while-at-berkman

Intro: Contra – This Machine Kills (remixed) https://contra805.bandcamp.com/track/this-machine-kills

We’re joined by two of the sharpest minds on the politics of AI and data governance—Meredith Whittaker and Salomé Viljoen—to chat about the relationship between corporate gatekeepers and academic research, the construction and infrastructure of data, AI as a universal hammer for all nails, how the state enforces Silicon Valley’s power, and what it would take to seize the data pipeline from private capital for the public good. 
This discussion expands on a recent article we published in Nature: Everyone should decide how their digital data are used—not just tech companies | Jathan Sadowski, Salomé Viljoen, Meredith Whittaker: nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01812-3 

Salomé’s profile: law.columbia.edu/faculty/salome-viljoen
And Twitter: twitter.com/salome_viljoen_ 
Meredith’s profile: ainowinstitute.org/people/meredith-whittaker.html 
And Twitter: twitter.com/mer__edith 

Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! patreon.com/thismachinekills  

Grab your TMK gear: bonfire.com/store/this-machine-kills-podcast/ 

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (twitter.com/braunestahl)

96. Taking Control of the Data Pipeline (ft. Meredith Whittaker, Salomé Viljoen)

Nearly everyone these days imaginatively uses virtual identities such as social media profiles, e-commerce accounts, and/or videogame characters. Yet, virtual identities can reproduce discrimination and stereotypes with devastating impacts on users ranging from worse performance and engagement for students to bullying and threats of violence. If such forms of oppression persist, e.g., female virtual identity users being threatened online, surely we must go advance our understanding of the roles these technologies play in society and how to design them to better suit diverse social needs. In this talk, Harrell presents some of the outcomes from his 5-year National Science Foundation-supported research initiative called the Advanced Identity Representation project. Namely, applying approaches from artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and sociology to technologies such as videogames and social media, his research both reveals social biases in existing systems and implements systems to respond to those biases with greater nuance and expressive power.

D. Fox Harrell is an Associate Professor of Digital Media at MIT in the Comparative Media Studies Program and Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He founded and directs the MIT Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory (ICE Lab). He was a 2014-15 recipient of the Lenore Annenberg and Wallis Annenberg Fellowship in Communication and fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

Fox Harrell: "Reflections On Advanced Identity Representation"

Yanis Varoufakis considers himself a politician by necessity, not by choice. An economist and academic by training, he became Greece’s finance minister amidst the country's financial crisis, creating an image for himself both beloved and reviled. He came to the Library last April to discuss this complicated role and his recent book, And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future. He was joined in conversation by  renowned academic and theorist Noam Chomsky.

Yanis Varoufakis and Noam Chomsky on Money and The Sickest Joke in the History of Humankind

Cathy O’Neil, data scientist and author of the new book Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, discussed how some algorithms can have an invisible, but important and destructive impact on people’s lives.

Media and Politics Podcast

Cathy O'Neil: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

This week, we’re bringing you a conversation with author and policy advisor Tim Wu. In his new book The Attention Merchants, Wu makes the case truly paying attention is both incredibly rare and incredibly valuable. He’s joined in conversation by conversation by writer, documentarian, and Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at CUNY/Queens, Douglas Rushkoff.

Tim Wu on How the Internet Is Not Really Free

Olá, nobres literatos!

Neste programa, recebemos um novo reforço para os nossos quadros: o escritor pernambucano Jacques Barcia! Jacques e Fábio Fernandes leem e analisam as primeiras páginas dos contos:

Alquimia, de Tayla Olandim (agora a versão correta!) - https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BziNoHVaH1kVWUlKNVpEVnhHM0k

A (in)Justa Lei de Edgar, de A J Oliveira - https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BziNoHVaH1kVZUF3NlR3UEtUb28 

Tecnomacumba, de Eduardo Regis - https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BziNoHVaH1kVX0NFQ3didWJSc1k

Se você quiser ter seu texto lido e analisado, mande a primeira página dele para contato@trespaginas.com.br.

Três Páginas

Três Páginas #09 - A Alquimista, a Dura Lei e a Tecnomacumba

alan garber says what's important to him in thinking about university

Provost Garber #1 - harvardx

To subscribe on iTunes please visit - https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/lse-iq-podcast/id1223817465 or search for 'LSE IQ' in your favourite podcast app.

Welcome to LSE IQ, a new monthly podcast from the London School of Economics and Political Science. This is the podcast where we ask some of the leading social scientists - and other experts - to answer intelligent questions about economics, politics or society. 

In this episode, Jo Bale investigates social media amid growing concerns that tech companies are putting profit before the well-being of individual users and democratic societies. She talks to Nick Couldry, Ellen Helsper, Sonia Livingstone and Svenja Ottovordemgentschenfelde of LSE’s Department of Media and Communications.

For further information about the podcast visit http://lse.ac.uk/iq and please tell us what you think using the hashtag #LSEIQ https://twitter.com/hashtag/LSEIQ?f=tweets

For further information about The Theatre Royal Haymarket Masterclass Trust and The Cyberscene Project created in partnership with the Pure Land Foundation and Kidscape, please visit - http://masterclass.org.uk/about/#5  - details of the broadcast will be confirmed at a later date.

Is social media good for society?

Nick Couldry outlined the project of his recent book, The Mediated Construction of Reality (Polity October 2016, co-written with Andreas Hepp). The book offers a critical reevaluation and rearticulation of the social constructivist ambitions of Berger and Luckmann’s 1966 book The Social Construction of Reality while radically rethinking the implications of this for a world saturated not just with digital media, but with data processes. Couldry outlined how a materialist phenomenology can draw not just on traditional phenomenology, but on the social theory of Norbert Elias, particularly his concept of figurations, to address the challenges of social analysis in the face of datafication. Elias, Couldry argued, is a particularly important theorist on whom to draw in making social constructivism ready to face the deep embedding of the social world with digital technologies, and more than that, to outline the challenges for social order of such a world. More broadly, Couldry argued for a reengagement of media theory with the broader tradition of social theory in the era of Big Data, in the face of a radical expansion of what media are and how mediation is embedded in everyday social orders.   

Nick Couldry is a sociologist of media and culture. He is Professor of Media Communications and Social Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is currently a Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research Lab, and during 2017-2018 a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University. He is the author or editor of twelve books including most recently The Mediated Construction of Reality (with Andreas Hepp, Polity, 2016), Ethics of Media (2013 Palgrave, coedited with Mirca Madianou and Amit Pinchevski), Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice (Polity 2012) and Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics After Neoliberalism (Sage 2010).

MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing

The Mediated Construction of Reality - From Berger and Luckmann to Norbert Elias

A small group of programmers wants to change how we code—before catastrophe strikes.

The Coming Software Apocalypse - The Atlantic - James Somers

Consciousness and the physical world [16:21] / The case against Andrew Cuomo [1:03:02] / No Olympics, anywhere [1:35:40] / The internet was always spying on you [2:06:04] / Let strippers work [3:02:06] / No water, no power in Puerto Rico [3:37:18]

Episode 990: Incogito (Full Broadcast - February 10 2018)

The changing nature of work is turning traditional employment on its head. More and more people are working in the gig economy or in jobs without formal employment contracts, and the payroll-based industrial-era social insurance policies are no longer providing the safety net for which they were designed. Michal Rutkowski oversees the World Bank’s work in developing systems that protect the most vulnerable sectors of society, and helped produce the 2019 World Development Report on the Future of Work. In this podcast, Rutkowski says 70 percent of the world’s population is now in the informal labor market without the means to contribute to health care insurance or pension plans. Rutkowski is author of  Reimagining Social Protection featured in the December 2018 edition of Finance and Development Magazine. Michal Rutkowski is Senior Director for Social Protection and Jobs at the World Bank Group.

while-at-berkman

Yaso