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Science Friday

Anonymous Data, Birding Basics. July 26, 2019, Part 1

Science Friday

Science Friday and WNYC Studios

Life Sciences, Wnyc, Science, Friday, Natural Sciences

4.4 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 26 July 2019

⏱️ 46 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Science Friday Book Club is buckling down to read Jennifer Ackerman’s The Genius of Birds this summer. Meanwhile, it’s vacation season, and we want you to go out and appreciate some birds in the wild. But for beginning birders, it may seem intimidating to find and identify feathered friends both near and far from home. Audubon experts Martha Harbison and Purbita Saha join guest host Molly Webster to share some advice. They explain how to identify birds by sight and by ear, some guides that can help, and tips on photographing your finds. Plus the highlights of summer birding: Shore bird migration is already underway, and baby birds are venturing out of the nest. We challenge you to get outside to see your local clever birds in action! Join the Science Friday Bird Club on the citizen science platform iNaturalist.  In this era of the Equifax breach and Facebook’s lax data privacy standards, most people are at least somewhat anxious about what happens to the data we give away. In recent years, companies have responded by promising to strip away identifying information, like your name, address, or social security number.  But data scientists are warning us that that isn’t enough. Even seemingly harmless data—like your preferred choice of cereal—can be used to identify you. In a paper from Nature Communications out this week, researchers published a tool that calculates the likelihood of someone identifying you after offering up only a few pieces of personal information, like your zip code and your birth date.  Dr. Julien Hendrickx, co-author of the study out in Nature Communications, joins guest host Molly Webster to discuss the risk of being discovered among anonymous data. And Joseph Jerome, policy council for the Privacy and Data project at the Center for Democracy and Technology, joins the conversation to talk about whether data can ever truly be anonymous. Plus, the Ebola crisis in the D.R.C. is now the second biggest outbreak on record. That, and other science stories in the news this week.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

This is Science Friday. I'm Molly Webster. Ira Flato is away. Later in the hour, the risk of being

0:06.1

identified among anonymous, supposedly, data. But first, the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic

0:13.2

Republic of the Congo has now infected 2,600 people and claimed more than 1,700 lives. It's the second biggest outbreak on record.

0:23.7

It's also been tough to treat because health workers have been attacked, some have been

0:27.8

shot and killed, by armed groups in the country.

0:31.4

At least one Ebola treatment center now has barricades and snipers to protect those

0:35.2

inside.

0:36.2

And this month, the World Health Organization

0:38.2

declared the outbreak, quote, a public health emergency of international concern. Here to explain

0:44.4

what this means is Sophie Bushwick, technology editor at Scientific American. Hello, Sophie.

0:49.7

Hi. So tell me what prompted this latest declaration by the World Health Organization?

0:55.5

So the reason that they've chosen now, so this outbreak has been going on for about a year,

1:00.8

and the reason they're now declaring it of international concern is because there was a case in a border city.

1:08.1

So it's been in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and there's been at least one

1:13.5

case in a border, a city that's on the border with Rwanda. So that really emphasized the danger

1:19.0

of this spreading internationally. And because it's been a tough outbreak to fight, the idea is

1:24.4

making this declaration will encourage other nations to put their resources

1:28.3

towards financial resources, but also security forces to protect health workers.

1:34.3

How often do they make a declaration like this?

1:37.3

I'm not sure. I think in this case, it's not a particularly common declaration to be made, but it is fairly common for a disease

1:47.8

to be an international problem. We live in a really connected world now, and often diseases

1:54.1

jump borders, and you can see this with the spread of less scary diseases in some ways as well.

...

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