Arvind Narayanan: I will focus the rest of my talk on this third category [predicting social outcomes], where there’s a lot of snake oil. I already showed you tools that claim to predict job suitability. Similarly, bail decisions are being made based on an algorithmic prediction of recidivism. People are being turned away at the […]
#algorithms
How Photography Was Optimized for White Skin Color
Priceonomics: [Kodak] didn’t develop a better film for rendering different gradations of brown until economic pressure came from a very different source: Kodak’s professional accounts. Two of their biggest clients were chocolate confectioners, who were dissatisfied with the film’s ability to render the difference between chocolates of different darknesses. “Also,” Connor says, “furniture manufacturers were […]
Learning to Love Robots
Patricia Marx, The New Yorker: The moment is equivalent, perhaps, to the juncture when fish crawled out of the sea and onto land. At the reception desk of a robot-staffed hotel in Japan, sharp-fanged, hairy-chested dinosaurs wearing bellhop hats and bow ties poise their talons at the keyboard; at a pizza restaurant in Multan, Pakistan, […]
Le risposte fasulle di Google
Da un paio d’anni Google ha iniziato a dare risposte: a selezionare, fra le fonti e i risultati di una ricerca, una singola risposta da evidenziare in un riquadro in cima alla lista dei risultati. Google promuove questi risultati dandogli un maggiore peso visivo e includendo il loro contenuto direttamente nella pagina dei risultati — evitando […]
Aggregazione e algoritmi
Ben Thompson: This is what makes the NYT Now and BuzzFeed News apps so interesting: both accept the idea that their respective publications don’t have a monopoly on the best content, even as both are predicated on the idea that curation remains valuable. Apple News takes this concept further by being completely publication agnostic. L’analisi […]
La Cina userà i big data come strumento di controllo?
Il 5 Luglio del 2009, nella provincia cinese Xinjiang, improvvisamente Internet smise di funzionare. Il governo decise di “spegnerlo” nel tentativo di disperdere una serie di proteste, finendo così col tenere i cittadini offline per 10 mesi. Un funzionario descrive oggi quella scelta come “un serio errore… Ora siamo anni indietro nel tracciare i terroristi in quell’area“. (La censura […]