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“Machine vision tools like facial recognition are increasingly being used for law enforcement, advertising, and other purposes. Pew Research Center itself recently used a machine vision system to measure the prevalence of men and women in online image search results. This kind of system develops its own rules for identifying men and women after seeing …
CRS Report via FAS – U.S. Role in the World: Background and Issues for Congress, updated September 23, 2019: “The U.S. role in the world refers to the overall character, purpose, or direction of U.S. participation in international affairs and the country’s overall relationship to the rest of the world. The U.S. role in the …
The New York Times – Psychometric tests like Color Code, Myers-Briggs and DiSC have become a goofy part of corporate life. But what happens when we take them seriously?…”The code is just one example of the kinds of psychometric tests now being administered in workplaces. There’s CliftonStrengths, owned by Gallup, which tells you your five …
Animal Legal Defense Fund: “In early 2017, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) purged tens of thousands of important documents related to animal welfare from the agency’s website. The purged inspection reports documented violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act (AWA) and inhumane treatment of animals in research labs, zoos, circuses, and puppy mills, as …
Comparitech: “Cities in China are under the heaviest CCTV surveillance in the world, according to a new analysis by Comparitech [along with the companion spreadhseet]. However, some residents living in cities across the US [like DC and Chicago], UK, UAE, Australia, and India will also find themselves surrounded by a large number of watchful eyes, …
The New York Times – “The F.B.I. has used secret subpoenas to obtain personal data from far more companies than previously disclosed, newly released documents show. The requests, which the F.B.I. says are critical to its counterterrorism efforts, have raised privacy concerns for years but have been associated mainly with tech companies. Now, records show …
The Nation – Exclusive: Edward Snowden’s First Adventures in Cyberspace An excerpt from the whistleblower’s new memoir. Excerpted from Permanent Record, by Edward Snowden, published September 17, 2019, by Henry Holt and Company. Copyright © 2019 by Edward Snowden. All rights reserved. “…Nowadays, connectivity is just presumed. smartphones, laptops, desktops, everything’s connected, always. Connected to …
MIT Technology Review: “San Francisco and Oakland, California, and Somerville, Massachusetts, have outlawed certain uses of facial recognition technology, with Portland, Oregon, potentially soon to follow. That’s just the beginning, according to Mutale Nkonde, a Harvard fellow and AI policy advisor. That trend will soon spread to states, and there will eventually be a federal ban …
ars technica – Surely this initiative will create meaningful change…”Facebook, which has managed to transcend geographic borders to draw in a population equal to roughly a third of all human life on Earth, has made its final charter for a “Supreme Court” of Facebook public. The company pledges to launch this initiative by November of …
Transaction Records Access Clearinghouse: “The Immigration Court’s active backlog of cases just passed the million case mark. The latest case-by-case court records through the end of August 2019 show the court’s active case backlog was 1,007,155. If the additional 322,535 cases which the court says are pending but have not been placed on the active …
Center for Data Innovation: “Deepfakes—realistic-looking images and videos altered by AI to portray someone doing or saying something that never actually happened—have been around since the end of 2017, yet in recent months have become a major focus of policymakers. Though image and video manipulation have posed challenges for decades, the threat of deepfakes is …
TED Talk: “The use of deepfake technology to manipulate video and audio for malicious purposes — whether it’s to stoke violence or defame politicians and journalists — is becoming a real threat. As these tools become more accessible and their products more realistic, how will they shape what we believe about the world? In a …
