Open Transcripts

Data & Society Databite #41: Ifeoma Ajunwa on Genetic Coercion

presented by Ifeoma Ajunwa

The mythology of genetic coercion is thoughts that genetic data, especially large-scale genetic databases, have the ability to pinpoint certain risk of disease. They provide agency to act to prevent such disease, and it can be used to create accurate personalized treatment for disease, and it should also be entrusted with the authority to dictate the modification of the genome for future generations.

Kay Mauchly on Finding Out about ENIAC, Programming It, and Marrying John Mauchly

presented by Kathleen Antonelli

Then we were told we had to learn how to operate this machine. Well, how do you go about that? And somebody from Moore School gave us a whole stack of blueprints, and these were the wiring diagrams for all the panels. And they said, “Here, you can figure out how the machine works and then figure out how to program it.”

ENIAC Programmers Keynote at WITI New York Network Meeting 1998

presented by Jean Bartik, Kathleen Antonelli

I applied and went over and they just talked to us a little bit. We never saw the machine or anything. So then they called us in and Herman Goldstine, who was the Army officer liaison coming in from Aberdeen, interviewed me. So Herman said to me, “What do you think of electricity?”

So I said, “Well, I had a physics course and I knew that E=IR.”

So he said, “No, I don’t mean that. I don’t care about that. Are you afraid of it?”

Reading the Riots on Twitter

presented by Farida Vis

One of the things that was happening at the time is that one of the accusations that was being made, or that was being proffered by people who made sort of snap, knee-jerk responses to what was going on is that social media is being blamed. Social media was blamed for the worst civil unrest that England had seen in recent years.

Nettrice Gaskins on Techno-Vernacular Creativity and STEAM

presented by Nettrice Gaskins

I think the part that engages students that are from underrepresented ethnic groups is missing. I think they don’t see themselves reflected, don’t see their interests or their cultures reflected, so they stay outside of it even if it’s free, or even if it’s something that is in their neighborhood.

Mindful Cyborgs #54 — A Positive Vision of Transhumanism and AI with Damien Williams

presented by Damien Williams, Klint Finley

I don’t think it’s going to be necessarily a problem within the next five to ten, fifteen, to maybe even twenty years. But my perspective on it has always been, because I am more philosophically focused in these things, why not try to address the issues before they arrive? Why not try to think about these questions before they become problems that we have to fix?

Mindful Cyborgs #55 — Magick & the Occult within the Internet and Corporations with Damien Williams

presented by Damien Williams, Klint Finley

We can see the hidden, occult operations of programmers, of people who are seeking to get very specific outcomes by operating on very particular components, ritually operating within very particular symbolic frameworks. People who are using particular coding languages, people who are using particular setups of hardware because for their purposes, for their end goals, these are the things that get the job done. These are the things that have the resonance and the capability, the power, the efficacy, to do the work.

Biased Data Panel Introduction

presented by Brenda Williams

The panel will examine how real world-biases and inequality are replicated and systematically integrated into neutral algorithms and databases.

Safiya Noble at Biased Data

presented by Safiya Noble

I often try to tell people that Google is not providing information retrieval algorithms, it’s providing advertising algorithms. And that is a very important distinction when we think about what kind of information is available in these corporate-controlled spaces.

An Xiao Mina at Biased Data

presented by An Xiao Mina

When we think about network graphs and we talk about how the network effects that make up an important part of how social movements and how information is distributed online, there’s this assumption in those visualizations that every node in that network is equal. But very often, and you can slice data in many different way, the languages that we speak actually limit the networks that we have access to and that we’re interacting with.