I'm just going to have my robot butler take care of this for me. So I'm not really sure. Are you, though? Or is your robot butler going to have the same problems? Ah, damn. Too bad. This is going to keep knocking on your door. 10 minutes to salmon. Then 10 minutes later. 12 minutes to salmon. Wait, I thought you just said 10 minutes. Two minutes ago. Well, it changed. It changed. I don't want a progress bar in my desk. So hungry. That's what I said. Meanwhile, all of our information is being observed by everyone. Nate Langson does the text message podcast and he's got something to say about that in the UK. Hey, thanks, Tom. Let me just ask your listeners if they would be happy with hearing their government was going to log everything they do online into a database and make it available for spy agencies and police forces to search it to find out if they've been involved in any criminal activity. Probably not. But that's exactly what's happening in the UK. I've discussed that in detail on text message episode 76 available now at techpodcast.uk or simply search for text message in iTunes. Over to you, Tom. Keep up on the UK. Check it out, techpodcast.uk. Facebook just announced today bringing 500 more jobs to London. So things are looking up on the tech scene there. Let's get to our messages of the day before we get out of here. And our message today comes from Alex in our engineering department. Well, he says the engineering department. This past Friday, he was listening to myself and Jerry talk about the sprayable cement Faraday cages. And Alex says, you were throwing around possible applications but one came to mind immediately for me. I recently worked as an engineer designing and working with extremely high power electrical assemblies for subsea equipment under the ocean, things like pumps, processing, et cetera. Like other large capital electrical equipment, everything is tested regularly through qualification and buildup. Tests like partial discharge testing, high voltage breakdown, have to take place in a Faraday cage. Often, this is like the size of a small room or walk-in cooler. But when you get to the final assemblies that are deployed off of ships, because remember this is a subsea stuff, the equipment gets enormous. For instance, if a company like Shell wants to drop an umbilical cable that delivers all of the data and power to the equipment on the sea floor, it is spooled up and built topside. This site can be just under a square mile. And without a Faraday cage that big, electrical testing has to be done with a ton of background noise.  Often you need the best analysts in the world to figure out what the partial discharge test is telling you with all that noise. This spray-on cement Faraday cage could see a huge boon in terrestrial or subsea major electrical testing wherever you need to throw up a cage to hold testing for a few months while you build up. It'll be interesting to see where they take that technology or if they can get back to the self-heating angle. That was the original project that they were doing, self-heating roads. Thanks for all your great work. You do awesome shows, sword and laser cord killers, et cetera. Thank you, Alex. I wish I knew more about that story you guys talked about that does sound super interesting. Yeah, if you missed it Friday, I mean the short version is they were trying to figure out how to conduct electricity into cement so they could have self-heating roads that melted off the ice. And they figured out that the magnetite they were using made the concrete into Faraday cages. And so now they can use, they can build concrete rooms that keep out emissions and there's even a spray-on concrete version of it. That's neat. Yeah, good stuff. Thank you, engineer Alex for that. And thank you Veronica Belmont for being here, as always. Of course, anytime, any Monday, I mean. SwordandLaser.com with myself and Veronica is a science fiction and fantasy book club. You can join and read along with us. We're having a good time with that. We've got a new episode coming out this week. Anything else coming up? No, happy Thanksgiving to everybody in the States. Happy Thanksgiving. I know in Canada you have it at a different day but here in the States it's gonna be on Thursday. That's a good programming note actually. No daily tech news show on Thursday or Friday but there will be daily tech headlines.  And I said, well, we got so many people subscribed to both. I thought that would be repetitive. So I'm gonna try putting the headlines in, see how many of you complain that it's repetitive because you're subscribed to both. And then that's our little bit of A-B testing. We'll see how it goes. Big thanks to everybody who supports the show and make it possible. It's one of the things I'll be thankful for this year. Patreon.com slash DTNS is our main source of funding. Welcome to all our new patrons including Scott, Robert Harris, Sean O'Connell. And big thanks to people who raised their pledge recently like Piotr Guttaker and Ben Slater. You guys are awesome. Thank you so much for your help. Anybody could support the show in any way they feel they can at dailytechnewshow.com slash support. As I said, we're starting to record our holiday episodes and one of those will be a best of. So if you have a moment from the year that you think that was a great segment, that was a great description, that was a great discussion, go to bit.ly slash best of DTNS and submit it there. So Roger can put it together at the end of the year with our best of show. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We're live Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern at alphagiqueradio.com and diamondclub.tv. And our website is dailytechnewshow.com. Back tomorrow with Patrick Beja. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program. All right, good show. What should we call it? How do you spell that? Gone in Instagram. Oh, that's clever, Darpar Deemer. That's clever. Gone in Instagram. I'm sorry, Dave. I can't grill that. That's good too. Well, you guys are funny today. No progress bar on my toast. Thank you, Parfaits Feridio. Router's not Reuters. Gone in. OK, so we go with that. We have at the top gun in an Instagram. I'm sorry, Dave. I can't grill that. Instagon, no progress bar in my toast. I guess that feels a niche. I guess that feels a niche. Router's not Reuters. You just said that. Wireless, routerless. Yeah, you know, I think in terms of the topic, I'm sorry, Dave, I can't grill that. That is probably the best. Oh, they added new functionality, huh? Neat. What new functionality? Oh, I just hadn't seen the freeze while reading or animations at the top. I don't see that. You don't see that? Do I have like a fancier version of showbot.tv than you do? Yeah, I see it. What's up with that? Oh, because I hadn't reloaded the page since last week. Now I see it. Nice. 10 minutes to salmon. That animation is sweet. Apple goes a different route. Oracle's fine dining. It just toasts. It toasts to Silicon Valley. I think I'm sorry, Dave, I can't grill that. All right. Although, can you really grill? Oh, I guess you can. I'm sorry, Dave, I can't grill that. You haven't given me the tools to flip it over. Table flip. I like my toast, Trevor. It's very oven. It's very simple. I don't use a toaster oven anymore. I just use the oven oven, which I know is probably wasteful. For toast? I use it for toast. Oh, no, I use a toaster for toast. I don't actually ever eat toast, though. Like, I only pull out the toaster when we have guests. I eat toast all the time. You only pull out the toaster when you have guests? Pretty much, yeah. We never make toast. He puts it back in the box when he's done. Yeah, it's down underneath the cabinet. And when people like, do you have toast? I make toast pretty regularly. I make toast with cheese and beef and tomatoes. Oh, that sounds good. Well, not with the less. We I do not own a loaf of bread. You don't? No. Oh, that's right.  Yes, I know. Nor am I a celiac. Thank you. I couldn't remember it. I am not gluten intolerant either. So you just don't own any bread. We just don't eat bread. We have crackers. We have rice. Rice. Well, rice goes without saying, Tom. We don't even really make rice very often, though. I only make it when we order in and I don't want to pay. I have some Scandinavian crisp bread. Like a rye. Actually, that's not true. Like, LA doesn't allow bread. It's just different types of bread. I like flat bread. Like, actually, the only bread I'll eat now is Dave's killer bread. I like Dave's killer bread. Yeah, I like Dave's killer bread. I didn't realize homicidal grain could be so good. I did not know the backstory, a fascinating backstory. Yeah, he writes it on the bag. Yeah, I know.  But really, it's just killer as in good and not killer as I killed people. Although he was close to go to jail, though. He could he went to jail because he almost killed someone. But no, he did not actually go through with the active. I feel like it's a bit of like, like morbid humor in the title of the bread, for sure. Can you say I'll forget the name? I'll just call it Ron Ron. So wait a minute. Was he guilty of involuntary manslaughter? Something like that. Are you reading the story on the internet? No, I'm not. But are you reading the story on the loaf of bread you don't have? No, I'm also not. It feels like it feels like a Netflix documentary waiting to happen. Yeah, making of a baker. All I remember is that he went he was in jail. Dave, Dave was in jail and he got out and he got a job. And now I'm just like forgetting. And let me go to his. It is a redemption story. It is the bread saved the bread. Well, the bread thing is part of his family's business. And he. Look at his today's color, red company, milestones. Where's your story, dude? Welcome back about us. Second chances. Oh, maybe this is it. That sounds like it might be it. Dave Cole, founder. Oh, no, this is just a pledge to help people. All right, I got to go, guys. All right. Yeah. I'll see you later. Bye. Have a good time. Ah, yes. So he. So what? He poisoned someone with his bread? No, no, he basically got into a lot of trouble as a kid and got hooked on drugs and was dealing and he just basically did a lot of. Beanie, theft, stronger robbery and stuff. So it's red bread redemption, says not. Yeah, but his his it's like a family recipe that like his family was in already bakers and his brother, his brother took over the business and I guess his brother took him in, you know, to help put him on the right track. It's really interesting. It's I is it a Bay Area thing? Because I'm not familiar with it, to be honest. I also thought this guy was like from the Northwest, Pacific Northwest. Where do you find it? Dave's killer bread dot com thing. I buy it at Costco. And they sell it at Safeway here, but Milwaukee, Milwaukee, Oregon, sorry. Yeah, it's an Oregon thing. OK, makes sense. Killing people with grain since 1908. Wow. No. It's really good bread. It's actually I never thought I would say this, but like compared to the other stuff you get to supermarket that all that tastes just like paper shavings. This actually tastes like real good bread. Well, we don't we don't ever buy the paper shaving stuff either. So I don't know. I don't think they have Dave's killer bread. I'll have to look next time I go. I mean, because we don't go to Costco. We go to rock here. Here's here. I'll I'll send you this so you can read up on it. The modern farmer in 1955, Jim Dahl, a Navy veteran and seventh day Adventist opened Midway Bakery in Portland, Oregon. He served donuts. This is done in a comic book style presentation. The 60s, Jim began to began to focus on organic breads and created a sprouted wheat loaf. He named. Oh, yeah, it's all it's like a like a comic book. Well, I mean, a comic book, like the art. Dave hated working at the baker with his dad, so he fought with his father all the time. Start smoking cigarettes, a gateway to a juvenile miscreant behavior and getting high in his teens. No, this memoir he wrote, the strongest memories I have for my childhood were those of contemplating suicide. He bid a bunch of things, including getting into meth, broke into a house and was arrested in 87. Basically, it was a. Well, by this time, hopes of helping his brother, Glenn Dave, got a job at the bakery in 1989. But by this time, Dave was carrying a sawed-off shotgun under a trench coat and kept meth hidden under the hood of his car. Like he just got into a bad way until he had brought him in prison. But the he got diagnosed as bipolar and I mean, it's there's a lot of a lot of that where people are not either diagnosed or caught with bipolar disorder. Nick with a C says this is all written on the bread packaging. I don't know. Is that all is this all usually on the bread? Because we're reading it on the modern farmer. I think there's a website link on the bread. That that's. But they don't try to pack all this in on the big.  It's really good bread. I I don't often like like most food products for me all taste the same, like, especially when it comes to staples like like sriracha and bread. Usually tastes the same to you. Yeah, you know, sriracha is not the tastiest hot sauce, but it's good, you know. OK, all right. It's like mayo, like I'm sure they're really fru fru varieties of mayo, but best foods is fine enough for me. Dark horse comics. Hmm, interesting. Milwaukee, Oregon. But you're so what you're saying is this this bread tastes really good. Yeah, it's really good, which people in Europe would be like, oh, so you have one loaf of bread that tastes good. Well, I would say it's one of the most mass produced bread that tastes good. Right. And I know I'm sure there are plenty of others. The thing is like, like I like it because it's it's just your standard sliced bread. So you can make a sandwich out of it, you know. The only the only thing that does bug me is there's so many seas and stuff because my kid runs around with a half like a little half of slice and show like it's like Johnny Appleseed except their little seeds from the loaf. I see. It's all in the crust. All this. Yes. Yeah. And some of it's inside. I think it's in the loaf bread. That's just good. Some of it is in our hearts and it's here the whole time. That's true. Toast can never be bread again. And you know what? You cannot uncook rice once you cook the rice, it's cooked. You don't you cannot uncook the rice. Do you understand what I'm saying? Yo, I understand what you're saying. You cannot uncook the rice. It's a you can't cook the rice, Tom can uncook it. It's part of the part part of the birds and the bees. Once the rice is cooked, you cannot uncook it. You understand. Not exactly where I thought you were going with that. Yes, I still understand. Yes. How's it coming with the segments? With the good. I have I saw we had a little more in there. We have a few more. I have not looked at the new one since last week. Good. Good. I haven't looked at them or no. I'm glad there's more waiting for you. It's great. And we've had some offers for help, which is good. Yes. I saw one. I saw one. I wasn't sure about if there were more. Yeah, no, I totally, totally appreciate it. I don't eat bread. Let me tell you what. You know what? Bread's great. I see you. It's good.  It's fine. You just eat it when it isn't totally hussed out from from its. Well, the thing about whole grain rice is that you get more out of it. It's not so much that white rice is bad for you. It's not that brown rice is better for you. You just get more nutrients out of it. You can count it as a whole grain. You can't count white rice as a whole grain. So you're getting more, more stuff. It's like eating the peel of an apple, which I think everybody does now, but I remember growing up, there was always a thing about, oh, you should eat the peels. The peels have the vitamins. Yeah, but who like, I can never say the skin off. The only people I knew who cut the skin off were people with braces. Yeah. Well, you kind of have to then. That makes sense. In that case, I just say, why don't you just eat applesauce? Pork chops and applesauce. Christopher Knight on the Brady Bunch. Yes. Johnny Bravo. Was that his rock and roll name? Johnny Bravo. I think so, but that wasn't the pork chops and applesauce thing. That's, you know, that's when he was trying to become an actor. Yeah. And then there's the goofball one where they became the silver platters. Keep on. Keep on. Keep on. All right. We have now published the show. Thank you all for joining us today. Oh, I'll need the, uh, the paste bin. If you have it. Beatmaster. Beatmaster has delivered the paste bin. I will pass it along to you. And then we will return tomorrow. For another broadcast day. Goodbye.