Andreas Kechagias – Pike & Hurricane

Greek Tragedy – The Next Act

Andreas Kechagias — Sat, 31 Jan 2015 21:55:35 +0000

2015 is shaping up to be one of those years for Greece. As it continues to plummet from one crisis to the next, the country finds itself, once again, in the international spotlight as the snap election on January 25 rekindles concerns over its relationship with the rest of Europe. SYRIZA (Coalition of the Radical Left), a party that before the debt crisis earned no more than 5% of the vote, has just swept the election with 36.3%, placing its leader, Alexis Tsipras, in the position of Prime Minister. But while most of the international commentary focuses on the 41-year-old’s fiery rhetoric and the possible shifts in policy planned by his new government, the real danger lies not in what he might do, but in what he might not be able to.

The just-formed coalition government, an unlikely marriage of convenience with the nationalist Independent Greeks, a party with which SYRIZA agrees on precious little other than their common opposition to austerity policies, runs a high risk of fracturing under the pressure of the decisions it will have to make in the coming months, making new elections necessary very soon. While this is nothing new for Greece, where, for the past two decades, early elections have been the norm rather than the exception, Tsipras’ attempt to govern will be marked by unique challenges, linked to the history of the Greek political left, and SYRIZA’s implausibly meteoric rise.

Since the re-establishment of democracy in 1974, Greek politics have been dominated by two parties: New Democracy (ND), situated on the center-right, and the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) on the center-left. These two parties have alternated in power for three decades, forming majority governments, as they each consistently gained close to or over 40% of the vote, with no need to cooperate, either with each other or with any of the other political parties. The decision to vote for one of the smaller parties was therefore decoupled from any chance that the party would have a say in policy, and became a gesture of protest, or an attempt to ensure that a particular social agenda, either conservative or progressive, had a voice in parliament.

Having been outlawed during the rule of the military junta, parties on the far left of the political spectrum have always held an air of revolutionary romanticism in Greece, combined with an underdog, anti-establishment attitude. At the same time, they experienced constant infighting, as the narrow share of the votes left available by ND and PASOK forced coalitions between wildly differing ideologies. In order to pass the 3% threshold that allows entry into parliament, civil libertarians, social progressives, greens and hardline communists have, in more than one occasion, found themselves inside the same political unit. SYRIZA is but the latest iteration of such a disjointed coalition.

After the fall of the Soviet Union caused the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) to eject all but the most diehard communist elements from its ranks in the early 1990s, coalitions with essentially the same limited political base formed, fractured and reformed a number of times. All of these efforts revolved around the largest and most powerful of these small groups, Synaspismos (Coalition of the Left), which served as their core. In 2004, Synaspismos signed an agreement with the Renewing Communist Ecological Left (AKOA), the Internationalist Worker’s Left (DEA) and other smaller leftist and communist groups, forming SYRIZA. The group managed to gain entry into parliament the same year with 3.3% of the vote, and moved to earn 5% in 2007 and 4.6% in 2009.

And then came the crisis, causing the Greek economy to contract by 25% between 2009 and today, handily beating the record set by the Great Depression of the 1930s and throwing the country’s political system into utter disarray. The succession of multi-party coalitions created under the pressure of the crisis were predictably chaotic in their attempts to guide the country out of its predicament, leading to a fundamental reordering of the political landscape during the 2012 national elections.

PASOK, which had won the 2009 election based on a program promising further increases in government spending, received the brunt of the public’s outrage, dropping from 44% to 12%. Disillusioned voters moved in one of two directions. Some chose to protest by voting for a slew of smaller parties that had never entered into parliament, resulting in the otherwise inexplicable rise of an Athenian street gang named Golden Dawn to national prominence. Most of them voted for SYRIZA, which was propelled from 4.6% to 26.9% and was only narrowly defeated by ND.

Tsipras, suddenly finding himself the leader of the main opposition party, was faced with the monumental task of transforming SYRIZA’s contrarian agenda into a substantive governing proposal, consistent with his new, much broader and more mainstream political base, while also trying to maintain cohesion within his coalition. Hyperbolic proclamations about unilateral debt write-offs and the possibility that Greece could be better off outside the European Union begun to be phased out, replaced by somewhat more plausible, if equally blusterous, lines about a tougher stance in debt negotiations, or the spearheading of a pan-European policy shift in coordination with sister organisations around Europe.

Which brings us to today, with victorious Tsipras set to be sworn in as Prime Minister of a tenuous anti-austerity coalition government, created together with the right-wing Independent Greeks. Both parties having acted as junior coalition partners since the start of the crisis, right-wing LAOS and left-wing DIMAR, have paid a heavy political price for their involvement, losing more than half of their electoral strength in subsequent elections. This will undoubtedly weight on the mind of Independent Greeks, exacerbating tensions as two parties with diametrically opposed ideologies try to govern together.

More importantly, while in 2013 he moved to consolidate his power by successfully transforming SYRIZA from a coalition to a unitary party, Tsipras remains constantly challenged and undermined from within his own ranks. The Left Platform, a hardline bloc that controls more than thirty percent of the party’s central governing body, and its leader, Panagiotis Lafazanis, have been vocally opposed to any attempt to court the political center, seeing it as a betrayal to the party’s founding ideals, or otherwise put, “becoming PASOK”.

It is unclear what the future holds for Greece. With its economy barely showing signs of recovery, political deadlock could jeopardise what little progress has been achieved in the past six years. What is more, the possible implications move beyond its own borders, as the European Union as a whole remains in the throes of a recession, and is faced with tough political questions regarding its very nature. Alexis Tsipras could be the monkey wrench in the gears that causes the entire apparatus to collapse. Or he could possibly mark the beginning of a shift towards a different approach to the problems plaguing Europe. Time will tell. But there’s another possibility. That, once in power, he will be able to complete his transformation, from a firebrand of the far left to the most comforting thing of all: just another politician.

By Andreas Kechagias

Image credit:

Picture 1: Thierry Ehrmann, licensed under CC BY 2.0

Picture 2: Sheila, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

Picture 3: Jan Wellmann, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The post Greek Tragedy – The Next Act appeared first on Pike & Hurricane.

Viral Misinformation

Andreas Kechagias — Fri, 28 Nov 2014 12:13:01 +0000

The possibility of a devastating epidemic seems to have been weighing heavily on the public mind for the past few years. Whether it is the swine flu, the bird flu, or the current outbreak of Ebola, fear that a deadly pathogen is going to slip past our careful precautions seems to lurk at the back of our collective psyche, aided by mass media happy to blow any threat out of proportion. But while the focus has been primarily on preparing for some newly mutated deadly critter arriving from some exotic locale, old foes have been making a dramatic comeback in unexpected places.

Outbreaks of preventable diseases, like polio, measles and the whooping cough, remain common in the developing world. A combination of economic constraints, poor health care infrastructure and, in a number of cases, fundamentalist groups that take violent action against vaccination efforts, have allowed these maladies to survive in Sub-Saharan Africa, Central and South-East Asia decades after they could have been eradicated. However, one wouldn’t expect to find infection clusters in, say, the most exclusive neighborhoods of Southern California. Surprisingly, one would be wrong.

Anti-vaccination movements are not new in Western societies. Historically their roster has been populated by those that refused medical treatment on religious grounds, or civil libertarians who opposed mandatory vaccinations, seeing them as governmental overreach. But in recent decades there has been a fundamental shift, bringing new momentum by drawing support from a different source altogether: New Age suburbanites.

Anti-corporatism and dedication to “all natural” alternative remedies, both central tenants of the New Age movement, have put it at ends with the practice of vaccination. Opposition ranges from seeing them as unnecessary, ineffective snake-oils, marketed as essential by big pharmaceutical companies to bolster their profits, purport them as causes of autism or auto-immune conditions in children.

Most prominent among the evidence presented by the anti-vaccine advocates is a 1998 study by former surgeon and researcher Andrew Wakefield, linking the widely used MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine with the appearance of developmental disorders in previously healthy children. This study has seen been subsequently found to contain a multitude of gross inaccuracies and has been retracted by the journal that published it. As for Dr Wakefield, he earned the ‘former’ in his title when it came to light that prior to, and in parallel with, the study, he was receiving payments for participating as an expert in a lawsuit against the makers of the MMR vaccine, while also working to create and market his own, competing vaccine.

Another oft referenced concern is that vaccine additives can be harmful to those receiving them. Specifically, the preservative Thimerosal (or Thiomersal) has often been identified as the culprit behind the alleged link between vaccines and autism. While this compound metabolises into ethylmercury, a molecule that is quickly eliminated by the human body, the anti-vaccination movement often confuses it with methylmercury, a different mercury compound that remains in the body for much longer and is toxic in high concentrations. Despite the lack of any scientific evidence against it, public concern regarding Thimerosal reached such high levels that most Western governments banned its use on vaccines about fifteen years ago. Since then, the frequency of autism in children has remained unchanged or increased in all the countries in question.

All this is not to say that there aren’t legitimate risks associated with vaccination. A vaccine, like any medicine, can cause unintended reactions. Those usually include sore throats, headaches or low-grade fevers, and in rare occasions can manifest more severely to include fainting spells or seizures. Lasting damage caused by most commonly administered vaccines is typically so rare as to not be statistically measurable.

This was not the case however for the vaccine Pandemrix, intended to inoculate against the 2009 H1N1 “swine flu” pandemic, which has been confirmed to be a contributing factor in a cluster of narcolepsy cases in Finland, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Investigations by the Swedish Medical Products Agency and the Finnish National Institute for Health and Welfare have concluded that a clear link exists between those cases and Pandemrix. The exact nature of this link is still unknown and currently under intense scrutiny, while similar vaccines administered the same year in the United States and China have also been examined, and shown to have no link to narcolepsy.

Unlike their possible harmful effects, there is nothing ambiguous about what happens when a large enough percentage of a population foregoes vaccination. Since a small chance of being infected remains even in those that have received the vaccine, successful prevention depends on near universal coverage. This has been amply, and tragically, demonstrated in the numerous occasions where a drop in vaccination rates has been quickly followed by epidemics of preventable diseases. This has been equally true in developing or developed states, counter to a common anti-vaccination movement refrain, claiming that increasing levels of sanitation is the real cause for the elimination of those illnesses.

Examples abound: Vaccination rates against the whooping cough in Japan were approximately 80% in 1974. An anti-vaccination movement caused those rates to fall to 10% within two years. In 1979, a whooping cough epidemic numbered 13.000 infected and 41 dead. After the revival of a similar movement in Southern California in the early 2000s the state suffered epidemics both in 2010 and 2014, with 8000 and 9000 infected respectively, and a total of 13 deaths, all of them young children or infants.

Modern medicine for the past two hundred years has achieved miracles, more than doubling human life expectancy and offering relief from scourges that had plagued humanity for most of its history. And while these life-saving advances have certainly not been uniformly distributed worldwide, every year they become available to more and more people across the globe. As battles are slowly won, against greed and corruption, against dogma and violence, it is truly disheartening to see these same technologies being spurned by those that already have access to them, simply because they feel they know better.

Information has never been easier to get to, with an ocean of knowledge at the fingertips of every one of us. It has become imperative that while researching any subject, a variety of different angles is examined before forming an informed opinion. Not all information is created equal, and one should always be mindful of the natural tendency in all of us to overvalue evidence that supports what we already believe to be true. Additionally, while never slavishly deferring to them, one should always give due weight to the conclusions of those that engage on a subject professionally. Especially when, as in this case, it concerns matters of life or death.

By Andreas Kechagias

Image credit:

Picture 1: DFID – UK Department for International Development, licensed under CC BY 2.0

Picture 2: Sanofi Pasteur, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The post Viral Misinformation appeared first on Pike & Hurricane.

The Future of the Smart Web

Andreas Kechagias — Thu, 30 Oct 2014 15:09:14 +0000

The year is 2024. It’s 6:57A.M and you have just woken up. You feel well-rested, as your watch monitored changes in your breathing and heart rate to detect when you exited deep REM sleep, letting your alarm clock know the optimal time for it to ring. In anticipation of you waking up, and based on your showering habits, your water heater has prepared 100 liters of water at 46 degrees Celsius. While preparing breakfast, your fridge suggests that since you skipped 24% of your workout yesterday, it’d be better if you opted for the skim milk today.

As you leave the house the door locks automatically and the thermostat turns the heating off, to be reactivated when your phone’s GPS shows you are returning home. You enter your car and tell it to calculate the route to work. While completely autonomous cars are still a decade away, an array of sensors allows for an advance form of cruise control, with your car being aware of both its immediate surroundings and traffic conditions along its route in real time and can automatically stir, accelerate and decelerate to avoid collisions.

You are halfway to work, when suddenly you feel a lurch, as your car violently accelerates and throws you in the town’s river. Both your phone and watch register the life-threatening deceleration and alert emergency services with a possible incident profile and GPS coordinates. Emergency services are on the scene in under four minutes and are able to pull you from the river and transfer you to the hospital.

As it turns out, your crash wasn’t an accident. You were randomly targeted by a virus that exploited a vulnerability in the connection between your MP3 player and your car’s stereo speakers to inject malicious code into your car’s navigation system. The police officers that visit you tell you the point of entry was most likely an illegally downloaded song, which makes you contributorily negligent and means your insurance will only cover part of your costs.

How likely is it that this is an accurate depiction of life ten years in the future?

All of the technologies described above already exist, even if not yet widely available. They involve the use of devices that come equipped with a variety of sensors to gather data, the processing power to make sense of the data, and the ability to connect with other “smart” devices to share and improve their capabilities. If current trends hold, we can expect such devices to reach critical adoption levels and become ubiquitous everyday objects

within the next decade. This would bring a variety of subtle and not-so-subtle changes to our daily lives. I try to highlight three of them below.

1. Your devices will start acting like your mother

Or at least like my mother… Smart sensors embedded in electronics gather a treasure trove of data about the user’s habits and uncover patterns in their activity that might not be immediately obvious. This allows for a macro outlook and much better management of one’s routine. A lot of the health trackers on the market today actually use positive and negative reinforcement mechanics similar to those found in video-games, nudging the users towards completing their preset goals. As more and more devices become equipped with such sensors, the picture presented would be increasingly complete. Using this information, everyone that wants to will be able to much better monitor and improve their health habits.

2. Efficiency saves lives, money (and maybe the planet)

Developed states are hard-pressed to continue providing high levels of services while dealing with low growth and aging populations, while developing states are facing challenges stemming from urbanisation and industrialisation, with a rising middle class that starts demanding those same services. In both cases the need to optimise the allocation of resources, both natural and budgetary, will be more important than ever.

Smart systems will be in a position to be a large part of this effort. Devices that micromanage their resource consumption and the parsing of publicly available data to more efficiently manage a variety of municipal services in
large cities are only two examples of the possibilities created by the proliferation of smart devices.

3. Virtual actions, real consequences

Whether the Internet will survive in its current global form remains an open question. But in one form or the other, networks of computers and devices are here to stay. As the increase in the use of networked devices drives our digital and real worlds closer together, risks taken online will have much greater impact offline. A just released Europol report warns that the first “online murder”, a murder committed remotely by exploiting security flaws in networked devices like pacemakers or cars, is going to happen within 2014, if it hasn’t already.

Beyond the physical risk, with so much of our lives cataloged by the various sensor-packed connected devices around us, privacy concerns and the need for data security will multiply a thousand-fold. This in combination with the economics of progressively lower prices for goods and services, will result in the norms of Internet activity starting to mirror those governing our everyday lives. Downloading a pirated movie or song will become equivalent to following a stranger into a dark alley to buy a bootleg CD, only the risk of bodily harm will be compounded by the possibility of exposing your entire life to them. The net effect of the need for more security will be that we will be increasingly held accountable for choices made online.

It is impossible to see a decade into the future with any sort of accuracy. To try is only to invite humiliation ten years down the line, if not much sooner. In the immortal words of Ken Olson, Chairman of Digital Equipment Corp. in 1977, “there is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home”. Despite that, there is value in undertaking this intellectual exercise, if for no other reason than to examine our present in a fresh light, and try to conceive of ways to engineer a future better than the one described above.

By Andreas Kechagias

Image credit:

Picture 1: Sam Howzit, licensed under CC BY 2.0

Picture 2: Nicholas Rumas, licensed under CC BY 2.0

The post The Future of the Smart Web appeared first on Pike & Hurricane.