flopto

I couldn't find the story I was looking for but here are a few. Both TSA and CBP represented here; the CBP stories are closer to what the grandparent post describes.

These stories describe sexual assault graphically (to various degrees).

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110906/11065015824/tsa-a...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/06/woman-sues-borde...

http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/immigration/201...

https://www.texastribune.org/2016/07/21/cbp-awards-us-citize...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/cnns-angela-rye-was-subj...

China throttles lots of foreign websites that it doesn't block. It wouldn't be surprising if they target all foreign ssl traffic for throttling too.

See the write up here: http://hmarco.org/bugs/CVE-2016-4484/CVE-2016-4484_cryptsetu...

Do you have a website? Factr is hard to find on google.

> So far, between Oct 10 and Oct 14, 631 stores have been fixed. [0]

So it sounds like does a pretty good job of fixing things

[0] https://gwillem.gitlab.io/2016/10/14/github-censored-researc...

Well, there are the famous ones. I'd bet facebook would have been treated differently if Mark Zuckerberg were black. You also probably automatically make guesses about people's race online. Race is a bit trickier, but it's not too hard to guess gender online (usernames, and things like this thing I just found on google: http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.php#Analyze)

1. Able. Not that skin color itself affects any sort of intellectual ability, but race--including, importantly, the experiences people have because of their skin color--definitely impacts who you are and what you are good at.

2. White software engineers are better at designing racist software (mostly joking). Another half joke: white people are better at designing technology that gets taken seriously by the government and the public (i.e. their technology will be taken more seriously because they are white, not any special ability there). But seriously, white engineers would probably be better at designing technology for teaching other white people about race.

3. Yes, there are absolutely some parts of designing medical software that engineers who have battled cancer would be better at. Imagine you are making one of those medical devices that sits next to a cancer patient's bed post-chemo and shows a bunch of numbers. Now if you fought cancer, you've probably had lots of experience lying in that bed next to those screens, and you could have a much better intuition about how those screens should look and how they should present their visualizations in ways that make a patient more confident. Or imagine the software engineer wants to, you know, talk with some patients or doctors to understand what to make: the engineer who battled cancer will probably be much better understanding what the patients (and doctors) want.

I would argue that it is not just bias. Indeed, not all people of color in the U.S. are experts on racism, but the vast majority of people with a good understanding of racism are people of color.

Just a supposition, but from an American (I'm white). I don't think it's a stretch to say that people who have experienced e.g. anti-black racism will be better able to make technology that addresses it.

In the U.S., a black software engineer is more likely to be able to design technology that helps keep people safe from police regardless of geekery and socioeconomic status.

Planet money's coverage is great; I think a bunch of the posts below would be answered by listening to the podcast.

One of the main things I remember taking away from the podcast was that the soloists in the study were not the most famous "best" violinists in the world (they may not even have been professionals?). One of the violin makers they interviewed thought this was the biggest weakness of the study, and he was confident he could tell the difference (not that that means too much).

This is cute. How could you pick e.g. Google-esque adjectives?

Is there a corpus of press releases, etc. from lots of big (tech) companies? If so, has anyone done basic comparative word/n-gram frequency analysis of it?

I thought you were joking, but apparently I haven't been following this. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is an LLC with no association to any 501c3.

TL;DR: 5 qubits as a service. Interact with them on your tablet.

From the press release: "The quantum processor is composed of five superconducting qubits and is housed at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York. The five-qubit processor represents the latest advancement in IBM’s quantum architecture that can scale to larger quantum systems. It is the leading approach towards building a universal quantum computer." (http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/49661.wss)

From the demo video: looks like you can use hadamard and CNOT gates as well as measurements. Somehow it sounds like you can also apply oracles (not sure how you specify what they are when it gets run). (https://youtu.be/pYD6bvKLI_c)

My opinion on this is totally uninformed.

A quick search for 'global aquifer depletion' yields

"Scientists had long suspected that humans were taxing the world’s underground water supply, but... major aquifers [are] indeed struggling to keep pace with demands from agriculture, growing populations, and industries such as mining." ... "The situation is quite critical" (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/16/new-n...)

Those statistics are just false. More reliable numbers are:

  Blacks killed by blacks: 90%
  Blacks killed by whites: 8%
  Whites killed by whites: 82%
  Whites killed by blacks: 15%
  Ratio of whites killed by police to blacks killed by police: 1.857

[1] http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/nov/...

[2] https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/...

Well some people have to work much harder to avoid incarceration.

Do you mean the premise that the patriarchy exists?

Well, if racism and sexism are real (they are) and person A believes that these are bad, then if person B disagrees with person A, that means person B believes racism and/or sexism are not bad.

Language like "racist/sexist" suggests that it's a binary, that each person is either racist or not racist. It's more useful to recognize that the dominant culture in the US is racist and that people benefit from/support that culture to varying degrees. Person B supports it.

Policing perpetuates poverty and thus crime by forcing poor, black men to deal with the criminal justice system from an early age. Court fees, court appearances, civil asset forfeiture, jail time, and property damage from police searches are all burdens that poor, black, law-abiding people bear, not to mention wrongful conviction.

Edit: missed this line in your comment before:

> Why this is the case is an interesting problem that I hope we can tackle, better understand, and attempt to solve as a society

This is what Black Lives Matter is about. They understand the problem (often by living through it) and are focused on tackling it. Because they don't focus too much on helping other people to understand the problem, this might not be clear to you.

Edit: I was about to respond to your reply, but it looks like you deleted it.

> too many topics seem taboo to reason about objectively

I think the disagreement is about where this reasoning can/should happen. From the perspective of the BLM movement, it is not their job to educate people about race. I think this reasoning has already happened at an academic level and has concluded that (to summarize very broadly) white people have a whole lot of privilege.

> Do we have that evidence?

Yes, I believe so.

[1] http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/bobo/files/2010_racialized_...

[2] Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

[3] Alice Goffman, On the Run (this is an ethnography, so you may need to have an understanding of ethnographic methods to accept the evidence here as "data")

> Poor whites and poor blacks are both subject to mass incarceration; though poor blacks are incarcerated at even higher rates.

Yes, good to point that out.

My argument (implicitly) was that this is a really huge factor which gives poor whites a "net advantage."

> Their argument is demonstrative rather than persuasive (although there is a persuasive component, but they expect interlocutors to be familiar with structuralist theory, which is not unreasonable in an academic setting).

I think this is spot-on.

> They are showing people what it feels like to be unexpectedly and unjustly placed into an out-group.

But I don't think this is the intent. Rather, the goal is to create a place where the structures they oppose are weaker/nonexistent. A consequence may be that people with privilege are made uncomfortable and/or put in an out-group, and that is fine because as you said this "is something that they have a lifetime's experience of." And that discomfort is even seen positively as a sign that the culture is going in the right direction, but it is just a symptom, not the goal.

Poor blacks, unlike poor whites, are subject to mass incarceration.

Edit: this is technically incorrect, see dragonwriter below.

If people are angry about X and you go up to them and try to tell them how much you like/support X, isn't that what you'd expect? To make people want to engage you in a thoughtful discussion, it's important to demonstrate humility and open-mindedness to their opinions.

The school (teachers and students together) recognizes an ideology (patriarchy) that they see as a problem and responds by creating a culture that opposes that ideology, in order to reduce the power of that ideology. I don't see any way to take a neutral stance on this issue, as ``doing nothing'' is supporting the status quo (patriarchy), so if you agree that patriarchy is a problem, then the school should be celebrated for picking the right side of the issue. If you like patriarchy, that's a different issue.

This is a fantastic question, and have been asking myself for a while. It turns out that there a quite a few technology projects that are tackling exactly these problems, addressing these issues technologically is an active area of research, and there are a number of companies with jobs that focus directly on developing this sort of technology.

One of my favorite projects is Rainforest Connection [1]: to help prevent illegal logging, they put recycled phones with solar panels in the tops of trees in rainforests, and then using some simple sound processing they listen for chainsaws and text the local villagers if they pick up on anything. The villagers then go out and stop the loggers.

For some other examples, check out PartoPen [2], and Projecting Health [3].

Projects like these are the subject of the field of ICTD (Information and Communication Technologies for Development). Much of the research here focuses on health and education in developing regions, but many projects go outside of that. For a look at some of the recent research here, check out the latest ICTD conference [4]. There are ICTD graduate programs at maybe ten universities.

Outside of academia, these sorts of projects are being tackled by Microsoft Research India [5], the teams in Google that used to be Google.org [6], IBM Watson [7], Palantir's philanthropy engineering [8], and various smaller companies like [9], [10], and [11].

EDIT: I'd also like to point out that climate modelling as chaosphere2112 mentioned is another way to work directly on global-level climate issues; most of the things I'm pointing to are local.

[1] https://rfcx.org/

[2] http://www.partopen.com/

[3] http://blog.path.org/2014/09/projecting-health-video-india/

[4] http://ictd2015.org/papers-notes/

[5] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/tem/

[6] https://www.google.org/

[7] http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_group_pubs....

[8] https://www.palantir.com/philanthropy-engineering/

[9] http://www.dimagi.com/

[10] https://www.commcarehq.org/home/

[11] http://www.dekaresearch.com/water.shtml

As I understand it, another important part of New Zealand's anti-nuclear position is the French bombing of the Rainbow Warrior--a Greenpeace boat en route to protest French nuclear tests--in a New Zealand port. The lack of international response to the attack certainly had a big impact on foreign policy, and I have to think that it influenced popular opinion of nuclear power as well. Incidentally, this was just a few months after Lange's Oxford Union debate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior

They're supposed to look hastily-made to reflect the imprecision in the estimates.

https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2014/why_xkcd_style_graph...