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Bill Fulkerson

When Splitters become Lumpers: Pitfalls of a Long History of Human Rights « L... - 0 views

lpeblog.org/...a-long-history-of-human-rights

economy law human rights history

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 14 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 14 Aug 18
     
    "For a close reader of Moyn's work on human rights the differences between his two works are head-spinning.  Where Last Utopia attacked the very idea of historic continuity in explaining the human rights movement that emerged in the 1970s, Not Enough builds an entire narrative on continuities. The result is an aspirational history for a reformed human rights movement, a history of roads not taken - with respect to equality, in particular, which Moyn elevates to the 'original' position - that can still be reclaimed.  Not Enough lacks the skepticism that Moyn employed so effectively in The Last Utopia to explain how disconnected contemporary human rights was from its claimed antecedents and undermines arguments in both books. In addition, by not heeding his own lessons from Last Utopia, Moyn understates the emergent human rights movement's inability to contest what became neoliberalism. As someone who confronted those issues at the time, it is harder to dismiss the claims of complicity."
Steve Bosserman

Modern grocery and the emerging-market consumer: A complicated courtship | McKinsey & C... - 0 views

www.mckinsey.com/...nsumer-a-complicated-courtship

emerging markets grocery stores supermarkets food distribution

shared by Steve Bosserman on 19 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • In the 1990s, the term “modern grocery retail” was essentially a proxy for a small group of multinational grocers including Ahold, Aldi, Auchan, Carrefour, Costco, Lidl, Metro, Tesco, and Walmart. It was widely presumed that these retailers’ entry into any market would lead to the demise of the traditional trade—the family-owned grocery chains, small independent stores, and informal merchants that at the time accounted for the vast majority of grocery sales in emerging markets. The prevailing expectation was that although there would be local differences due to cultural specificities, in every country the retail landscape would eventually consist of a combination of modern formats: full-line supermarkets and hypermarkets, convenience stores, and discounters. These assumptions have been proved wrong. Global grocery giants are struggling to grow profitably in many emerging markets. Traditional trade has proved remarkably resilient. And the market and channel structures taking shape in individual emerging economies are distinct from one another, following no obvious pattern.
Bill Fulkerson

Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding | naked capitalism - 0 views

www.nakedcapitalism.com/...ernist-thinking-exploding.html

capitalism power society

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 11 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 11 Mar 17
     
    " Fearless commentary on finance, economics, politics and power Follow yvessmith on Twitter Feedburner RSS Feed RSS Feed for Comments Subscribe via Email SUBSCRIBE Recent Items Links 3/11/17 - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith Deutsche Bank Tries to Stay Alive - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith John Helmer: Australian Government Trips Up Ukrainian Court Claim of MH17 as Terrorism - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith 2:00PM Water Cooler 3/10/2017 - 03/10/2017 - Lambert Strether Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Links 3/10/17 - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Why It Will Take a Lot More Than a Smartphone to Get the Sharing Economy Started - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith CalPERS' General Counsel Railroads Board on Fiduciary Counsel Selection - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Another Somalian Famine - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Trade now with TradeStation - Highest rated for frequent traders Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding Posted on March 10, 2017 by Yves Smith By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website Across the globe, a collective freak-out spanning the whole political system is picking up steam with every new "surprise" election, rush of tormented souls across borders, and tweet from the star of America's great unreality show, Donald Trump. But what exactly is the force that seems to be pushing us towards Armageddon? Is it capitalism gone wild? Globalization? Political corruption? Techno-nightmares? Rajani Kanth, a political economist, social thinker, and poet, goes beyond any of these explanations for the answer. In his view, what's throwing most of us off kilter - whether we think of ourselves as on the left or right, capitalist or socialist -was birthed 400 years ago during the period of the Enlightenment. It's a set of assumptions, a particular way of looking at the world that pushed out previous modes o
Bill Fulkerson

Millennials and Gen Z are spreading coronavirus-but not because of parties and bars - 0 views

www.nationalgeographic.com/...ch-parties-bars-inequality-cvd

millennials COVID-19 pandemic gen-z

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 17 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 17 Sep 20
     
    Younger generations are blamed for the pandemic's spread, but also face the brunt of the transmission risk that comes with keeping the economy going. 6 MINUTE READ BY REBECCA RENNER PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 17, 2020 WHEN PARAMEDICS RUSHED the pregnant Honduran woman into the emergency room, 28-year-old Chuan-Jay Jeffrey Chen stood ready to receive her. It was April, and the pandemic had already taken over his final year as an emergency medicine resident. Of all the coronavirus patients surging into Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, this 32-year-old patient remains Chen's most memorable. The woman was so short of breath she could barely speak, so Chen would need to intubate her-a tricky procedure that requires precision as well as speed. Every moment without oxygen causes a patient's chances of survival to decline; pregnancy further complicates the scenario by making airways swollen, causing blood pressure to drop more quickly. As Chen set to work and talked her through the steps in Spanish, he also tried to calm his own nerves. "I knew I had very little margin for error," says Chen. The woman's husband had been barred from entering the building because of coronavirus restrictionsgen-z
Bill Fulkerson

The problem with 'Clean Slate' policies: Could broader sealing of criminal records hurt... - 0 views

www.niskanencenter.org/hurt-more-people-than-it-helps

policies sealing slate criminal

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 31 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 31 Aug 20
     
    With this in mind, a growing chorus has called for broader sealing (also called "expungement") of criminal records. Sealing an official criminal record hides it from view by employers, landlords, and others doing formal background checks. However, relatively few criminal records are currently eligible for sealing (typically minor offenses committed a long time ago), and the process to have a record sealed is complicated and costly. Advocates are pushing to expand the set of records eligible for sealing-and to leverage technology to make sealing automatic. These are often referred to as 'Clean Slate' policies.
Steve Bosserman

Donald Trump, the First President of Our Post-Literate Age - Bloomberg View - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...ident-of-our-post-literate-age

literacy platforms social media storytelling

shared by Steve Bosserman on 02 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • And here we begin to see how the age of social media resembles the pre-literate, oral world. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and other platforms are fostering an emerging linguistic economy that places a high premium on ideas that are pithy, clear, memorable and repeatable (that is to say, viral). Complicated, nuanced thoughts that require context don’t play very well on most social platforms, but a resonant hashtag can have extraordinary influence.
Steve Bosserman

Gamification has a dark side - 0 views

www.fastcompany.com/...he-dark-side-of-gamifying-work

gamification productivity software development social control

shared by Steve Bosserman on 01 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • Gamification is the application of game elements into nongame spaces. It is the permeation of ideas and values from the sphere of play and leisure to other social spaces. It’s premised on a seductive idea: if you layer elements of games, such as rules, feedback systems, rewards and videogame-like user interfaces over reality, it will make any activity motivating, fair and (potentially) fun. ‘We are starving and games are feeding us,’ writes Jane McGonigal in Reality Is Broken (2011). ‘What if we decided to use everything we know about game design to fix what’s wrong with reality?’
  • But gamification’s trapping of total fun masks that we have very little control over the games we are made to play – and hides the fact that these games are not games at all. Gamified systems are tools, not toys. They can teach complex topics, engage us with otherwise difficult problems. Or they can function as subtle systems of social control.
  • The problem of the gamified workplace goes beyond micromanagement. The business ethicist Tae Wan Kim at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh warns that gamified systems have the potential to complicate and subvert ethical reasoning. He cites the example of a drowning child. If you save the child, motivated by empathy, sympathy or goodwill – that’s a morally good act. But say you gamify the situation. Say you earn points for saving drowning children. ‘Your gamified act is ethically unworthy,’ he explained to me in an email. Providing extrinsic gamified motivators, even if they work as intended, deprive us of the option to live worthy lives, Kim argues. ‘The workplace is a sacred space where we develop ourselves and help others,’ he notes. ‘Gamified workers have difficulty seeing what contributions they really make.’
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  • The 20th-century French philosopher Michel Foucault would have said that these are technologies of power. Today, the interface designer and game scholar Sebastian Deterding says that this kind of gamification expresses a modernist view of a world with top-down managerial control. But the concept is flawed. Gamification promises easy, centralised overviews and control. ‘It’s a comforting illusion because de facto reality is not as predictable as a simulation,’ Deterding says. You can make a model of a city in SimCity that bears little resemblance to a real city. Mistaking games for reality is ultimately mistaking map for territory. No matter how well-designed, a simulation cannot account for the unforeseen.
Steve Bosserman

How We Made AI As Racist and Sexist As Humans - 0 views

thewalrus.ca/as-racist-and-sexist-as-humans

artificial intelligence algorithms sexism data mining racism

shared by Steve Bosserman on 25 May 18 - No Cached
  • Artificial intelligence may have cracked the code on certain tasks that typically require human smarts, but in order to learn, these algorithms need vast quantities of data that humans have produced. They hoover up that information, rummage around in search of commonalities and correlations, and then offer a classification or prediction (whether that lesion is cancerous, whether you’ll default on your loan) based on the patterns they detect. Yet they’re only as clever as the data they’re trained on, which means that our limitations—our biases, our blind spots, our inattention—become theirs as well.
  • The majority of AI systems used in commercial applications—the ones that mediate our access to services like jobs, credit, and loans— are proprietary, their algorithms and training data kept hidden from public view. That makes it exceptionally difficult for an individual to interrogate the decisions of a machine or to know when an algorithm, trained on historical examples checkered by human bias, is stacked against them. And forget about trying to prove that AI systems may be violating human rights legislation.
  • Data is essential to the operation of an AI system. And the more complicated the system—the more layers in the neural nets, to translate speech or identify faces or calculate the likelihood someone defaults on a loan—the more data must be collected.
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  • But not everyone will be equally represented in that data.
  • And sometimes, even when ample data exists, those who build the training sets don’t take deliberate measures to ensure its diversity
  • The power of the system is its “ability to recognize that correlations occur between gender and professions,” says Kathryn Hume. “The downside is that there’s no intentionality behind the system—it’s just math picking up on correlations. It doesn’t know this is a sensitive issue.” There’s a tension between the futuristic and the archaic at play in this technology. AI is evolving much more rapidly than the data it has to work with, so it’s destined not just to reflect and replicate biases but also to prolong and reinforce them.
  • Accordingly, groups that have been the target of systemic discrimination by institutions that include police forces and courts don’t fare any better when judgment is handed over to a machine.
  • A growing field of research, in fact, now looks to apply algorithmic solutions to the problems of algorithmic bias.
  • Still, algorithmic interventions only do so much; addressing bias also demands diversity in the programmers who are training machines in the first place.
  • A growing awareness of algorithmic bias isn’t only a chance to intervene in our approaches to building AI systems. It’s an opportunity to interrogate why the data we’ve created looks like this and what prejudices continue to shape a society that allows these patterns in the data to emerge.
  • Of course, there’s another solution, elegant in its simplicity and fundamentally fair: get better data.
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