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colemorris

Supermodel Halima Aden: 'Why I quit' - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...stories-55653029

world discrimination industry

shared by colemorris on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • the first hijab-wearing supermodel, quit the fashion industry in November saying it was incompatible with her Muslim religion.
  • "I'm Halima from Kakuma," she says, referring to the refugee camp in Kenya,
  • However she was dressed, keeping her hijab on for every shoot was non-negotiable
    • colemorris
      colemorris on 17 Jan 21
       
      good for her for standing up for herself in an industry that is so manipulative
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • "There are girls who wanted to die for a modelling contract," she says, "but I was ready to walk away if it wasn't accepted."
  • But as time went on she had less control over the clothes she wore, and agreed to head coverings she would have ruled out at the start.
  • In the last year of her career her hijab got smaller and smaller, sometimes accentuating her neck and chest.
    • colemorris
      colemorris on 17 Jan 21
       
      edge of being true to herself and being manipulated by the industry
  • "I eventually drifted away and got into the confusing grey area of letting the team on-set style my hijab."
    • colemorris
      colemorris on 17 Jan 21
       
      grey area TOK lesson
  • IMG supported her in this and in 2018 Halima became a Unicef ambassador. As she had spent her childhood in a refugee camp, her work focused on children's rights.
  • "I could spell 'Unicef' when I couldn't spell my own name. I was marking X,"
  • "The style and makeup were horrendous. I looked like a white man's fetishised version of me," she says.
  • "Why would the magazine think it was acceptable to have a hijab-wearing Muslim woman when a naked man is on the next page?" she asks. It went against everything she believed in.
  • I'm putting my mental health and my family at the top. I'm thriving, not just surviving. I'm getting my mental health checked, I'm getting therapy time."
knudsenlu

The Brutal Math of Gender Inequality in Hollywood - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...550232

gender inequality hollywood culture

shared by knudsenlu on 13 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Lady Bird won the award for Best Motion Picture Musical or Comedy, but its writer and director Greta Gerwig was curiously not nominated for Best Director. That category’s five nominees were all male. In fact, only one woman has ever won a Golden Globe for directing: Barbra Streisand, in 1984, for Yentl. At the time, Gerwig was six months old, and her film’s lead actress had not yet been born. Hollywood remains an industry where women are more likely to be celebrated for speaking out in front of a camera than for holding one.
  • Finally, actresses are vulnerable, not only because men dominate powerful occupations, but also because women are cast to portray the very quality of vulnerability
  • Altogether, these surveys and studies suggest something quite simple: The ratio of women in an industry (like film) or in an occupation within that industry (like directing) shapes how women are treated. While more than 80 percent of women say they have been harassed at work, they are 50 percent more likely to say so in male-dominated industries.
peterconnelly

Opinion: How streaming can avoid the same fate as cable TV - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

opinion cnn streaming

shared by peterconnelly on 04 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Streaming networks were the center of attention last month when the television industry — or, more accurately now, the entertainment industry — staged its annual ritual known as the "upfronts."
  • The program distributors (what used to be called studios) are trying to navigate a marketplace that is not entirely sure where it's going. Streaming was expected to take over as the be-all/end-all of not just TV, but also the film industry. But the sudden crash for Netflix, the industry leader, in both subscribers and stock price, has the business collectively hitting the pause button. After all, who knows whether an overall better idea than streaming is only a few years away?
  • on. After
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • hugely successful media giants dominating the entertainment scene, growing fat and cocky, dismissive of upstart competitors, followed by a humbling slide toward marginalization, if not outright irrelevance.
  • First radio was so dominant that surely no one thought television could ever replace it. Then broadcast TV was such an enormous presence in American life, some network executives dismissed cable TV as destined to be small-timey forever.
  • A viewer could watch a whole series in a single day and never be bothered by somebody selling corn flakes.
  • There could be a number of reasons for the huge subscriber drop, but the biggest seems to be increased competition, with a slew of companies with great resources and deep libraries of content entering the streaming world in recent years, including Disney, Universal and Warner Bros. Discovery (the parent company of CNN).
  • Netflix, following in the footsteps of streaming competitors like Hulu and HBO Max, is reportedly exploring a new option for financial security. Or rather an old one, a really old one.
  • The one that brought all those people together in Manhattan for the upfronts: ad dollars.
Javier E

The Chatbots Are Here, and the Internet Industry Is in a Tizzy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...disrupt-internet-industry.html

chatbot AI industry effects business internet companies technology

shared by Javier E on 10 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • He cleared his calendar and asked employees to figure out how the technology, which instantly provides comprehensive answers to complex questions, could benefit Box, a cloud computing company that sells services that help businesses manage their online data.
  • Mr. Levie’s reaction to ChatGPT was typical of the anxiety — and excitement — over Silicon Valley’s new new thing. Chatbots have ignited a scramble to determine whether their technology could upend the economics of the internet, turn today’s powerhouses into has-beens or create the industry’s next giants.
  • Cloud computing companies are rushing to deliver chatbot tools, even as they worry that the technology will gut other parts of their businesses. E-commerce outfits are dreaming of new ways to sell things. Social media platforms are being flooded with posts written by bots. And publishing companies are fretting that even more dollars will be squeezed out of digital advertising.
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  • The volatility of chatbots has made it impossible to predict their impact. In one second, the systems impress by fielding a complex request for a five-day itinerary, making Google’s search engine look archaic. A moment later, they disturb by taking conversations in dark directions and launching verbal assaults.
  • The result is an industry gripped with the question: What do we do now?
  • The A.I. systems could disrupt $100 billion in cloud spending, $500 billion in digital advertising and $5.4 trillion in e-commerce sales,
  • As Microsoft figures out a chatbot business model, it is forging ahead with plans to sell the technology to others. It charges $10 a month for a cloud service, built in conjunction with the OpenAI lab, that provides developers with coding suggestions, among other things.
  • Smaller companies like Box need help building chatbot tools, so they are turning to the giants that process, store and manage information across the web. Those companies — Google, Microsoft and Amazon — are in a race to provide businesses with the software and substantial computing power behind their A.I. chatbots.
  • “The cloud computing providers have gone all in on A.I. over the last few months,
  • “They are realizing that in a few years, most of the spending will be on A.I., so it is important for them to make big bets.”
  • Yusuf Mehdi, the head of Bing, said the company was wrestling with how the new version would make money. Advertising will be a major driver, he said, but the company expects fewer ads than traditional search allows.
  • Google, perhaps more than any other company, has reason to both love and hate the chatbots. It has declared a “code red” because their abilities could be a blow to its $162 billion business showing ads on searches.
  • “The discourse on A.I. is rather narrow and focused on text and the chat experience,” Mr. Taylor said. “Our vision for search is about understanding information and all its forms: language, images, video, navigating the real world.”
  • Sridhar Ramaswamy, who led Google’s advertising division from 2013 to 2018, said Microsoft and Google recognized that their current search business might not survive. “The wall of ads and sea of blue links is a thing of the past,” said Mr. Ramaswamy, who now runs Neeva, a subscription-based search engine.
  • As that underlying tech, known as generative A.I., becomes more widely available, it could fuel new ideas in e-commerce. Late last year, Manish Chandra, the chief executive of Poshmark, a popular online secondhand store, found himself daydreaming during a long flight from India about chatbots building profiles of people’s tastes, then recommending and buying clothes or electronics. He imagined grocers instantly fulfilling orders for a recipe.
  • “It becomes your mini-Amazon,” said Mr. Chandra, who has made integrating generative A.I. into Poshmark one of the company’s top priorities over the next three years. “That layer is going to be very powerful and disruptive and start almost a new layer of retail.”
  • In early December, users of Stack Overflow, a popular social network for computer programmers, began posting substandard coding advice written by ChatGPT. Moderators quickly banned A.I.-generated text
  • t people could post this questionable content far faster than they could write posts on their own, said Dennis Soemers, a moderator for the site. “Content generated by ChatGPT looks trustworthy and professional, but often isn’t,”
  • When websites thrived during the pandemic as traffic from Google surged, Nilay Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, a tech news site, warned publishers that the search giant would one day turn off the spigot. He had seen Facebook stop linking out to websites and foresaw Google following suit in a bid to boost its own business.
  • He predicted that visitors from Google would drop from a third of websites’ traffic to nothing. He called that day “Google zero.”
  • Because chatbots replace website search links with footnotes to answers, he said, many publishers are now asking if his prophecy is coming true.
  • , strategists and engineers at the digital advertising company CafeMedia have met twice a week to contemplate a future where A.I. chatbots replace search engines and squeeze web traffic.
  • The group recently discussed what websites should do if chatbots lift information but send fewer visitors. One possible solution would be to encourage CafeMedia’s network of 4,200 websites to insert code that limited A.I. companies from taking content, a practice currently allowed because it contributes to search rankings.
  • Courts are expected to be the ultimate arbiter of content ownership. Last month, Getty Images sued Stability AI, the start-up behind the art generator tool Stable Diffusion, accusing it of unlawfully copying millions of images. The Wall Street Journal has said using its articles to train an A.I. system requires a license.
  • In the meantime, A.I. companies continue collecting information across the web under the “fair use” doctrine, which permits limited use of material without permission.
Javier E

The Dark Age Of Journalism « The Dish - 0 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...the-dark-age-of-journalism

journalism media industry propaganda information ethics

shared by Javier E on 27 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Anyone who cares deeply about quality, independent journalism should pray for paywalls and other subscription models to take hold. Because in the world of the smart and the desperate, desperate always has the last word.
  • it matters that the industry that is responsible for the dissemination of information is increasingly ceding editorial control to PR firms simply to stay afloat
  • Democracy is a market in which politicians design policies to get votes. Like any market, it relies on information and signals being reliably transmitted from producer to consumer and vice versa. In a situation where the producer can effectively block the signals that actually their policies are designed simply to siphon wealth from everyone else into the pockets of the rich, what do you think happens to that market? Yep, that’s right, you get a choice between red, blue and yellow versions of producers all with the same agenda.
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  • We’ve gone from advertizing supporting journalism to journalism supporting corporate propaganda. At the rate we’re going, as the line between church and state is deliberately blurred by desperate media companies, we may end up with a handful of actual independent online magazines and newspapers and a vast industry of corporate propaganda designed to look like the real thing. If we’re lucky.
Dunia Tonob

Too-Skinny Model Ban Takes Effect in Israel | How To - Yahoo! Shine - 0 views

shine.yahoo.com/...s-effect-israel-213500942.html

model ban israel education social media

shared by Dunia Tonob on 03 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • The law, approved last March by Israel's legislating Knesset, requires models to prove they have maintained a Body Mass Index (BMI) of at least 18.5 for three months prior to a fashion shoot or show.
  • "This law is another step in the war against eating disorders,"
  • But critics of the law in this country say it and others like it—the Madrid Fashion Show's ban on women whose BMI is below 18, for example, and Milan's Fashion Week's ban on models with a BMI below 18.5—are misguided, focusing on weight instead of health.
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  • create guidelines for models which, rather than focusing on BMI, strive to educate the industry and foster a healthy working environment.
  • "I realized that only legislation can change the situation. There was no time to educate so many people, and the change had be forced on the industry. There was no time to waste, so many girls were dieting to death."
  • "Certainly I don't believe the modeling industry has caused the rise in eating disorders, but it makes it harder," she says. "It's a difficult recovery environment, worshiping thinness as the beauty ideal."
Javier E

What Can't Tech Money Buy? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...what-cant-tech-money-buy.html

rich oligarchy philanthropy tech elite social gospel billionaire politics

shared by Javier E on 29 May 16 - No Cached
  • IT did not take long for the tech industry to become the new establishment, and to assign itself the rights and responsibilities that come with such prosperity.
  • Tech’s elite, lauded for their originality, are influencing media, politics and society at large with a kind of venture philanthropy, much as their industrial predecessors did more than 100 years ago.
  • The robber barons of the 19th and 20th centuries were kings of infrastructure. The people with towering wealth today are kings of information. The rise of Silicon Valley is best understood as a new industrial revolution in this tradition.
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  • In recent years, many of the industry’s elite have pledged financial support to schools, hospitals, police stations and homeless shelters, all while many of the industry’s companies have avoided paying taxes that would fund those same vital public institutions.
  • Any philanthropy seems legitimate when it aligns with your own goals.
  • We did indeed give them this mandate through our politics: loose campaign finance laws and lower tax rates. Through policies that have reinforced exceptional wealth disparities, we have allowed them not just to govern themselves, but us as well.
  • To many of Gawker’s critics, Mr. Thiel is a hero on a charitable crusade for justice. It would be safe to say that this is how his fellow Silicon Valley philanthropists would also define their giving. They are under a presumptive mandate to improve society according to their own values, purely because they have made a lot of money while most everyone else has not. The Gospel of Wealth dictates that this is not only their ability, but their responsibility.
  • the concerned public might take a different, simpler tack.Mr. Thiel told an interviewer in 2012 that he feared the result of this precipitous wealth gap. “In the history of the modern world, inequality has only been ended through Communist revolution, war or deflationary economic collapse,” he said. “It’s a disturbing question which of these three is going to happen today, or if there’s a fourth way out.”
  • If we’re lucky, there may be, but Mr. Thiel isn’t going to like it. Wealth gleaned by way of tax dodges and monopolistic business practices is wealth stolen from the public, even when it is returned in the form of supposed gifts.
  • Philanthropy has the power to do a great deal of good, but so do tax dollars allocated in an equitable democratic system. Perhaps it’s time to adopt a Gospel of Government.
dicindioha

Why coal-fired power handouts would be an attack on climate and common sense | Environm... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ck-on-climate-and-common-sense

shared by dicindioha on 08 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • The coal industry knows that to stop runaway climate change all coal-powered generators need to close Australia joined 174 countries and the European Union in 2015, signing the Paris agreement. In doing so, Australia agreed to do its part in keeping the global temperature rise “well below” 2C.
  • According to data from the Office of the Chief Economist, the demand for coal-generated electricity has dropped by more than 15% in the past eight years.
  • Coal is now the most expensive form of new power. According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, the cost of energy from a new coal power plant would be $134-$203/MWh. That’s more expensive than wind, solar or highly efficient combined-cycle gas (costing $61-$118/MWh, $78-$140/MWh and $74-$90/MWh, respectively).
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  • The only people who still think we need the old-fashioned sort of “baseload power” that coal provides – power that is always running regardless of whether you need it – are those in the coal industry.
    • dicindioha
      dicindioha on 08 Feb 17
       
      This claim seems a bit extreme, saying that the only people still interested in coal are in the coal industry. It might be true, but I also feel as if some people do not think of where their power source comes from.
  • In the short term, that can be gas. But, in the longer term, to stop runaway climate change, that service will need to be supplied by renewable sources such as battery storage, hydro, solar thermal with storage or geothermal.
  • “As the world’s largest coal exporter, we have a vested interest in showing that we can provide both lower emissions and reliable baseload power with state-of-the-art, clean, coal-fired technology.”
  • dicindioha on 08 Feb 17
     
    This article is really interesting because I think it goes to show that there is still some side of the global warming/climate change argument that is making progress. As we learned today, it is important to walk that middle line between over-skepticism and gullibility. Here people recognize that coal emissions are bad, and countries are taking a stand to try and lower that. It does make me wonder though what the future with coal holds, and if one day, we really will resort to renewable energy. It seems increasingly important. One more interesting thing I found was the use of the graphs to support the information, for graphs used to seem to me something people trust, but now I realize we have survival instincts associated even with data, and I wonder if some people would remark this as "fake news."
Javier E

Our economy is a hellscape for consumers. The United flier is the latest victim. - The ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ted-flier-is-the-latest-victim

oligopoly market fundamentalism consumers

shared by Javier E on 12 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • We are told that this is the era of the empowered consumer:
  • Better information means more competition, which means lower prices — all features, of course, of an open marketplace ostensibly presided over by a regulatory authority that, while distant, exists to protect our safety.
  • This vision is a lie. Air travel is the most concentrated version of an essentially authoritarian experience that can be found throughout today’s economy. We live, work, shop, and travel under a system of grossly asymmetric power relationships, in which consumers sign away most of their rights just by purchasing a ticket and companies deputize themselves to enforce contracts with hired goons.
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  • It doesn’t help that the Trump administration is rapidly stripping away as many regulations as it can, promising to repeal two for every new one implemented — an ultra-wealthy administration’s attempt to formalize the plutocratic free-for-all that has followed decades of growing corporate power, defined by massive income inequality, regulatory capture, a revolving door between agencies and the industries they oversee, and steadily eroding consumer rights. The empowered consumer is a figment of our imagination.
  • Experiences that used to be standardized are being divided into tiers denoting various rights, access and costs. The result is to both pit consumers against one another — as they compete for a limited pool of guaranteed seats on an airplane, for example — and to extract more money out of better-heeled customers.
  • If we violate any of the strictures of the contract we’ve implicitly signed by buying a ticket, then the airline — backed with the imprimatur of state authority, perhaps even with the help of local police — has every right to remove us from the plane without apology.
  • Survey the economic landscape and you’re likely to find similarly scrambled power relationships. During the foreclosure crisis, banks acted like arms of the state, with local sheriffs becoming the banking industry’s eviction force. Health insurers dictate access to health care for millions while a small coterie of chief executives reaps huge payouts. The telecommunications industry has consolidated into a handful of industry behemoths that maintain regional monopolies
  • The result is a lack of competition and slow, pricey service
  • Increasingly we’re not just paying more for less; we are sacrificing our privacy rights in the process, as personal data has become a huge driver of the digital economy
  • Those are the economic costs of this arrangement. The social and cultural costs are harder to define but no less important. As Sandel explains, common experiences become increasingly fragmented and subjected to the vicissitudes of the market: “At a time of rising inequality, the marketization of everything means that people of affluence and people of modest means lead increasingly separate lives. We live and work and shop and play in different places. Our children go to different schools.”
  • traditionally guaranteed rights become more contingent and benefits accrue to the wealthy.
  • We get what we pay for, which increasingly means whatever a company like United decides.
grayton downing

2013 Life Sciences Salary Survey | The Scientist Magazine® - 0 views

www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/38033/title/2013-Life-Sciences-Salary-Survey/

sciences salary survey research

shared by grayton downing on 11 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • US researchers across academia, industry, and government earn an average of nearly $96,000 per year in total compensation, including base salary, bonuses, and other income, compared with a European average of just $66,700. Life scientists in Canada come in right in the middle, at $78,200, while researchers in India lag far behind, earning an average of just $11,200.
  • life sciences, could explain the oft-cited “brain drain,” which has seen foreign researchers flock to the U.S. in search of good jobs with ample compensation.
  • Across the globe, scientists earn a wide range of salaries, with US researchers earning nearly $96,000 total compensation per year while India lags far behind at less than $11,200, though this discrepancy is at least partly explained by the vast differences in cost of living in the two countries. Still, this enormous gulf is a strong driver of “brain drain
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  • Dramatic budget cuts in the past few years, however, may make US academia less of a paradise.
  • European salaries also lag behind those in the U.S., with the average European life scientist making anywhere from 41 to 82 percent of what the average American researcher earns.
  • Europe make around 50 percent of what full professors there make, postdocs in the U.S. earn less than a third of a professor’s salary.
  • Equal Pay Act prohibited unequal pay for men and women doing the same jobs. But salary disparities remain, including in the life sciences. “It is a persistent problem,” says Curtis. “It’s important for people to realize that there are continuing inequalities.” In this year’s survey, for example, male respondents in the U.S. reported an average total income of around $111,000 per year, while their female counterparts averaged just $77,000 in annual pay.
  • fewer women make it to high-level positions than men do, says Curtis.
  • life-science specialty is often tomorrow’s overcrowded field. Case in point: genomics versus genetics. Genomics relies heavily on bioinformatics, mathematics, and computational modeling
  • survey highlights the well-established discrepancy between industry and academic salaries. According to the data, life scientists in industry make around $136,000 per year, compared to average academic earnings of $85,000.
Javier E

Guess Who Doesn't Fit In at Work - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...who-doesnt-fit-in-at-work.html

recruiting hiring psychology job fitness culture values discrimination diversity bias

shared by Javier E on 02 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • ACROSS cultures and industries, managers strongly prize “cultural fit” — the idea that the best employees are like-minded.
  • One recent survey found that more than 80 percent of employers worldwide named cultural fit as a top hiring priority.
  • When done carefully, selecting new workers this way can make organizations more productive and profitable.
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  • In the process, fit has become a catchall used to justify hiring people who are similar to decision makers and rejecting people who are not.
  • The concept of fit first gained traction in the 1980s. The original idea was that if companies hired individuals whose personalities and values — and not just their skills — meshed with an organization’s strategy, workers would feel more attached to their jobs, work harder and stay longer.
  • in many organizations, fit has gone rogue. I saw this firsthand while researching the hiring practices of the country’s top investment banks, management consultancies and law firms. I interviewed 120 decision makers and spent nine months observing
  • While résumés (and connections) influenced which applicants made it into the interview room, interviewers’ perceptions of fit strongly shaped who walked out with job offers.
  • Crucially, though, for these gatekeepers, fit was not about a match with organizational values. It was about personal fit. In these time- and team-intensive jobs, professionals at all levels of seniority reported wanting to hire people with whom they enjoyed hanging out and could foresee developing close relationships with
  • To judge fit, interviewers commonly relied on chemistry. “
  • Many used the “airport test.” As a managing director at an investment bank put it, “Would I want to be stuck in an airport in Minneapolis in a snowstorm with them?”
  • interviewers were primarily interested in new hires whose hobbies, hometowns and biographies matched their own. Bonding over rowing college crew, getting certified in scuba, sipping single-malt Scotches in the Highlands or dining at Michelin-starred restaurants was evidence of fit; sharing a love of teamwork or a passion for pleasing clients was not
  • it has become a common feature of American corporate culture. Employers routinely ask job applicants about their hobbies and what they like to do for fun, while a complementary self-help industry informs white-collar job seekers that chemistry, not qualifications, will win them an offer.
  • Selection based on personal fit can keep demographic and cultural diversity low
  • In the elite firms I studied, the types of shared experiences associated with fit typically required large investments of time and money.
  • Class-biased definitions of fit are one reason investment banks, management consulting firms and law firms are dominated by people from the highest socioeconomic backgrounds
  • Also, whether the industry is finance, high-tech or fashion, a good fit in most American corporations still tends to be stereotypically masculine.
  • Perhaps most important, it is easy to mistake rapport for skill. Just as they erroneously believe that they can accurately tell when someone is lying, people tend to be overly confident in their ability to spot talent. Unstructured interviews, which are the most popular hiring tools for American managers and the primary way they judge fit, are notoriously poor predictors of job performance.
  • Organizations that use cultural fit for competitive advantage tend to favor concrete tools like surveys and structured interviews that systematically test behaviors associated with increased performance and employee retention.
  • For managers who want to use cultural fit in a more productive way, I have several suggestions.
  • First, communicate a clear and consistent idea of what the organization’s culture is (and is not) to potential employees. Second, make sure the definition of cultural fit is closely aligned with business goals. Ideally, fit should be based on data-driven analysis of what types of values, traits and behaviors actually predict on-the-job success. Third, create formal procedures like checklists for measuring fit, so that assessment is not left up to the eyes (and extracurriculars) of the beholder.
  • But cultural fit has become a new form of discrimination that keeps demographic and cultural diversity down
Javier E

Technology Imperialism, the Californian Ideology, and the Future of Higher Education - 2 views

hackeducation.com/...technoimperialism

imperialism education trends learning ideology california narrative silicon valley

shared by Javier E on 19 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • What I hope to make explicit today is how much California – the place, the concept, “the dream machine” – shapes (wants to shape) the future of technology and the future of education.
  • In an announcement on Facebook – of course – Zuckerberg argued that “connectivity is a human right.”
  • As Zuckerberg frames it at least, the “human right” in this case is participation in the global economy
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  • This is a revealing definition of “human rights,” I’d argue, particularly as it’s one that never addresses things like liberty, equality, or justice. It never addresses freedom of expression or freedom of assembly or freedom of association.
  • in certain countries, a number of people say they do not use the Internet yet they talk about how much time they spend on Facebook. According to one survey, 11% of Indonesians who said they used Facebook also said they did not use the Internet. A survey in Nigeria had similar results:
  • Evgeny Morozov has described this belief as “Internet-centrism,” an ideology he argues permeates the tech industry, its PR wing the tech blogosphere, and increasingly government policy
  • “Internet-centrism” describes the tendency to see “the Internet” – Morozov uses quotations around the phrase – as a new yet unchanging, autonomous, benevolent, and inevitable socio-technological development. “The Internet” is a master framework for how all institutions will supposedly operate moving forward
  • “The opportunity to connect” as a human right assumes that “connectivity” will hasten the advent of these other rights, I suppose – that the Internet will topple dictatorships, for example, that it will extend participation in civic life to everyone and, for our purposes here at this conference, that it will “democratize education.”
  • Empire is not simply an endeavor of the nation-state – we have empire through technology (that’s not new) and now, the technology industry as empire.
  • Facebook is really just synecdochal here, I should add – just one example of the forces I think are at play, politically, economically, technologically, culturally.
  • it matters at the level of ideology. Infrastructure is ideological, of course. The new infrastructure – “the Internet” if you will – has a particular political, economic, and cultural bent to it. It is not neutral.
  • This infrastructure matters. In this case, this is a French satellite company (Eutelsat). This is an American social network (Facebook). Mark Zuckerberg’s altruistic rhetoric aside, this is their plan – an economic plan – to monetize the world’s poor.
  • The content and the form of “connectivity” perpetuate imperialism, and not only in Africa but in all of our lives. Imperialism at the level of infrastructure – not just cultural imperialism but technological imperialism
  • “The Silicon Valley Narrative,” as I call it, is the story that the technology industry tells about the world – not only the world-as-is but the world-as-Silicon-Valley-wants-it-to-be.
  • To better analyze and assess both technology and education technology requires our understanding of these as ideological, argues Neil Selwyn – “‘a site of social struggle’ through which hegemonic positions are developed, legitimated, reproduced and challenged.”
  • This narrative has several commonly used tropes
  • It often features a hero: the technology entrepreneur. Smart. Independent. Bold. Risk-taking. White. Male
  • “The Silicon Valley narrative” invokes themes like “innovation” and “disruption.” It privileges the new; everything else that can be deemed “old” is viewed as obsolete.
  • It contends that its workings are meritocratic: anyone who hustles can make it.
  • “The Silicon Valley narrative” fosters a distrust of institutions – the government, the university. It is neoliberal. It hates paying taxes.
  • “The Silicon Valley narrative” draws from the work of Ayn Rand; it privileges the individual at all costs; it calls this “personalization.”
  • “The Silicon Valley narrative” does not neatly co-exist with public education. We forget this at our peril. This makes education technology, specifically, an incredibly fraught area.
  • Here’s the story I think we like to hear about ed-tech, about distance education, about “connectivity” and learning: Education technology is supportive, not exploitative. Education technology opens, not forecloses, opportunities. Education technology is driven by a rethinking of teaching and learning, not expanding markets or empire. Education technology meets individual and institutional and community goals.
  • That’s not really what the “Silicon Valley narrative” says about education
  • It is interested in data extraction and monetization and standardization and scale. It is interested in markets and return on investment. “Education is broken,” and technology will fix it
  • If “Silicon Valley” isn’t quite accurate, then I must admit that the word “narrative” is probably inadequate too
  • The better term here is “ideology.”
  • Facebook is “the Internet” for a fairly sizable number of people. They know nothing else – conceptually, experientially. And, let’s be honest, Facebook wants to be “the Internet” for everyone.
  • We tend to not see technology as ideological – its connections to libertarianism, neoliberalism, global capitalism, empire.
  • The California ideology ignores race and labor and the water supply; it is sustained by air and fantasy. It is built upon white supremacy and imperialism.
  • As is the technology sector, which has its own history, of course, in warfare and cryptography.
  • So far this year, some $3.76 billion of venture capital has been invested in education technology – a record-setting figure. That money will change the landscape – that’s its intention. That money carries with it a story about the future; it carries with it an ideology.
  • When a venture capitalist says that “software is eating the world,” we can push back on the inevitability implied in that. We can resist – not in the name of clinging to “the old” as those in educational institutions are so often accused of doing – but we can resist in the name of freedom and justice and a future that isn’t dictated by the wealthiest white men in Hollywood or Silicon Valley.
  • We in education would be naive, I think, to think that the designs that venture capitalists and technology entrepreneurs have for us would be any less radical than creating a new state, like Draper’s proposed state of Silicon Valley, that would enormously wealthy and politically powerful.
  • When I hear talk of “unbundling” in education – one of the latest gerunds you’ll hear venture capitalists and ed-tech entrepreneurs invoke, meaning the disassembling of institutions into products and services – I can’t help but think of the “unbundling” that Draper wished to do to my state: carving up land and resources, shifting tax revenue and tax burdens, creating new markets, privatizing public institutions, redistributing power and doing so explicitly not in the service of equity or justice.
  • I want to show you this map, a proposal – a failed proposal, thankfully – by venture capitalist Tim Draper to split the state of California into six separate states: Jefferson, North California, Silicon Valley, Central California, West California, and South California. The proposal, which Draper tried to collect enough signatures to get on the ballot in California, would have created the richest state in the US – Silicon Valley would be first in per-capita income. It would also have created the nation’s poorest state, Central California, which would rank even below Mississippi.
  • that’s not all that Silicon Valley really does.
silveiragu

BBC - Future - The man who studies the spread of ignorance - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...tudies-the-spread-of-ignorance

research knowledge ignorance science social media

shared by silveiragu on 09 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • is the study of wilful acts to spread confusion and deceit, usually to sell a product or win favour.
    • silveiragu
      silveiragu on 09 Jan 16
       
      Interesting data point on the irrationality of words: individuals invent words all the time, purposefully or not. Additionally, this word is USEFUL, as it reveals a clear deficiency in public understanding of, say, the tobacco industry. So, why have I not been able to find any dictionary recognizing its existence? 
  • Ignorance is power
  • Agnotology is as important today as it was back when Proctor studied
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • politically motivated doubt was sown over US President Barack Obama’s nationality for many months by opponents until he revealed his birth certificate in 2011.
  • ignorance can often be propagated under the guise of balanced debate. For example, the common idea that there will always be two opposing views does not always result in a rational conclusion.
    • silveiragu
      silveiragu on 09 Jan 16
       
      What's the exploited heuristic? There must be one.
  • a false picture of the truth, hence ignorance.
  • For example, says Proctor, many of the studies linking carcinogens in tobacco were conducted in mice initially, and the tobacco industry responded by saying that studies into mice did not mean that people were at risk,
  • Even though knowledge is ‘accessible’, it does not mean it is accessed, he warns
  • often comes from faith or tradition, or propaganda
    • silveiragu
      silveiragu on 09 Jan 16
       
      If there are Ways of Knowing, what are the Ways of Not Knowing?
  • a scientifically illiterate society will probably be more susceptible to the tactics used by those wishing to confuse and cloud the truth.
  • It’s not just about the facts, it’s about what is imagined to flow from and into such facts,
  • Another academic studying ignorance is David Dunning, from Cornell University.
  • "While some smart people will profit from all the information now just a click away, many will be misled into a false sense of expertise
  • US presidential candidate Donald Trump's solutions that are either unworkable or unconstitutional are an example of agnotology, says Dunning
    • silveiragu
      silveiragu on 09 Jan 16
       
      Or, rather, the analysis of US Presidential candidate Donald Trump...is.
  • today the need for both a word and the study of human ignorance is as strong as ever
  • How do people or companies with vested interests spread ignorance and obfuscate knowledge? Georgina Kenyon finds there is a term which defines this phenomenon.
  • 1979, a secret memo from the tobacco industry was revealed to the public.
  • it revealed many of the tactics employed by big tobacco to counter “anti-cigarette forces
  • “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”
  • revelation piqued the interest of Robert Proctor, a science historian from Stanford University
  • led him to create a word for the study of deliberate propagation of ignorance: agnotology.
Javier E

What Is Wrong with the West's Economies? by Edmund S. Phelps | The New York Review of B... - 1 views

www.nybooks.com/...what-wrong-wests-economies

economics theory science

shared by Javier E on 22 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • What is wrong with the economies of the West—and with economics?
  • With little or no effective policy initiative giving a lift to the less advantaged, the jarring market forces of the past four decades—mainly the slowdowns in productivity that have spread over the West and, of course, globalization, which has moved much low-wage manufacturing to Asia—have proceeded, unopposed, to drag down both employment and wage rates at the low end. The setback has cost the less advantaged not only a loss of income but also a loss of what economists call inclusion—access to jobs offering work and pay that provide self-respect.
  • The classical idea of political economy has been to let wage rates sink to whatever level the market takes them, and then provide everyone with the “safety net” of a “negative income tax,” unemployment insurance, and free food, shelter, clothing, and medical care
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  • This failing in the West’s economies is also a failing of economics
  • many people have long felt the desire to do something with their lives besides consuming goods and having leisure. They desire to participate in a community in which they can interact and develop.
  • Our prevailing political economy is blind to the very concept of inclusion; it does not map out any remedy for the deficiency
  • injustice of another sort. Workers in decent jobs view the economy as unjust if they or their children have virtually no chance of climbing to a higher rung in the socioeconomic ladder
  • “Money is like blood. You need it to live but it isn’t the point of life.”4
  • justice is not everything that people need from their economy. They need an economy that is good as well as just. And for some decades, the Western economies have fallen short of any conception of a “good economy”—an economy offering a “good life,” or a life of “richness,” as some humanists call it
  • The good life as it is popularly conceived typically involves acquiring mastery in one’s work, thus gaining for oneself better terms—or means to rewards, whether material, like wealth, or nonmaterial—an experience we may call “prospering.”
  • As humanists and philosophers have conceived it, the good life involves using one’s imagination, exercising one’s creativity, taking fascinating journeys into the unknown, and acting on the world—an experience I call “flourishing.”
  • prospering and flourishing became prevalent in the nineteenth century when, in Europe and America, economies emerged with the dynamism to generate their own innovation.
  • What is the mechanism of the slowdown in productivity
  • prospering
  • In nineteenth-century Britain and America, and later Germany and France, a culture of exploration, experimentation, and ultimately innovation grew out of the individualism of the Renaissance, the vitalism of the Baroque era, and the expressionism of the Romantic period.
  • What made innovating so powerful in these economies was that it was not limited to elites. It permeated society from the less advantaged parts of the population on up.
  • High-enough wages, low-enough unemployment, and wide-enough access to engaging work are necessary for a “good-enough” economy—though far from sufficient. The material possibilities of the economy must be adequate for the nonmaterial possibilities to be widespread—the satisfactions of prospering and of flourishing through adventurous, creative, and even imaginative work.
  • today’s standard economics. This economics, despite its sophistication in some respects, makes no room for economies in which people are imagining new products and using their creativity to build them. What is most fundamentally “wrong with economics” is that it takes such an economy to be the norm—to be “as good as it gets.”
  • ince around 1970, or earlier in some cases, most of the continental Western European economies have come to resemble more completely the mechanical model of standard economics. Most companies are highly efficient. Households, apart from the very low-paid or unemployed, have gone on saving
  • In most of Western Europe, economic dynamism is now at lows not seen, I would judge, since the advent of dynamism in the nineteenth century. Imagining and creating new products has almost disappeared from the continent
  • The bleak levels of both unemployment and job satisfaction in Europe are testimony to its dreary economies.
  • a recent survey of household attitudes found that, in “happiness,” the median scores in Spain (54), France (51), Italy (48), and Greece (37) are all below those in the upper half of the nations labeled “emerging”—Mexico (79), Venezuela (74), Brazil (73), Argentina (66), Vietnam (64), Colombia (64), China (59), Indonesia (58), Chile (58), and Malaysia (56)
  • The US economy is not much better. Two economists, Stanley Fischer and Assar Lindbeck, wrote of a “Great Productivity Slowdown,” which they saw as beginning in the late 1960s.11 The slowdown in the growth of capital and labor combined—what is called “total factor productivity”—is star
  • though the injustices in the West’s economies are egregious, they ought not to be seen as a major cause of the productivity slowdowns and globalization. (For one thing, a slowdown of productivity started in the US in the mid-1960s and the sharp loss of manufacturing jobs to poorer countries occurred much later—from the late 1970s to the early 1990s.) Deeper causes must be at work.
  • The plausible explanation of the syndrome in America—the productivity slowdown and the decline of job satisfaction, among other things—is a critical loss of indigenous innovation in the established industries like traditional manufacturing and services that was not nearly offset by the innovation that flowered in a few new industries
  • hat then caused this narrowing of innovation? No single explanation is persuasive. Yet two classes of explanations have the ring of truth. One points to suppression of innovation by vested interests
  • some professions, such as those in education and medicine, have instituted regulation and licensing to curb experimentation and change, thus dampening innovation
  • established corporations—their owners and stakeholders—and entire industries, using their lobbyists, have obtained regulations and patents that make it harder for new firms to gain entry into the market and to compete with incumbents.
  • The second explanation points to a new repression of potential innovators by families and schools. As the corporatist values of control, solidarity, and protection are invoked to prohibit innovation, traditional values of conservatism and materialism are often invoked to inhibit a young person from undertaking an innovation.
  • ow might Western nations gain—or regain—widespread prospering and flourishing? Taking concrete actions will not help much without fresh thinking: people must first grasp that standard economics is not a guide to flourishing—it is a tool only for efficiency.
  • Widespread flourishing in a nation requires an economy energized by its own homegrown innovation from the grassroots on up. For such innovation a nation must possess the dynamism to imagine and create the new—economic freedoms are not sufficient. And dynamism needs to be nourished with strong human values.
  • a reform of education stands out. The problem here is not a perceived mismatch between skills taught and skills in demand
  • The problem is that young people are not taught to see the economy as a place where participants may imagine new things, where entrepreneurs may want to build them and investors may venture to back some of them. It is essential to educate young people to this image of the economy.
  • It will also be essential that high schools and colleges expose students to the human values expressed in the masterpieces of Western literature, so that young people will want to seek economies offering imaginative and creative careers. Education systems must put students in touch with the humanities in order to fuel the human desire to conceive the new and perchance to achieve innovations
  • This reorientation of general education will have to be supported by a similar reorientation of economic education.
sissij

Trump Is a Chinese Agent - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-is-a-chinese-agent.html

new york times social media bias

shared by sissij on 29 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • The big story everyone is chasing is whether President Trump is a Russian stooge. Wrong. That’s all a smoke screen. Trump is actually a Chinese agent. He is clearly out to make China great again. Just look at the facts.
  • That’s called l-e-v-e-r-a-g-e, and Trump just threw it away … because he promised to in the campaign — without, I’d bet, ever reading TPP. What a chump! I can still hear the clinking of champagne glasses in Beijing.
  • O.K., Mr. President, let’s assume for a second that climate change is a hoax. Do you believe in math?
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • How can America be great if we don’t dominate the next great global industry — clean power?
  • Finally, Trump wants to slash the State Department and foreign aid budgets and make it harder for people to immigrate to America, particularly Muslims. This opens the way for China to expand its influence across the developing world and signals the smartest math and science students in the world to start their start-ups overseas and not in America.
  • sissij on 29 Mar 17
     
    After we watched about storytelling in politics today in TOK class, I think it is very interesting that people with good stories are often very popular. In entertainment industry, it is very common that the stars create stories intentionally to keep them hot and famous. Sometimes, they even create scandals and affairs to make their story interesting to the general population. I think the news are keep telling stories about Donald Trump, or Trump intentionally make himself a great story to be told. People that with different perspectives have different stories to tell about Trump. Trump is very "famous" in this sense. --Sissi (3/29/2017)
anonymous

Opinion | The Pandemic and the Future City - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cities-covid-remote-work.html

shared by anonymous on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The Pandemic and the Future City
  • Lessons from Alexander Hamilton and the book trade.
  • In 1957 Isaac Asimov published “The Naked Sun,” a science-fiction novel about a society in which people live on isolated estates, their needs provided by robots and they interact only by video
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • how will we live once the pandemic subsides?
  • First, it seems safe to predict that we won’t fully return to the way we used to live and work.
  • A year of isolation has, in effect, provided remote work with a classic case of infant industry protection, a concept usually associated with international trade policy that was first systematically laid out by none other than Alexander Hamilton.
  • never coming close to overtaking physical books
  • Given a break from competition, for example through temporary tariffs, these industries could acquire enough experience and technological sophistication to become competitive
  • the pandemic, by temporarily making our former work habits impossible, has clearly made us much better at exploiting the possibilities of remote work, and some of what we used to do — long commutes so we can sit in cubicles, constant flying to meetings of dubious value — won’t be coming back.
  • f history is any guide, however, much of our old way of working and living will, in fact, return.
  • what the internet did and didn’t do to the way we read books.
  • Hamilton asserted that there were many industries that could flourish in the young United States but couldn’t get off the ground in the face of imports.
  • And while big chains have suffered, independent bookstores have actually been flourishing.
  • for many readers this convenience is offset by subtler factors. The experience of reading a physical book is different and, for many, more enjoyable than reading e-ink.
  • what I find in a bookstore, especially a well-curated independent store, are books I wasn’t looking for but end up treasuring.
  • The remote work revolution will probably play out similarly, but on a much vaster scale.
  • The advantages of remote work — either from home or, possibly, in small offices located far from dense urban areas — are obvious.
  • Both living and work spaces are much cheaper; commutes are short or nonexistent; you no longer need to deal with the expense and discomfort of formal business wear, at least from the waist down.
  • The advantages of going back to in-person work will, by contrast, be relatively subtle — the payoffs from face-to-face communication, the serendipity that can come from unscheduled interactions, the amenities of urban life.
  • But these subtle advantages are, in fact, what drive the economies of modern cities
  • until Covid-19 struck these advantages were feeding a growing economic divergence between large, highly educated metropolitan areas and the rest of the country
  • We may commute to the office less than we used to; there may well be a glut of urban office space. But most of us won’t be able to stay very far from the madding crowd.
Javier E

Thieves of experience: On the rise of surveillance capitalism - 1 views

www.roughtype.com/?p=8608

tech brain science knowledge memory distraction smartphone learning creativity reasoning problem-solving silicon valley elite surveillance capitalism psychology

shared by Javier E on 06 May 20 - No Cached
  • Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff argues in her new book that the Valley’s wealth and power are predicated on an insidious, essentially pathological form of private enterprise—what she calls “surveillance capitalism.” Pioneered by Google, perfected by Facebook, and now spreading throughout the economy, surveillance capitalism uses human life as its raw material. Our everyday experiences, distilled into data, have become a privately-owned business asset used to predict and mold our behavior, whether we’re shopping or socializing, working or voting.
  • By reengineering the economy and society to their own benefit, Google and Facebook are perverting capitalism in a way that undermines personal freedom and corrodes democracy.
  • Under the Fordist model of mass production and consumption that prevailed for much of the twentieth century, industrial capitalism achieved a relatively benign balance among the contending interests of business owners, workers, and consumers. Enlightened executives understood that good pay and decent working conditions would ensure a prosperous middle class eager to buy the goods and services their companies produced. It was the product itself — made by workers, sold by companies, bought by consumers — that tied the interests of capitalism’s participants together. Economic and social equilibrium was negotiated through the product.
  • ...72 more annotations...
  • By removing the tangible product from the center of commerce, surveillance capitalism upsets the equilibrium. Whenever we use free apps and online services, it’s often said, we become the products, our attention harvested and sold to advertisers
  • this truism gets it wrong. Surveillance capitalism’s real products, vaporous but immensely valuable, are predictions about our future behavior — what we’ll look at, where we’ll go, what we’ll buy, what opinions we’ll hold — that internet companies derive from our personal data and sell to businesses, political operatives, and other bidders.
  • Unlike financial derivatives, which they in some ways resemble, these new data derivatives draw their value, parasite-like, from human experience.To the Googles and Facebooks of the world, we are neither the customer nor the product. We are the source of what Silicon Valley technologists call “data exhaust” — the informational byproducts of online activity that become the inputs to prediction algorithms
  • Another 2015 study, appearing in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, showed that when people hear their phone ring but are unable to answer it, their blood pressure spikes, their pulse quickens, and their problem-solving skills decline.
  • The smartphone has become a repository of the self, recording and dispensing the words, sounds and images that define what we think, what we experience and who we are. In a 2015 Gallup survey, more than half of iPhone owners said that they couldn’t imagine life without the device.
  • So what happens to our minds when we allow a single tool such dominion over our perception and cognition?
  • Not only do our phones shape our thoughts in deep and complicated ways, but the effects persist even when we aren’t using the devices. As the brain grows dependent on the technology, the research suggests, the intellect weakens.
  • he has seen mounting evidence that using a smartphone, or even hearing one ring or vibrate, produces a welter of distractions that makes it harder to concentrate on a difficult problem or job. The division of attention impedes reasoning and performance.
  • internet companies operate in what Zuboff terms “extreme structural independence from people.” When databases displace goods as the engine of the economy, our own interests, as consumers but also as citizens, cease to be part of the negotiation. We are no longer one of the forces guiding the market’s invisible hand. We are the objects of surveillance and control.
  • Social skills and relationships seem to suffer as well.
  • In both tests, the subjects whose phones were in view posted the worst scores, while those who left their phones in a different room did the best. The students who kept their phones in their pockets or bags came out in the middle. As the phone’s proximity increased, brainpower decreased.
  • In subsequent interviews, nearly all the participants said that their phones hadn’t been a distraction—that they hadn’t even thought about the devices during the experiment. They remained oblivious even as the phones disrupted their focus and thinking.
  • The researchers recruited 520 undergraduates at UCSD and gave them two standard tests of intellectual acuity. One test gauged “available working-memory capacity,” a measure of how fully a person’s mind can focus on a particular task. The second assessed “fluid intelligence,” a person’s ability to interpret and solve an unfamiliar problem. The only variable in the experiment was the location of the subjects’ smartphones. Some of the students were asked to place their phones in front of them on their desks; others were told to stow their phones in their pockets or handbags; still others were required to leave their phones in a different room.
  • the “integration of smartphones into daily life” appears to cause a “brain drain” that can diminish such vital mental skills as “learning, logical reasoning, abstract thought, problem solving, and creativity.”
  •  Smartphones have become so entangled with our existence that, even when we’re not peering or pawing at them, they tug at our attention, diverting precious cognitive resources. Just suppressing the desire to check our phone, which we do routinely and subconsciously throughout the day, can debilitate our thinking.
  • They found that students who didn’t bring their phones to the classroom scored a full letter-grade higher on a test of the material presented than those who brought their phones. It didn’t matter whether the students who had their phones used them or not: All of them scored equally poorly.
  • A study of nearly a hundred secondary schools in the U.K., published last year in the journal Labour Economics, found that when schools ban smartphones, students’ examination scores go up substantially, with the weakest students benefiting the most.
  • Data, the novelist and critic Cynthia Ozick once wrote, is “memory without history.” Her observation points to the problem with allowing smartphones to commandeer our brains
  • Because smartphones serve as constant reminders of all the friends we could be chatting with electronically, they pull at our minds when we’re talking with people in person, leaving our conversations shallower and less satisfying.
  • In a 2013 study conducted at the University of Essex in England, 142 participants were divided into pairs and asked to converse in private for ten minutes. Half talked with a phone in the room, half without a phone present. The subjects were then given tests of affinity, trust and empathy. “The mere presence of mobile phones,” the researchers reported in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, “inhibited the development of interpersonal closeness and trust” and diminished “the extent to which individuals felt empathy and understanding from their partners.”
  • The evidence that our phones can get inside our heads so forcefully is unsettling. It suggests that our thoughts and feelings, far from being sequestered in our skulls, can be skewed by external forces we’re not even aware o
  •  Scientists have long known that the brain is a monitoring system as well as a thinking system. Its attention is drawn toward any object that is new, intriguing or otherwise striking — that has, in the psychological jargon, “salience.”
  • even in the history of captivating media, the smartphone stands out. It is an attention magnet unlike any our minds have had to grapple with before. Because the phone is packed with so many forms of information and so many useful and entertaining functions, it acts as what Dr. Ward calls a “supernormal stimulus,” one that can “hijack” attention whenever it is part of our surroundings — and it is always part of our surroundings.
  • Imagine combining a mailbox, a newspaper, a TV, a radio, a photo album, a public library and a boisterous party attended by everyone you know, and then compressing them all into a single, small, radiant object. That is what a smartphone represents to us. No wonder we can’t take our minds off it.
  • The irony of the smartphone is that the qualities that make it so appealing to us — its constant connection to the net, its multiplicity of apps, its responsiveness, its portability — are the very ones that give it such sway over our minds.
  • Phone makers like Apple and Samsung and app writers like Facebook, Google and Snap design their products to consume as much of our attention as possible during every one of our waking hours
  • Social media apps were designed to exploit “a vulnerability in human psychology,” former Facebook president Sean Parker said in a recent interview. “[We] understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.”
  • A quarter-century ago, when we first started going online, we took it on faith that the web would make us smarter: More information would breed sharper thinking. We now know it’s not that simple.
  • As strange as it might seem, people’s knowledge and understanding may actually dwindle as gadgets grant them easier access to online data stores
  • In a seminal 2011 study published in Science, a team of researchers — led by the Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow and including the late Harvard memory expert Daniel Wegner — had a group of volunteers read forty brief, factual statements (such as “The space shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry over Texas in Feb. 2003”) and then type the statements into a computer. Half the people were told that the machine would save what they typed; half were told that the statements would be erased.
  • Afterward, the researchers asked the subjects to write down as many of the statements as they could remember. Those who believed that the facts had been recorded in the computer demonstrated much weaker recall than those who assumed the facts wouldn’t be stored. Anticipating that information would be readily available in digital form seemed to reduce the mental effort that people made to remember it
  • The researchers dubbed this phenomenon the “Google effect” and noted its broad implications: “Because search engines are continually available to us, we may often be in a state of not feeling we need to encode the information internally. When we need it, we will look it up.”
  • as the pioneering psychologist and philosopher William James said in an 1892 lecture, “the art of remembering is the art of thinking.”
  • Only by encoding information in our biological memory can we weave the rich intellectual associations that form the essence of personal knowledge and give rise to critical and conceptual thinking. No matter how much information swirls around us, the less well-stocked our memory, the less we have to think with.
  • As Dr. Wegner and Dr. Ward explained in a 2013 Scientific American article, when people call up information through their devices, they often end up suffering from delusions of intelligence. They feel as though “their own mental capacities” had generated the information, not their devices. “The advent of the ‘information age’ seems to have created a generation of people who feel they know more than ever before,” the scholars concluded, even though “they may know ever less about the world around them.”
  • That insight sheds light on society’s current gullibility crisis, in which people are all too quick to credit lies and half-truths spread through social media. If your phone has sapped your powers of discernment, you’ll believe anything it tells you.
  • A second experiment conducted by the researchers produced similar results, while also revealing that the more heavily students relied on their phones in their everyday lives, the greater the cognitive penalty they suffered.
  • When we constrict our capacity for reasoning and recall or transfer those skills to a gadget, we sacrifice our ability to turn information into knowledge. We get the data but lose the meaning
  • We need to give our minds more room to think. And that means putting some distance between ourselves and our phones.
  • Google’s once-patient investors grew restive, demanding that the founders figure out a way to make money, preferably lots of it.
  • nder pressure, Page and Brin authorized the launch of an auction system for selling advertisements tied to search queries. The system was designed so that the company would get paid by an advertiser only when a user clicked on an ad. This feature gave Google a huge financial incentive to make accurate predictions about how users would respond to ads and other online content. Even tiny increases in click rates would bring big gains in income. And so the company began deploying its stores of behavioral data not for the benefit of users but to aid advertisers — and to juice its own profits. Surveillance capitalism had arrived.
  • Google’s business now hinged on what Zuboff calls “the extraction imperative.” To improve its predictions, it had to mine as much information as possible from web users. It aggressively expanded its online services to widen the scope of its surveillance.
  • Through Gmail, it secured access to the contents of people’s emails and address books. Through Google Maps, it gained a bead on people’s whereabouts and movements. Through Google Calendar, it learned what people were doing at different moments during the day and whom they were doing it with. Through Google News, it got a readout of people’s interests and political leanings. Through Google Shopping, it opened a window onto people’s wish lists,
  • The company gave all these services away for free to ensure they’d be used by as many people as possible. It knew the money lay in the data.
  • the organization grew insular and secretive. Seeking to keep the true nature of its work from the public, it adopted what its CEO at the time, Eric Schmidt, called a “hiding strategy” — a kind of corporate omerta backed up by stringent nondisclosure agreements.
  • Page and Brin further shielded themselves from outside oversight by establishing a stock structure that guaranteed their power could never be challenged, neither by investors nor by directors.
  • What’s most remarkable about the birth of surveillance capitalism is the speed and audacity with which Google overturned social conventions and norms about data and privacy. Without permission, without compensation, and with little in the way of resistance, the company seized and declared ownership over everyone’s information
  • The companies that followed Google presumed that they too had an unfettered right to collect, parse, and sell personal data in pretty much any way they pleased. In the smart homes being built today, it’s understood that any and all data will be beamed up to corporate clouds.
  • Google conducted its great data heist under the cover of novelty. The web was an exciting frontier — something new in the world — and few people understood or cared about what they were revealing as they searched and surfed. In those innocent days, data was there for the taking, and Google took it
  • Google also benefited from decisions made by lawmakers, regulators, and judges — decisions that granted internet companies free use of a vast taxpayer-funded communication infrastructure, relieved them of legal and ethical responsibility for the information and messages they distributed, and gave them carte blanche to collect and exploit user data.
  • Consider the terms-of-service agreements that govern the division of rights and the delegation of ownership online. Non-negotiable, subject to emendation and extension at the company’s whim, and requiring only a casual click to bind the user, TOS agreements are parodies of contracts, yet they have been granted legal legitimacy by the court
  • Law professors, writes Zuboff, “call these ‘contracts of adhesion’ because they impose take-it-or-leave-it conditions on users that stick to them whether they like it or not.” Fundamentally undemocratic, the ubiquitous agreements helped Google and other firms commandeer personal data as if by fiat.
  • n the choices we make as consumers and private citizens, we have always traded some of our autonomy to gain other rewards. Many people, it seems clear, experience surveillance capitalism less as a prison, where their agency is restricted in a noxious way, than as an all-inclusive resort, where their agency is restricted in a pleasing way
  • Zuboff makes a convincing case that this is a short-sighted and dangerous view — that the bargain we’ve struck with the internet giants is a Faustian one
  • but her case would have been stronger still had she more fully addressed the benefits side of the ledger.
  • there’s a piece missing. While Zuboff’s assessment of the costs that people incur under surveillance capitalism is exhaustive, she largely ignores the benefits people receive in return — convenience, customization, savings, entertainment, social connection, and so on
  • hat the industries of the future will seek to manufacture is the self.
  • Behavior modification is the thread that ties today’s search engines, social networks, and smartphone trackers to tomorrow’s facial-recognition systems, emotion-detection sensors, and artificial-intelligence bots.
  • All of Facebook’s information wrangling and algorithmic fine-tuning, she writes, “is aimed at solving one problem: how and when to intervene in the state of play that is your daily life in order to modify your behavior and thus sharply increase the predictability of your actions now, soon, and later.”
  • “The goal of everything we do is to change people’s actual behavior at scale,” a top Silicon Valley data scientist told her in an interview. “We can test how actionable our cues are for them and how profitable certain behaviors are for us.”
  • This goal, she suggests, is not limited to Facebook. It is coming to guide much of the economy, as financial and social power shifts to the surveillance capitalists
  • Combining rich information on individuals’ behavioral triggers with the ability to deliver precisely tailored and timed messages turns out to be a recipe for behavior modification on an unprecedented scale.
  • it was Facebook, with its incredibly detailed data on people’s social lives, that grasped digital media’s full potential for behavior modification. By using what it called its “social graph” to map the intentions, desires, and interactions of literally billions of individuals, it saw that it could turn its network into a worldwide Skinner box, employing psychological triggers and rewards to program not only what people see but how they react.
  • spying on the populace is not the end game. The real prize lies in figuring out ways to use the data to shape how people think and act. “The best way to predict the future is to invent it,” the computer scientist Alan Kay once observed. And the best way to predict behavior is to script it.
  • competition for personal data intensified. It was no longer enough to monitor people online; making better predictions required that surveillance be extended into homes, stores, schools, workplaces, and the public squares of cities and towns. Much of the recent innovation in the tech industry has entailed the creation of products and services designed to vacuum up data from every corner of our lives
  • “The typical complaint is that privacy is eroded, but that is misleading,” Zuboff writes. “In the larger societal pattern, privacy is not eroded but redistributed . . . . Instead of people having the rights to decide how and what they will disclose, these rights are concentrated within the domain of surveillance capitalism.” The transfer of decision rights is also a transfer of autonomy and agency, from the citizen to the corporation.
  • What we lose under this regime is something more fundamental than privacy. It’s the right to make our own decisions about privacy — to draw our own lines between those aspects of our lives we are comfortable sharing and those we are not
  • Other possible ways of organizing online markets, such as through paid subscriptions for apps and services, never even got a chance to be tested.
  • Online surveillance came to be viewed as normal and even necessary by politicians, government bureaucrats, and the general public
  • Google and other Silicon Valley companies benefited directly from the government’s new stress on digital surveillance. They earned millions through contracts to share their data collection and analysis techniques with the National Security Agenc
  • As much as the dot-com crash, the horrors of 9/11 set the stage for the rise of surveillance capitalism. Zuboff notes that, in 2000, members of the Federal Trade Commission, frustrated by internet companies’ lack of progress in adopting privacy protections, began formulating legislation to secure people’s control over their online information and severely restrict the companies’ ability to collect and store it. It seemed obvious to the regulators that ownership of personal data should by default lie in the hands of private citizens, not corporations.
  • The 9/11 attacks changed the calculus. The centralized collection and analysis of online data, on a vast scale, came to be seen as essential to national security. “The privacy provisions debated just months earlier vanished from the conversation more or less overnight,”
sanderk

Why the Coronavirus Could Threaten the U.S. Economy Even More Than China's - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...onavirus-economy-us-china.html

economy education science research

shared by sanderk on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • After a string of deaths, some heart-stopping plunges in the stock market and an emergency rate cut by the Federal Reserve, there is reason to be concerned about the ultimate economic impact of the coronavirus in the United States.
  • Advanced economies like the United States are hardly immune to these effects. To the contrary, a broad outbreak of the disease in them could be even worse for their economies than in China. That is because face-to-face service industries — the kind of businesses that go into a tailspin when fearful people withdraw from one another — tend to dominate economies in high-income countries more than they do in China.
  • If people stay home from school, stop traveling and don’t go to sporting events, the gym or the dentist, the economic consequence would be worse
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • With shortages of everything from auto parts to generic medicines and production delays in things like iPhones and Diet Coke, a great deal of pain is coming from the closing of Chinese factories. That proliferating damage has central banks and financial analysts talking about a global recession in the coming months.
  • As a baseline, several factors work against the United States. China’s authoritarian government can quarantine entire cities or order people off the streets in a way that would be hard to imagine in America, presumably giving China an advantage in slowing the spread of the disease. In addition, a large share of American workers lack paid sick days and millions lack health care coverage, so people may be less likely to stay home or to get proper medical care. And 41 percent of China’s population lives outside urban areas, more than twice the share in the United States. Diseases generally spread faster in urban areas.
  • When people pull back from interacting with others because of their fear of disease, the things they stop doing will frequently affect much bigger industries in the United States.
  • People may stop attending American sporting events. There have even been calls for the N.C.A.A. to play its March Madness college basketball tournament without an audience. But sports is a huge business in the United States. People spend upward of 10 times as much on sporting events as they do in China.
  • Who wants to go to the dentist or the hospital during an outbreak if a visit isn’t necessary? Yet health spending is 17 percent of the U.S. economy — more than triple the proportion spent in China.
  • But over all, the United States is substantially more reliant on services than China is.
  • A major coronavirus epidemic in the United States might be like a big snowstorm that shuts down most economic activity and social interaction only until the snow is cleared away. But the coronavirus could be a “Snowmaggedon-style storm” that hits the whole country and lasts for months.
Javier E

Opinion | The Ugly Secrets Behind the Costco Chicken - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...co-chicken-animal-welfare.html

animal rights cruelty morality

shared by Javier E on 08 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • we must guard our moral compasses. And some day, I think, future generations will look back at our mistreatment of livestock and poultry with pain and bafflement. They will wonder how we in the early 21st century could have been so oblivious to the cruelties that delivered $4.99 chickens to a Costco rotisserie.
  • Torture a single chicken in your backyard, and you risk arrest. Abuse tens of millions of them? Why, that’s agribusiness.
  • Those commendable savings have been achieved in part by developing chickens that effectively are bred to suffer. Scientists have created what are sometimes called “exploding chickens” that put on weight at a monstrous clip, about six times as fast as chickens in 1925. The journal Poultry Science once calculated that if humans grew at the same rate as these chickens, a 2-month-old baby would weigh 660 pounds.
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  • When Herbert Hoover talked about putting “a chicken in every pot,” chicken was a luxury: In 1930, whole dressed chicken retailed in the United States for $7 a pound in today’s dollars. In contrast, that Costco bird now sells for less than $2 a pound.
  • It’s not that Costco chickens suffer more than Walmart or Safeway birds. All are part of an industrial agricultural system that, at the expense of animal well-being, has become extremely efficient at producing cheap protein.
  • “They’re living on their own feces, with no fresh air and no natural light,” said Leah Garcés, the president of Mercy for Animals. “I don’t think it’s what a Costco customer expects.”
  • Garcés wants Costco to sign up for the “Better Chicken Commitment,” an industry promise to work toward slightly better standards for industrial agriculture. For example, each adult chicken would get at least one square foot of space, there would be some natural light and the company would avoid breeds that put on weight that the legs can’t support.
  • Burger King, Popeyes, Chipotle, Denny’s and some 200 other food companies have embraced the Better Chicken Commitment, but grocery chains generally have not, with the exception of Whole Foods.
  • Yet what struck me was that Costco completely accepts that animal welfare should be an important consideration. We may disagree about whether existing standards are adequate, but the march of moral progress on animal rights is unmistakable.
  • When I began writing about these issues, I never guessed that McDonald’s would commit to cage-free eggs, that California would legislate protections for mother pigs, that there would be court fights about whether an elephant has legal “personhood,” and that Pope Francis would suggest that animals go to heaven and that the Virgin Mary “grieves for the sufferings” of mistreated livestock.
  • I don’t pretend that there are neat solutions. We raised a flock of chickens on our family farm when I was a kid, and we managed to be neither efficient nor humane. Many birds died, and being eaten by a coyote wasn’t such a pleasant way to go, either. There’s no need for a misplaced nostalgia for traditional farming practices, just a pragmatic acknowledgment of animal suffering and trade-offs to reduce it.
  • We treat poultry particularly poorly because humans identify less with birds than with fellow mammals. We may empathize with a calf with big eyes, but less so with species that we dismiss as “bird brains.”
  • Still, the issue remains as the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham posed it in 1789: “The question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”
Javier E

'The Godfather of AI' Quits Google and Warns of Danger Ahead - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...bot-engineer-quits-hinton.html

danger AI pioneer industry warning technology research

shared by Javier E on 01 May 23 - No Cached
  • he officially joined a growing chorus of critics who say those companies are racing toward danger with their aggressive campaign to create products based on generative artificial intelligence, the technology that powers popular chatbots like ChatGPT.
  • Dr. Hinton said he has quit his job at Google, where he has worked for more than decade and became one of the most respected voices in the field, so he can freely speak out about the risks of A.I. A part of him, he said, now regrets his life’s work.
  • “I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,”
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • Industry leaders believe the new A.I. systems could be as important as the introduction of the web browser in the early 1990s and could lead to breakthroughs in areas ranging from drug research to education.
  • But gnawing at many industry insiders is a fear that they are releasing something dangerous into the wild. Generative A.I. can already be a tool for misinformation. Soon, it could be a risk to jobs. Somewhere down the line, tech’s biggest worriers say, it could be a risk to humanity.
  • “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” Dr. Hinton said.
  • After the San Francisco start-up OpenAI released a new version of ChatGPT in March, more than 1,000 technology leaders and researchers signed an open letter calling for a six-month moratorium on the development of new systems because A.I technologies pose “profound risks to society and humanity.
  • Several days later, 19 current and former leaders of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, a 40-year-old academic society, released their own letter warning of the risks of A.I. That group included Eric Horvitz, chief scientific officer at Microsoft, which has deployed OpenAI’s technology across a wide range of products, including its Bing search engine.
  • Dr. Hinton, often called “the Godfather of A.I.,” did not sign either of those letters and said he did not want to publicly criticize Google or other companies until he had quit his job
  • Dr. Hinton, a 75-year-old British expatriate, is a lifelong academic whose career was driven by his personal convictions about the development and use of A.I. In 1972, as a graduate student at the University of Edinburgh, Dr. Hinton embraced an idea called a neural network. A neural network is a mathematical system that learns skills by analyzing data. At the time, few researchers believed in the idea. But it became his life’s work.
  • Dr. Hinton is deeply opposed to the use of artificial intelligence on the battlefield — what he calls “robot soldiers.”
  • In 2012, Dr. Hinton and two of his students in Toronto, Ilya Sutskever and Alex Krishevsky, built a neural network that could analyze thousands of photos and teach itself to identify common objects, such as flowers, dogs and cars.
  • In 2018, Dr. Hinton and two other longtime collaborators received the Turing Award, often called “the Nobel Prize of computing,” for their work on neural networks.
  • Around the same time, Google, OpenAI and other companies began building neural networks that learned from huge amounts of digital text. Dr. Hinton thought it was a powerful way for machines to understand and generate language, but it was inferior to the way humans handled language.
  • Then, last year, as Google and OpenAI built systems using much larger amounts of data, his view changed. He still believed the systems were inferior to the human brain in some ways but he thought they were eclipsing human intelligence in others.
  • “Maybe what is going on in these systems,” he said, “is actually a lot better than what is going on in the brain.”
  • As companies improve their A.I. systems, he believes, they become increasingly dangerous. “Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now,” he said of A.I. technology. “Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That’s scary.”
  • Until last year, he said, Google acted as a “proper steward” for the technology, careful not to release something that might cause harm. But now that Microsoft has augmented its Bing search engine with a chatbot — challenging Google’s core business — Google is racing to deploy the same kind of technology. The tech giants are locked in a competition that might be impossible to stop, Dr. Hinton said.
  • His immediate concern is that the internet will be flooded with false photos, videos and text, and the average person will “not be able to know what is true anymore.”
  • He is also worried that A.I. technologies will in time upend the job market. Today, chatbots like ChatGPT tend to complement human workers, but they could replace paralegals, personal assistants, translators and others who handle rote tasks. “It takes away the drudge work,” he said. “It might take away more than that.”
  • Down the road, he is worried that future versions of the technology pose a threat to humanity because they often learn unexpected behavior from the vast amounts of data they analyze. This becomes an issue, he said, as individuals and companies allow A.I. systems not only to generate their own computer code but actually run that code on their ow
  • And he fears a day when truly autonomous weapons — those killer robots — become reality.
  • “The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that,” he said. “But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.”
  • Many other experts, including many of his students and colleagues, say this threat is hypothetical. But Dr. Hinton believes that the race between Google and Microsoft and others will escalate into a global race that will not stop without some sort of global regulation.
  • But that may be impossible, he said. Unlike with nuclear weapons, he said, there is no way of knowing whether companies or countries are working on the technology in secret. The best hope is for the world’s leading scientists to collaborate on ways of controlling the technology. “I don’t think they should scale this up more until they have understood whether they can control it,” he said.
  • Dr. Hinton said that when people used to ask him how he could work on technology that was potentially dangerous, he would paraphrase Robert Oppenheimer, who led the U.S. effort to build the atomic bomb: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.”
  • He does not say that anymore.
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