”OPACITY” CATEGORY

This category deals with ideas using data that is not freely available, but should be. We claim that  “Anything can be a source of information”. This is the section where we will attempt to prove it. On the other hand, this is also the category in which the lighter touch of the “Transparency” projects turns darker. Transparency and privacy are deadly serious issues, and deserve to be treated as such.  For concrete projects, we are particularly interested in information sources which may at first seem completely impenetrable.  At the moment, we are particularly interested in two intriguing and important issues.

Project: Is aviation safety a shameful thing? By almost any measure, flying is the safest way to move long distances. Most airlines make massive investments into safety. Yet we have found that it is difficult for a casual outsider to find out precisely what the airlines are doing with that invested money.  All airlines have a safety culture, yet this culture is quite opaque to outsiders. We ask whether everyone (society, customers, and the airlines) could benefit from making the information transparent when things go well, rather than having it forced open only when a major accident occurs.

Project: Search engines & small languages. Search engines, if anything, are opaque. Their algorithms are mostly proprietary and shifting; it is difficult to make any sense of any figures; with personalized searches, every person’s results are different, making studies non-repeatable. Nevertheless, engine are an intense subject of study in the research world. Given our limited resources, it makes no sense to try to duplicate what is already being done with real money and time elsewhere. Rather, we have found an interesting niche for ourselves: during a quick study, we realized that certain features of the Finnish language make search engines behave unpredictably. Based on this fact, we suggest that small languages like Finnish could serve as a “laboratory” in which at least some global issues can be isolated. For the moment, this idea is little more than a hunch, but we are slowly developing it further.