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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard about a story that appeared on CNN on September 9, 2016.
From targeted advertising and insurance to education and policing, Cathy O'Neil's new book 'Weapons of Math Destruction' [WMD] looks at how algorithms and big data are targeting the poor, reinforcing racism and amplifying inequality.
[...] In a vacuum, these models are bad enough, but O'Neil emphasizes, "they're feeding on each other." Education, job prospects, debt and incarceration are all connected, and the way big data is used makes them more inclined to stay that way.
"Poor people are more likely to have bad credit and live in high-crime neighborhoods, surrounded by other poor people," she writes. "Once ... WMDs digest that data, it showers them with subprime loans or for-profit schools. It sends more police to arrest them and when they're convicted it sentences them to longer terms."
In turn, a new set of WMDs uses this data to charge higher rates for mortgages, loans and insurance.
[...] "Big Data processes codify the past," O'Neil writes. "They do not invent the future. Doing that requires moral imagination, and that's something only humans can provide."
I'm not interested in the story. I'm interested in what it says about once proud CNN's current quality of journalism. Fox News: Left Division?
Source: http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/06/technology/weapons-of-math-destruction/
(Score: 2) by Non Sequor on Monday October 03 2016, @02:59AM
One thing I've been thinking about lately is the way that people interpret different kinds of writing mistakes. Essentially, writing "properly" results in hiding any informal grammar and usage you may have learned as a child, and writing "improperly" reveals your background.
Of course, if everyone at home speaks in a style that's closer to the cultural ideal of proper grammar and usage you have an advantage. Even if you are equally talented as a writer as someone without that background, the mistakes you make are likely to be judged less harshly than the mistakes they make.
Mathematically, you can model the amount of similarity of one person's writing and some standard in terms of Kullback-Leibler divergence of distributions of word and construction selection. Objectively, some dialects should have greater similarity to the standard than others.
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.
(Score: 1, Troll) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday October 03 2016, @10:38AM
My grammar made the best fried chicken ever.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.