What does it mean to be “liberal all the way down”? — Alexandre Lefebvre (Sydney) talks about the personal and the political with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
Latest Surprise Firing at Australian Catholic University
Everyone Has A Price And Corporations Know Yours
The Lever – “Digital surveillance and customer isolation are locking us into a consumer hell of personalized prices.
Six years ago, I was at a conference at the University of Chicago, the intellectual heart of corporate-friendly capitalism, when my eyes found the cover of the Chicago Booth Review, the business school’s flagship publication. “Are You Ready for Personalized Pricing?” the headline asked. I wasn’t, so I started reading. The story looked at how online shopping, persistent data collection, and machine-learning algorithms could combine to generate the stuff of economists’ dreams: individual prices for each customer.
It even recounted an experiment in 2015, where online employment website ZipRecruiter essentially outsourced its pricing strategy to two University of Chicago economists, Sanjog Misra and Jean-Pierre Dubé.”
Internet Archive Blogs: “When MTVNews.com went offline in late June, Internet users were quick to discover that some (but sadly, not all) of the site had been archived in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. While you can no longer browse MTV News directly on the web, the archived pages are available via the Wayback Machine, starting with the first crawl of the site on July 5, 1997. The same is true for CMT (Country Music Television) News, which was first crawled by the Internet Archive on January 10, 2002. In response to patron requests, our engineers have created new search indexes for each site:
- Search more than 470,000 pages from MTV News (here’s a sample search for Peter Gabriel): https://web.archive.org/mtv.com/search/%22Peter%20Gabriel%22
- Search more than 70,000 pages from CMT News (here’s a sample search for Dolly Parton): https://web.archive.org/cmt.com/search/%22Dolly%20Parton%22
Even Disinformation Experts Don’t Know How to Stop It
The New York Times – “Researchers have learned plenty about misinformation and how it spreads. But they’re still struggling to figure out how to stop it…Holding the line against misinformation and disinformation is demoralizing and sometimes dangerous work, requiring an unusual degree of optimism and doggedness. Increasingly, however, even the most committed warriors are feeling overwhelmed by the onslaught of false and misleading content online.
Researchers have learned a great deal about the misinformation problem over the past decade: They know what types of toxic content are most common, the motivations and mechanisms that help it spread and who it often targets. The question that remains is how to stop it. A critical mass of research now suggests that tools such as fact checks, warning labels, prebunking and media literacy are less effective and expansive than imagined, especially as they move from pristine academic experiments into the messy, fast-changing public sphere.
A megastudyconducted last year — the largest ever for testing interventions, with more than 33,000 participants — found mixed results. Interventions like warning labels and digital literacy training improved the ability of participants to judge true or false headlines by only about 5 to 10 percent.
Those results are better than nothing, its authors said, but it pales in comparison to the enormous scale of digital misinformation. “I find it hard to say that these initiatives have had a lot of success,” said Chico Q. Camargo, a senior lecturer in computer science at the University of Exeter who has argued that disinformation research needs reform.
Political experts worry that disinformation peddlers, equipped with increasingly sophisticated schemes, will be able to easily bypass weak defenses to influence election results — an increasingly urgent concern, as voters in countries around the globe head to the polls in hotly contested elections.”
