YOUR NEIGHBORS' CARS REVEAL HOW THEY VOTE
Et si votre voiture révélait vos opinions politiques ?
En analysant des millions de photos disponibles sur Google Street View, des chercheurs de Stanford ont développé une intelligence artificielle capable de faire le lien entre l’opinion politique d’une personne et le type de voiture qu’elle possède. Dis-moi ce que tu conduis, je te dirai pour qui tu roules…
When it comes to a neighborhood’s political leanings, look no further than the cars or pickups on the street.
2. Researchers at Stanford University used a computer algorithm to sift through 50 million Google Street View images from 200 cities across the U.S. — and what they found was that cars are a shockingly good predictor of whether a neighborhood votes Republican or Democratic.
PICKUPS VS SEDANS
3. In neighborhoods with more sedans than extended-cab pickup trucks, there’s an 88 percent chance voters picked a Democrat at the polls, researchers said. And the opposite was true as well, the study found: In neigh-
1. when it comes to... en matière de / neighborhood quartier / leaning penchant, tendance / look no
further than... ne cherchez pas plus loin que .... 2. to sift through passer en revue, faire le tri dans / across ici, sur l'ensemble du territoire de / to find, found, found ici, découvrir / shockingly ici, étonnamment / predictor indicateur / whether si. 3. sedan berline / extended-cab à cabine approfondie / chance probabilité / to pick choisir; ici, voter pour / at the polls aux élections / as well également / where pickups outnumber sedans, there’s an 82 percent chance an individual precinct went Republican.
4. The election data researchers looked at was from the 2008 presidential race between Barack Obama and John McCain, researchers said.
5. “Using easily obtainable visual data, we can learn so much about our communities,” Fei-Fei Li, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Stanford Vision Lab, where the research was done, said in a statement.
6. Li added that what can be gleaned from cheap or publicly available data is often “on par with some information that takes billions of dollars to obtain via census surveys.”
to outnumber dépasser en nombre, être plus nombreux que / precinct quartier, circonscription / to go, went, gone ici, voter. 4. data données, statistiques / race course (à la présidence), élection. 5. lab = laboratory / statement déclaration. 6. to glean glaner, recueillir / cheap peu coûteux / available disponible, accessible / on par with comparable à / to take, took, taken ici, nécessiter, coûter / billion milliard / census survey enquête de recensement.
BIG DATA AND POLITICS
7. The 2016 presidential election was a high profile example of how big data is a growing part of our daily lives — and how it can be exploited in a number of ways. Each camborhoods
7. high profile médiatisé / growing de plus en plus grand / way façon /
paign dumped millions of dollars into data operations, hoping to find voters, target them and get them out to the polls.
8. “The more you know about someone, the better you can engage with them and the more relevant you can make the communications that you send to them,” Alexander Nix, the head of Cambridge Analytica — a firm the Trump campaign paid $5 million to target voters in September 2016 alone — told NBC News. “Our job is to use data to understand audiences.”
9. Cambridge Analytica told NBC last year that it had about 4,000 “data points” on each of the 230 million American adults it had in its system. That data had been ferreted out through just about every source imaginable — from voters’ gym memberships to their charity donations, their loyalty cards to their
to dump débourser, consacrer / to target cibler / to [...] get them out to the polls les inciter à aller voter/aux urnes. 8. to engage with interagir avec / relevant adapté / audience public. 9. about environ / to ferret out dénicher / through au moyen de / gym membership abonnement à une salle de sport / charity donation don à une association caritative / loyalty card carte de fidélité / online profiles. And while Li’s team may not have paid millions for their data, it did take a lot of work to train computers to comb through millions and millions of images, catalog which car was which and then associate the cars with demographic data about the area — and finally, to link that data to the area’s political leanings, researchers said.
15 YEARS IN JUST TWO WEEKS
10. Researchers spent two weeks training the algorithm to go through the roughly 22 million cars that were pictured in 50 million Google Street View images. Then, computers were able to file each into one of nearly 3,000 categories — broken down by make, model, and year, researchers said.
11. If a person were doing the same work, the study said, it would have taken about 15 years to complete (assuming it took 10 seconds to catalog each image.)
12. On the demographic side of the equation, the study found that Volkswagens and Aston
to train ici, programmer / to comb through passer au peigne fin / area ici, quartier / to link associer. 10. to spend, spent, spent passer (temps) / to go, went, gone through passer en revue / roughly environ / to file classer / nearly près de / to break, broke, broken down ici, subdiviser / make marque. 11. to complete terminer, mener à terme / to assume partir du principe/considérer que. Martins tend to be found in predominantly white areas. African-American neighborhoods, meanwhile, are more likely to have Chryslers, Buicks and Oldsmobiles driving around or parked on the street. Asian neighborhoods were more likely to have Hondas or Toyotas, the study found.
13. And make and model weren’t the only useful data points researchers identified.
14. “If you walk around a neighborhood looking at cars, the density of traffic sometimes tells you things as valuable as the types of cars you see on the streets,” Timnit Gebru, a study author, said in a statement. “We can use all this information in our algorithms.”
15. Gebru hopes the algorithm used in the study could someday help monitor carbon dioxide levels, or even improve traffic on congested streets.
12. side ici, point de vue / equation ici, question / to tend to avoir tendance à / meanwhile ici, cependant, quant à eux / to be likely to être susceptible de / to drive, drove, driven around circuler. 14. to walk around parcourir à pied / valuable ici, riche en informations. 15. someday un jour / to monitor surveiller, contrôler, suivre l'évolution de / level taux, concentration / even même / to improve améliorer; ici, diminuer / congested encombré, embouteillé.