Doina @doina@mastodon.utwente.nl

At least a dozen police forces are using predictive analytics, despite warnings that algorithms and “predictive policing” models risk locking discrimination into the criminal justice system.

The West Midlands police’s ethics committee raised concerns. No privacy impact assessments had been made, and no analysis of how it impacted rights. The tool uses data linked to stop and search, which includes information on people stopped with nothing found, i.e., police bias.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/apr/20/predictive-policing-tool-could-entrench-bias-ethics-committee-warns

Bunnies working hard:

"The documents emanate from a court case against Facebook by the app developer Six4Three in California, and reveal that Sandberg considered European data protection legislation a “critical” threat. The documents include details of how Facebook:

- Lobbied politicians across Europe in a strategic operation to head off “overly restrictive” GDPR legislation.

- Threatened to withhold investment from countries unless they supported or passed Facebook-friendly laws."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/02/facebook-global-lobbying-campaign-against-data-privacy-laws-investment

World Bank data measuring gender inequality in the law:

https://wbl.worldbank.org/# (--> "Get the data")

Canada, Denmark, Latvia and Spain at the top with a score of 97.5.

NL in 27th place (score 89.38), surpassed by 23 other European countries, including less than high-income countries, such as Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania.

In NL: no legislation on domestic violence, no paid parental/paternity leave, no pension credit for childcare periods (as of 2018).

"Article 8 of the Treaty of the Functioning of the European Union: “In all its activities, the Union shall aim to eliminate inequalities between men and women.” Women being 47% more likely to be seriously injured in a car crash is one hell of an inequality to overlook.

Crash-test dummies for decades were based around the 50th-percentile male. The most commonly used dummy is 1.77m tall and weighs 76kg (significantly taller and heavier than an average woman)."

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/feb/23/truth-world-built-for-men-car-crashes

The creators of a revolutionary AI system that can write news stories and fiction – dubbed “deepfakes for text” – have taken the unusual step of not releasing their research publicly, for fear of potential misuse.

OpenAI made a version that can be used to generate infinite positive –or negative– reviews of products. Spam and fake news are other potential downsides. As it is trained on the internet, it is not hard to generate bigoted text, conspiracy theories and so on.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/14/elon-musk-backed-ai-writes-convincing-news-fiction

"YouTube will recommend fewer videos that “could misinform users in harmful ways”, the company announced on Friday.

The company did not provide a clear definition of what it considers to be harmful misinformation, but said that some examples were “videos promoting a phony miracle cure for a serious illness, claiming the Earth is flat, or making blatantly false claims about historic events like 9/11”."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/25/youtube-conspiracy-theory-videos-recommendations

Non-fiction for anyone with an interest.

Drop by the library (namely, my office) to get any.

A different skin colour does not cause a lack of empathy:

"A white rat raised among black and white rats rescued rats of both colors. It is not the rat’s color that determines which type of rat it will show empathy for, but the social context in which it was raised. Rats do not show empathy because of similarity in physical appearance.

Empathy can be partial because the experiences of [other] people are hidden, which limits our empathy toward them."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/28/opinion/empathy-research-morality-rats.html

Multi-species social networks in the wild, for fun and profit:

"Bacterial cells communicate by producing and releasing chemical signal molecules that other bacteria pick up. [A virus] could also sense information emitted from bacteria.

All living things — down to the tiniest bacterium — communicate. Even viruses do it. You have to think about how ancient the need to communicate is, how it goes across all domains through billions of years of evolution.""

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/12/13/676389858/a-virus-can-eavesdrop-on-bacterial-communication