The Bigot in the Machine: Bias in Algorithmic Systems

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…”

They Have at Least This Requiem'

Stephen Edgar’s new poem, “The Noise of Time,” shares a title with Osip Mandelstam’s autobiographical prose – story? essay? – published in 1925. The poem’s speaker listens to a CD ofSviatoslav Richter’s piano recital recorded in Sofia in 1958: Mussorgsky, Chopin, Schubert, Liszt, Rachmaninoff. The audio quality is poor: “the faintest hiss” and “A few odd snuffles and cleared throats / Rudely descanting on the notes, / And, intermittent and remiss, / The creak of seats and scuffing feet.” Then the speaker remembers the context:

“. . . shades of the Eastern Bloc,

Drabness, dread and the midnight knock,

The list of names too long to trace.”

The audience of more than sixty years ago dwells in what Edgar calls “that grey-lit frozen zone.” He means the drab limbo of post-Stalin Bulgaria, but also that vaporous region inhabited by the unknown and forgotten dead:

“These listeners in the concert hall,

They have at least this requiem,

Though all they have left us to recall

That they have been, inscribed on air,

Is no more than a shifting chair

Or the ill-timed loosening of phlegm.”

Chap. XIII, “Komissarzhevskaya,” of Mandelstam’s “Noise of Time” (The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, trans. Clarence Brown, 1986) begins:

“My desire is not to speak about myself but to track down the age, the noise and the germination of time. My memory is inimical to all that is personal. If it depended on me, I should only make a wry face in remembering the past. I was never able to understand the Tolstoys and Aksakovs, all those grand Bagrovs, enamored of family archives with their epic domestic memoirs. I repeat—my memory is not loving but inimical, and it labors not to reproduce but to distance the past.”

In his introduction to “The Noise of Time,” Brown writes of Mandelstam: “He was preeminently the poet of the present moment, of the literal fact in all its particularity, believing that only the instant of the artist’s perception has any chance of withstanding time’s attrition . . .”