Eyes on the Pirates, Part 1

01/13/17 • 30 min

The history books teach that slavery ended, but it still exists; it’s just morphed its form—different commodity, different location, but same abuses. The commodity is seafood. The location, Southeast Asia. The abuses, forced servitude with all its ugly associations. Some people make a substantial living off illegal, unregulated, and unreported (IUU) fishing, which fuels a dark underground. How is big data angling to stop it? Find out in our next two episodes.Transcript:Michele Kuruc: “People who were seeking better lives and, and coming to look for work were kidnapped by unscrupulous dealers, who forced them into lives we can’t even imagine.”Ginette Methot: “I’m Ginette.”Curtis Seare: “And I’m Curtis.”Ginette: “And you are listening to Data Crunch.”Curtis: “A podcast about how data and prediction shape our world.”Ginette: “A Vault Analytics production.”Ginette: “Welcome back to Data Crunch! We took a bit of a break over the holidays, and we hope you were able to too. “So upward and onward to 2017. What are we up to this year? We’ll be finishing our data science history miniseries for you, and we’ll be meeting some really cool people from KDnuggets, Galvanize Austin, and Datascope in Chicago. But before we do those episodes, we have to pivot because with major recent developments, this particular episode deserves to come out now.“The lives we can’t even imagine look like this according to the Associated Press. One Burmese man left his village when he was 18 years old. He followed a recruiter who promised him a construction job. When he arrived in Thailand, his captors held him with little food or water for a month. He was then forced onto a fishing boat. He was told that he was sold and would never be rescued. In that fishing environment, sometimes he worked 24-hours a day. He and his fellow fishers were whipped with stingray tails and shocked with electric devices. They were told during their time fishing that they would never be let go, not even when they died, and men in his similar situation were sometimes sold from ship captain to ship captain. “If they tried to escape the work, they were locked in cages on remote islands. In the 22 years he was away from home, he asked to go home twice. The first time he asked, the company official chucked a helmet at his head, which left a bloody gash that he had to hold closed. The second time he begged to go home, he was chained to the boat deck for three days in the blistering sun and when the night came, it was rainy, and he could do little to protect himself from it. During that three-day period, he had no food. He amazingly fashioned a lock pick and unlocked his shackles. He knew if he was caught, he’d be killed, so he dove into the water in the cover of night and swam ashore, hiding for his life.“You might ask why he didn’t go to local officials. The answer is he couldn’t because they might sell him back to the ship captains. So after eight years in the jungle hiding from the fishing companies, he finally got to go home because of the AP’s reporting. This is modern-day slavery. Every year, thousands of people are tricked or sold into this type of slavery in order to catch fish for lucrative markets.“If you’ve ever read Solomon Northup’s gripping autobiography, Twelve Years a Slave, the similarity is eery. They are both free men who are initially unknowingly abducted. They’re shackled, beaten into servitude, and forced to work in harsh conditions for many, many years. Both are desperate to go home to their families, and both experience miraculous escapes from tyrannical systems. But unfortunately, not everyone escapes.“This is a huge problem, and it’s frequently linked to illegal, unregulated, and unreported fishing, well known as IUU fishing. Unfortunately, IUU fishing is linked to some of the ugliest transnational crimes: modern-day slavery, human trafficking, drug trafficking,

Previous Episode

The Curated History of Data Science, Part 1

Who were the people pushing the limits of their time and circumstances to bring us what we know today as data science? We examine what motivated them to do their important work and how they laid the foundations for our modern world where algorithms and analytics affect everything from communications to transportation to health care—to basically every aspect of our lives.This is their story.Transcript:Ginette: “She was obsessed with her failure—she thought she hadn’t done enough. And it didn’t matter that the public saw her as a heroine. So she ended up writing an 830-page report where she employed some power graphics, and this paired with her other efforts ended up changing the entire system.”Ginette and Curtis: “I’m Ginette, and I’m Curtis, and you are listening to Data Crunch, a podcast about how data and prediction shape our world. A Vault Analytics production.”Ginette: “In our last three episodes, we have just thrown you into the middle of data and prediction and the explosion of data science. And some of you have had some questions, like, How did data science become a thing?“In the next three episodes, we’re doing a miniseries where we’re going to address some of these questions, and I think you’ll find it very interesting. Our story starts with an impressive woman. “It’s 1854. It’s the Crimean War, and a woman shows up at a hospital to help. She finds horrifying conditions. To paint an accurate picture for you, here’s a little bit of what she found: the sewage and ventilation systems were broken; the floor was an inch thick with waste—probably human and rodent; the water was contaminated because, come to find out, the hospital was built over a sewer; rats were hiding under beds and scurrying past, as were bugs; and the soldiers’ clothing was swarming with lice and fleas; and on top of that, there were no towels, no basins, no soap, and there were only 14 baths for 2,000 soldiers. Keep in mind this was 20 years before Pasteur and Koch spread Germ Theory. “So she and the 37 nurses that she brought with her set to work, and they did their best to clean up the hospital and help the soldiers. Eventually, because of her, the government sent a sanitary commission. They flushed the sewers; they improved the ventilation. And this helped the situation dramatically. In the end, she reduced the death rate by two thirds.“But Florence Nightingale went home feeling like she had failed, which you’ll remember we mentioned right at the beginning of the podcast. She felt a lot of soldiers had died needlessly. This drove her to write her famous 830-page report. And she ended up working with lead statistician William Farr, who actually helped invent medical statistics. He would say to her, ‘We don’t want impressions, we want facts.’ And working under that type of context, she gathered vast amounts of complex army data and analyzed it to find something rather shocking: 16,000 of 18,000 deaths in hospitals were not due to battle wounds but to preventable diseases spread by poor sanitation.”“So these statistics completely changed her understanding. She thought the deaths were due to inadequate food and lack of supplies, but after the sanitary commission came in, she noticed that the mortality rate dropped significantly. So as Florence prepared her report, she was afraid that people’s eyes would glaze over the numbers and that they wouldn’t grasp the significance of what she was trying to say. So she came up with a clever way to present her data: she ended up using graphics, in particular what she’s known form the rose chart, to convey her message.”Curtis: “Nowadays, charts are everywhere, but back in her day, the idea of creating a picture that was defined by certain data points was not very common, and so the fact that Nightingale thought to do this was very innovative and clever, and it was important because it was able to communicate what she needed to communicate. “Her mentor,

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Eyes on the Pirates, Part 2

Pirates in folk stories and popular movies conjure up strong imagery: eye patches, Jolly Rogers, parrots, swashbuckling, scruffy voices that say “Aye, Matey.” But what do the lives of successful pirates look like today? And what's being done to stop them from plundering and smuggling our ocean's precious resources? World Wildlife Fund's project Detect IT: Fish takes aim at these pirates and other illegal actors with this cutting-edge project that reduces a time-consuming tracking process from days to minutes.Ginette Methot-Seare: “After nearly 15 years of lucrative, illegal activity, he was caught and convicted. The judge in this key case stated that his business activities were an ‘astonishing display of the arrogance of wealth and power.’ He destroyed evidence, and while under investigation, even hired a private I to follow an agent around. After serving prison time, the main perpetrator and his accomplices were ordered to pay 22.5 million dollars in restitution to South Africa for the damage they had done.”Curtis Seare: “Who was this man? Arnold Bengis, a modern-day pirate.”Ginette: “I’m Ginette.”Curtis: “And I’m Curtis.”Ginette: “And you are listening to Data Crunch.”Curtis: “A podcast about how data and prediction shape our world.”Ginette: “A Vault Analytics production.”Ginette: “Believe it or not, these episodes take hours and hours of hard work to produce, and the success of this show depends in large part on the listener reviews and ratings we get. If you like what we do, the best way to support us is to go to iTunes, Google Play, or your favorite medium for getting the episodes, and leave us a review. “If you’re willing to do that, a big thank you in advance, and a big thank you to those who already done it.”“At the end of our last episode, we promised you the story of one of the biggest pirate busts in history, and we will deliver, but before we go on, if you’re new to Data Crunch, you may want to start with the last episode, which will give you more background and context.“By some accounts, this is what happened: Arnold Bengis became incredibly wealthy after growing a business in South Africa. He had a house in Bridgehampton, New York, worth several million dollars, an apartment in the Upper West Side of Manhattan on the 41 floor, and a house in Four Beaches, an exclusive neighborhood in Cape Town, South Africa. “His 6,000-plus square foot Bridgehampton house, a large Spanish-tile stucco villa, overlooked the beautiful Mecox Bay to one side and the Atlantic ocean on the other. His six bedroom, seven full bathroom single-family home had what you’d expect to find at a palatial place: a well-manicured golf green; a luxurious pool; large, well-decorated rooms with chandeliers, and expensive furniture. When the house last sold, it went for 10 and a half million dollars. One of the agents of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, who investigated Bengis’s case even said he was in partial awe of the lifestyle Bengis was living, which was supported by illegal fishing business.“Bengis held his money, both personal and business, in a highly complex network of trusts and asset havens. The money was scattered abroad in many different places, like Switzerland, Gibraltar, Jersey Islands, and Britain. While authorities didn’t know everything about his money, what they did know was that he had vast assets. For example, in just one year, he deposited $13 million into one of his accounts. His lawyer said that one of his several trusts was worth more than $25 million, according to the book Hooked: Pirates, Poaching, and the Perfect Fish. “I know what you’re probably thinking: ‘How did this man make so much money from illegal fishing?’ We told you in our last episode that IUU fishing rakes in between $10 billion and $23.5 billion dollars a year, and that’s a conservative estimate. The larger picture is this: When you consider that the entire world’s trade...