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Daily Archives: October 15, 2019

AI: Algorithms and Justice

Berkman Kein Center – “Government institutions around the globe are beginning to explore decision automation in a variety of contexts, from determining eligibility for services; to evaluating where to deploy health inspectors and law enforcement personnel; to defining boundaries around voting districts. Use cases for technologies that incorporate AI or machine learning will expand as governments and companies amass larger quantities of data and analytical tools become more powerful. Our work on algorithms and justice (a) explores ways in which government institutions incorporate artificial intelligence, algorithms, and machine learning technologies into their decisionmaking; and (b) in collaboration with the Global Governance track, examines ways in which development and deployment of these technologies by both public and private actors impacts the rights of individuals and efforts to achieve social justice. Our aim is to help companies that create such tools, state actors that procure and deploy them, and citizens they impact to understand how those tools work. We seek to ensure that algorithmic applications are developed and used with an eye toward improving fairness and efficacy without sacrificing values of accountability and transparency.”

Analysis Shows Top 1% Gained $21 Trillion in Wealth Since 1989 While Bottom Half Lost $900 Billion

Commondreams.org: “Adding to the mountain of statistical evidence showing the severity of U.S. inequality, an analysis published Friday found that the top one percent of Americans gained $21 trillion in wealth since 1989 while the bottom 50 percent lost $900 billion. Matt Bruenig, founder of the left-wing think tank People’s Policy Project, broke down the… Continue Reading

The Best Way to Search for Free Software Online

lifehacker:  “…you want to search for is “open-source” plus the general topic of whatever app or service you’re trying to find. This won’t always net you an app that costs you nothing, but you’re likely to have better luck. You can also search for “alternative to” a conventional app that does something you don’t want… Continue Reading

Crawl data analysis of 2 billion links from 90 million domains offer glimpse into today’s web

SearcEngineLand: Data analysis reveals the distribution of PageRank is highly right-skewed meaning the majority of hosts have very low PageRank – “The web is not only essential for people working in digital marketing, but for everyone. We professionals in this field need to understand the big picture of how the web functions for our daily… Continue Reading

Internet Archive releases 2,500 more MS-DOS games

Internet Archive Blogs: “Another few thousand DOS Games are playable at the Internet Archive! Since our initial announcement in 2015, we’ve added occasional new games here and there to the collection, but this will be our biggest update yet, ranging from tiny recent independent productions to long-forgotten big-name releases from decades ago.\ To browse the… Continue Reading

Edward Snowden – Without encryption, we will lose all privacy. This is our new battleground.

UK Guardian – Opinion – Edward Snowden – “In every country of the world, the security of computers keeps the lights on, the shelves stocked, the dams closed, and transportation running. For more than half a decade, the vulnerability of our computers and computer networks has been ranked the number one risk in the US… Continue Reading

Google introducing auto-delete controls for your Location History and activity data

Google Blog – “Whether you’re looking for the latest news or the quickest driving route, we aim to make our products helpful for everyone. And when you turn on settings like Location History or Web & App Activity, the data can make Google products more useful for you—like recommending a restaurant that you might enjoy,… Continue Reading

Google’s new voice recorder app transcribes in real time, even when offline

TechCrunch: “At Google’s hardware event this morning, the company introduced a new voice recorder app for Android devices, which will tap into advances in real-time speech processing, speech recognition and AI to automatically transcribe recordings in real time as the person is speaking. The improvements will allow users to take better advantage of the phone’s… Continue Reading