Nike and Boeing Are Paying Sci-Fi Writers to Predict Their Futures, apparently. I have to admit, I was very excited to read this article when I stumbled on it. I’ve done some futurology projects on a couple of occasions, and

In Atlanta and other racially segregated cities, the education system is stacked against African Americans competing for STEM careers. If Amazon picks the city for its second headquarters, things could get even worse.

The rise of corporate and state surveillance technology is terrifying, but we cannot talk about privacy without talking about power. Lorraine Chuen examines how technologies and data systems are being used to monitor communities at the margins.

Rage and tears followed the murder of Nia Wilson, an 18-year old Black woman from Oakland, who was killed while exiting a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) train one Sunday evening in July. These were appropriate reactions in the wake of such a tragedy, especially from community members incensed by the seemingly relentless targeted killing of Black people across the nation by police and racist vigilantes. But there were inappropriate responses as well. Among the worst of these came from BART authorities that responded with a proposal for widely expanding transit surveillance. One BART policymaker went as far as to call for the widespread use of facial recognition technology. Let’s be clear: expanded surveillance and facial recognition technology are not the solution. Would these technologies have prevented Nia Wilson’s murder? No. Instead of preventing race-based hate crimes, expanded surveillance will just put more people of color at risk, adding insult to injury, salt to an open...

A woman says she was targeted by West University librarians, who called 911 when she wouldn't leave children's story time.

Facebook “has a black people problem,” according to Mark Luckie, a now-former manager of partnerships at Facebook. Luckie, whose last day at Facebook was earlier this month, just posted an internal memo he sent to his colleagues that argues Facebook is failing its black employees, as well as its black users. At Facebook, Luckie served as strategic […]

Research article; OK for grad assignment

A “bibliomaniac” forged an alternative to Eurocentric library classifications.

Despite efforts against hateful and false content, those posts and videos are thriving. One Instagram search produced nearly 12,000 posts with the hashtag “#jewsdid911.”

This week, instead of answering each letter individually, I shall increase the level of difficulty by answering all the letters with one universal, overarching clapback.

Author(s): Brown, Jennifer; Ferretti, Jennifer A; Leung, Sofia; Méndez-Brady, Marisa L | Abstract: In this article, we seek to seed an honest conversation about how librarianship needs to meaningfully address systems of structural oppression in order to actualize diversity and inclusion initiatives at large. We will investigate issues of recruitment, retention, education, and mentorship within the library and information science profession through the lens of our experiences as women of color, and as early-career librarians; we will also weave relevant insights reflected from within the literature to support our narratives. Central to this work is an understanding of the barriers that people of color (POC) face in our workplaces and the profession at large; we will discuss this at length throughout. Finally, we will conclude with recommendations on how the profession, as a whole, can do better at retaining and supporting its marginalized workforce. This is a call to action for librarians at every level to hold themselves accountable for the ways in which they are complicit within systems of oppression and inequality. Concurrently, this article aims to generate momentum in coalition building as a tool for POC attempting to navigate the overwhelming whiteness evident within the profession.

In the wake of school shootings, some are using social media monitoring companies like Social Sentinel to find threats. But critics have concerns.

They’re everywhere, but nobody wants to know about it.

If you use Bing’s image search, you’re going to see the worst filth you can imagine.  Bing suggests racist terms and shows horrifying images. Bing will even suggest you search for exploited children if you have SafeSearch disabled.

White people in North America live in a social environment that protects and insulates them from race-based stress. This insulated environment of racial protection builds white expectations for racial comfort while at the same time lowering the ability to tolerate racial stress, leading to what I refer to as White Fragility. White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium. This paper explicates the dynamics of White Fragility.

While privacy and surveillance affect different populations in disparate ways, they are often treated as monolithic concepts by journalists, privacy advocates, and researchers. Achieving privacy is especially difficult for those who are marginalized in other areas of life. This special issue interrogates what privacy looks like at the margins, investigating a broad spectrum of issues, methodologies, and contexts. Many make an intervention into mainstream theories of privacy and surveillance, showing how examining the experiences of individuals outside the normative white, American, middle-class subject often complicates assumptions about how privacy operates. Others examine the mundane and the banal in order to analyze how power relations play out in everyday life. By incorporating research outside the canon of privacy research, and by advocating for projects that discuss more diverse conceptualizations of “the user” or the subject, we can envision a future for privacy scholarship that incorporates a wider set of harms and needs, and encompasses the concerns of a larger base of citizens.

A cautionary tutorial. Let's make a sentiment classifier!¶Sentiment analysis is a very frequently-implemented task in NLP, and it's no surprise. Recognizing whether people are expressing positi