Archive

The Fate of Civil Liberties in National Crises

The sys­tem I would want is I would want an assur­ance that if some extra­or­di­nary mea­sure has to be put in place tem­porar­i­ly to deal with a tem­po­rary cri­sis, that the word tem­po­rary” will in fact con­tin­ue to apply. And I will add that this is a moment when I real­ly wish we had a func­tion­ing Congress.

The Beauty of Inclusion

As a black, African, woman, with albinism, my very exis­tence attracts social and polit­i­cal con­se­quences. And all of it is sig­nif­i­cant for me. It is my world between worlds. In the same way I could not just pick one doll, I can­not just pick one iden­ti­ty. An inclu­sive cul­ture accepts that it is not this or that. It is this and that. 

Compassion through Computation: Fighting Algorithmic Bias

I think the ques­tion I’m try­ing to for­mu­late is, how in this world of increas­ing opti­miza­tion where the algo­rithms will be accu­rate… They’ll increas­ing­ly be accu­rate. But their appli­ca­tion could lead to dis­crim­i­na­tion. How do we stop that?

Big Data Bodies: Machines and Algorithms in the World

I’m inter­est­ed in data and dis­crim­i­na­tion, in the things that have come to make us unique­ly who we are, how we look, where we are from, our per­son­al and demo­graph­ic iden­ti­ties, what lan­guages we speak. These things are effec­tive­ly incom­pre­hen­si­ble to machines. What is gen­er­al­ly cel­e­brat­ed as human diver­si­ty and expe­ri­ence is trans­formed by machine read­ing into some­thing absurd, some­thing that marks us as different.

The Conversation #49 — Scott Douglas

People think that the Civil Rights Movement and all big epochal move­ments involve con­science, and they do. They also involve con­scious­ness. I mean, you can’t strug­gle against what you’re unaware off, right? The Klan as the icon­ic car­ri­ers of vio­lence, the Bull Connor of the icon­ic south­ern white male resis­tance, George Wallace the icon­ic neopop­ulist racist. You know, these were his­toric fig­ures in myth and real­i­ty. But we would­n’t get to what they rep­re­sent­ed till much later.

The Ethics of Open Source

This talk is more about the coer­cion of labor into open source soft­ware. So I want to take a crit­i­cal look at how we can engage busi­ness­es and oth­er stake­hold­ers in tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies to begin to cre­ate a more equal and sus­tain­able envi­ron­ment for all peo­ple con­tribut­ing to open source.

Forbidden Research: Why We Can’t Do That

Quite often when we’re ask­ing these dif­fi­cult ques­tions we’re ask­ing about ques­tions where we might not even know how to ask where the line is. But in oth­er cas­es, when researchers work to advance pub­lic knowl­edge, even on uncon­tro­ver­sial top­ics, we can still find our­selves for­bid­den from doing the research or dis­sem­i­nat­ing the research.

The Conversation #43 — Roberta Francis

Generally peo­ple don’t see the skir­mish­es that are always always always going on in the back­ground to pre­serve where we are now in terms of laws against sex dis­crim­i­na­tion or laws that would pro­mote sex equal­i­ty. But com­pared to where we were when the ERA came out of Congress in 1972, we are very much bet­ter off in terms of equal­i­ty of rights being guar­an­teed by the law, because so many laws that did dis­crim­i­nate on their face are off the books as a result of the strug­gle for the Equal Rights Amendment.