COVID-19 is the quiz, climate change the final exam Jeff Masters, Yale Climate Connection. Sadly, Masters’ blog at Weather Underground is defunct; this is his new home.
Kleingeld Wins 2.5 Million Euro Spinoza Prize
Pauline Kleingeld, professor of philosophy at the University of Groningen, has been named as one of the winners of this year’s Spinoza Prize
“The New York Technical Services Librarians, an organization that has been active since 1923 – imagine all that has happened in tech services since 1923! – invited me to give a talk about bias in algorithms. They quickly got a recording up on their site and I am, more slowly, providing the transcript. Thanks for the invite and all the tech support, NYTSL.
The Bigot in the Machine: Bias in Algorithmic Systems – Abstract: We are living in an “age of algorithms.” Vast quantities of information are collected, sorted, shared, combined, and acted on by proprietary black boxes.
Bill curates: Notes from a Wikipedian
Massive spying on users of Google’s Chrome shows new security weakness - Reuters: “A newly discovered spyware effort attacked users through 32 million downloads of extensions to Google’s market-leading Chrome web browser, researchers at Awake Security told Reuters, highlighting the tech industry’s failure to protect browsers as they are used more for email, payroll and other sensitive functions. Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google said it removed more than 70 of the malicious add-ons from its official Chrome Web Store after being alerted by the researchers last month. “When we are alerted of extensions in the Web Store that violate our policies, we take action and use those incidents as training material to improve our automated and manual analyses,” Google spokesman Scott Westover told Reuters. Most of the free extensions purported to warn users about questionable websites or convert files from one format to another. Instead, they siphoned off browsing history and data that provided credentials for access to internal business tools. Based on the number of downloads, it was the most far-reaching malicious Chrome store campaign to date, according to Awake co-founder and chief scientist Gary Golomb…”
German coronavirus outbreak at abattoir infects more than 1,000 Reuters
The New York Times – Social media allows us “to see a reality that has been entirely visible to some people and invisible to others – “…Omar Wasow, a professor at Princeton University and co-founder of the pioneering social network BlackPlanet.com, said social media was helping publicize police brutality and galvanizing public support for protesters’ goals — a role that his research found conventional mediaplayed a half century ago. And he said he believed that the internet was making it easier to organize social movements today, for good and for ill. Here are excerpts from our conversation…”