Technology is amoral. It is up to its users to resist the urge to do evil with it, whether cyber-bullying, the spreading of fake news and racist/ religiously-bigoted memes, slander or libel, plagiarism, or outright fraud and theft. Face it: evil is tempting. So it is with computing and web use. Most of us do not have the ability to code, but we certainly can compose messages -- some of which can hurt others emotionally and vocationally.

Can Higher Education Make Silicon Valley More Ethical?

By Nell Gluckman March 14, 2018

The internet and the technology companies powering it have shown their dark side recently. Racism and sexism have flourished, mostly unchecked, on social media. Algorithms used by Facebook and Twitter have been blamed for the spread of fake news. And as phones, cars, and household devices scoop up their users’ data, the expectation of privacy has practically evaporated.


Under each of those phenomena lie ethical quandaries. Is technological development outpacing our ability to tease out its implications? If so, is higher education responsible for the problem?

Jim Malazita, an assistant professor of science and technology studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, believes higher education has played a role. He thinks there’s something about how the STEM disciplines are taught — science, technology, engineering, and mathematics — that discourages students from considering ethical questions as they learn the skills they need to work for big technology companies. But if colleges and universities are contributing to the problem, then they can also help fix it.

With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Malazita is piloting an initiative to inject discussions of ethics and politics into introductory computer-science courses at Rensselaer, in New York. He is pushing back against the idea that programmers should focus purely on technical work and leave the softer questions about how their products are used to social scientists. He hopes his students will see it as their job to build socially responsible technology.


Q. How is what you’re trying to do different from the way ethics and computer science are usually taught?


A. Rarely will you talk to a STEM student who says ethics aren’t important. But by the time they’re done with their education, they’re like, It’s other people around me’s job to make sure this technology is doing the right thing.

Rather than pairing computer science with a suite of courses to make computer science ethical, what if we get humanists into core computer-science classes to get students to think about the ethics and politics of computer science as part of their core skill set?
How can we teach you Python and coding, but at the same time always talk about coding as a political practice?

Q. What will that look like in your course?


A. We’re using data sets about various social issues, such as race and violence in New York City, and a Unesco database about education funding. We’re saying, Here are these data sets you’re going to have to crunch through using Python. What do these algorithms leave out? What can’t you account for?

We’re thinking through teaching how to use code and the way the code shapes the way you think about the database. Every language you learn has a bias to it, so let’s acknowledge that.

Q. What’s an example of a type of problem you might have your students solve that helps them understand their work as programmers more politically?


A. The data set about gun violence in New York City is already used by computer-science faculty in the classroom. But the way the problems are framed is: Walk through the data set, parse up where gun violence is and where it’s not. And then based on those findings, tell me where you would rather live and rather not live in New York City.

We use the data set, but with readings about gun violence. We ask what’s the problem with asking the question in this way. How can we use this data to understand the phenomenon of gun violence rather than “these parts of New York City are good and these parts are bad”?

More from the Chronicle of Higher Education.


Obviously for purpo0ses of discussion.

First, I consider this a bad idea. It adds new cruelty to the judicial system and may give drug traffickers mo0re cause to shoot it out with the police. Note that countries with draconian penalties against drug trafficking typically also have tough laws against the possession of firearms, something that the almighty NRA denies us. Drug rehab is a far more humane way of dealing with addicts and gutting the customer base of drug traffickers. We also need an economic order in which people believe that they have some chance of happiness and don't simply resort to killing themselves with drugs.

But Donald Trump is our President, he is a cruel man, and he practically never sees the other side of an issue except as treachery toward some Truth identical with his gut feelings.

• President Donald Trump in a speech on Saturday called for executing drug dealers, praising other countries that adopt the practice.
  
• Trump said he recently spoke with leaders in China and Singapore, who told him they'd eliminated their drug problems by giving dealers the death penalty.
  
• It's not the first time Trump has raised the issue — he mentioned it earlier this month in a White House summit on opioid addiction.
  

from the Atlantic:


The Grim Conclusions of the Largest-Ever Study of Fake News


Falsehoods almost always beat out the truth on Twitter, penetrating further, faster, and deeper into the social network than accurate information.



“Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it,” Jonathan Swift once wrote.

It was hyperbole three centuries ago. But it is a factual description of social media, according to an ambitious and first-of-its-kind study published Thursday in Science.

The massive new study analyzes every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter’s existence—some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years—and finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories.

“It seems to be pretty clear [from our study] that false information outperforms true information,” said Soroush Vosoughi, a data scientist at MIT who has studied fake news since 2013 and who led this study. “And that is not just because of bots. It might have something to do with human nature.”

The study has already prompted alarm from social scientists. “We must redesign our information ecosystem in the 21st century,” write a group of 16 political scientists and legal scholars in an essay also published Thursday in Science. They call for a new drive of interdisciplinary research “to reduce the spread of fake news and to address the underlying pathologies it has revealed.”

“How can we create a news ecosystem ... that values and promotes truth?” they ask.

The new study suggests that it will not be easy. Though Vosoughi and his colleagues only focus on Twitter—the study was conducted using exclusive data that the company made available to MIT—their work has implications for Facebook, YouTube, and every major social network. Any platform that regularly amplifies engaging or provocative content runs the risk of amplifying fake news along with it.

Though the study is written in the clinical language of statistics, it offers a methodical indictment of the accuracy of information that spreads on these platforms. A false story is much more likely to go viral than a real story, the authors find. A false story reaches 1,500 people six times quicker, on average, than a true story does. And while false stories outperform the truth on every subject—including business, terrorism and war, science and technology, and entertainment—fake news about politics regularly does best.

More here at The Atlantic.

In an unprecedented attack of candour, Sean Parker, the 38-year-old founding president of Facebook, recently admitted that the social network was founded not to unite us, but to distract us. “The thought process was: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’” he said at an event in Philadelphia in November. To achieve this goal, Facebook’s architects exploited a “vulnerability in human psychology”, explained Parker, who resigned from the company in 2005. Whenever someone likes or comments on a post or photograph, he said, “we… give you a little dopamine hit”. Facebook is an empire of empires, then, built upon a molecule.
Dopamine, discovered in 1957, is one of 20 or so major neurotransmitters, a fleet of chemicals that, like bicycle couriers weaving through traffic, carry urgent messages between neurons, nerves and other cells in the body. These neurotransmitters ensure our hearts keep beating, our lungs keep breathing and, in dopamine’s case, that we know to get a glass of water when we feel thirsty, or attempt to procreate so that our genes may survive our death.
In the 1950s, dopamine was thought to be largely associated with physical movement after a study showed that Parkinsonism (a group of neurological disorders whose symptoms include tremors, slow movement and stiffness) was caused by dopamine deficiency. In the 1980s, that assumption changed following a series of experiments on rats by Wolfram Schultz, now a professor of neuroscience at Cambridge University, which showed that, inside the midbrain, dopamine relates to the reward we receive for an action. Dopamine, it seemed, was to do with desire, ambition, addiction and sex drive.

Schultz and his fellow researchers placed pieces of apple behind a screen and immediately saw a major dopamine response when the rat bit into the food. This dopamine process, which is common in all insects and mammals, is, Schultz tells me, at the basis of learning: it anticipates a reward to an action and, if the reward is met, enables the behaviour to become a habit, or, if there’s a discrepancy, to be adapted. (That dishwasher tablet might look like a delicious sweet, but the first fizzing bite will also be the last.) Whether dopamine produces a pleasurable sensation is unclear, says Schultz. But this has not dented its reputation as the miracle bestower of happiness.

Quote:We are abusing a useful and necessary system. We shouldn’t do it, even though we can

A fifteen-year-old ice-dancer, Alina Zagitova, has won Olympic Gold on behalf of the Olympic Athletes from Russia team, the Russian athletes not blacklisted for the doping scandal.





She becomes, so far as I know, the first prominent person who (born 2002 or 2003) has no connection whatsoever to the 20th century, which creates the generational angle.

http://www.vulture.com/2018/02/watch-ali...ogram.html

Edit: she was born on May 18, 2002

I was actually shocked when doing a search that no one has even mentioned "blockchain technology".

If you've heard of bitcoin, you've heard of blockchain, as this is the engine that operates cryptocurrencies.

The technology is gaining in popularity and Millennials in particular have fully embraced it. 

I feel this will be one of the major tools if not THE major tool utilized for the 1T.

Thoughts?

Here is a graphic showing a personal point of view of the Anacyclosis described by Polybius in relation with Strauss-Howe Theory.
Elements concerning psychological cycle are missing (that Matrix can be divided in 32 parts / defense mechanism / personnality types / related to each part of history).

House explores bill placing higher fines for passing a stopped school bus


http://www.cjonline.com/news/state-gover...ng-stopped

Kathie Glass announces Libertarian bid for governor


http://www.chron.com/news/politics/texas...335199.php

Deficit could hit $1 trillion in 2018, and that's before the full impact of tax cuts

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/poli...969347001/