Sohrob

This list is an attempt to collect and categorize a growing critical literature on algorithms as social concerns. The work included spans sociology, anthropology, science and technology studies, ge...

Tags: critical algorithm studies computational socialism

In May 2015 Greek newspaper Athens Voice suggested that the woman who inspired the song is Danae Stratou, wife of Yanis Varoufakis, a former Greek Finance minister. Mrs. Stratou studied at St. Martins between 1983 and 1988 and is the eldest daughter of a wealthy Greek businessman.[5] Greek newspaper "Ta Nea" contacted Mrs. Stratou who replied that "I think the only person who knows for whom the song was written is Jarvis himself!".[6] Katerina Kana, a Greek-Cypriot who also studied at St. Martins during that time, has claimed since 2012 that the song was about her,[7] though no actual confirmation as such has come from the song's composer.

Tags: common people yanis varoufakis

Colbert channels his inner Zizek starting at 4:00

Tags: zizek colbert unknown knowns

he sent out actual fucking video players.

Tags: jeb bush election schwag

Donald Trump, speaking to a religious crowd at Virginia's Liberty University on Monday, turned to Scripture.

"We're going to protect Christianity. I can say that. I don't have to be politically correct," he said. “Two Corinthians, 3:17, that’s the whole ballgame … is that the one you like?”

The verse, “Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty,” seems to have been Trump’s attempt to ingratiate himself to the audience of religious students.

But the crowd tittered, and several of the students audibly corrected him, pointing out that Christians say “Second Corinthians,” not “Two Corinthians.”

Rival campaigns noticed the error immediately.

Cruz’s rapid-response director:

What is "Two Corinthians?"

— Brian Phillips (@RealBPhil) January 18, 2016

Rubio’s faith outreach director:

"Two" Corinthians... It won't matter. Nothing seems to matter.

— Eric Teetsel (@EricTeetsel) January 18, 2016

Trump later made his usual comparison between the Bible and "The Art of the Deal," his best-selling business book.

"'The Art of the Deal' is second to the Bible," Trump said magnanimously. As for other books, "The Bible blows them away. There’s nothing like it, the Bible."

"Interpreter explaining that 'New York values' means 'Jewish homosexual.'" last nights debate was the most surreal thing ive seen in a long time...

Tags: republicans republican debate gop debate

US academic says Turkish president – who has condemned leftwing critics for ignorance – has been aiding Isis, which he blamed for bomb attack on Istanbul

Tags: chomsky erdogan turkey

Absurdist monetary economics.

white people

Tags: oregon militia right wing bundy ammon bundy black lives matter

“Let our ambassador from the United States invite Chomsky, who has made statements about Turkey’s operations against the terrorist organization. Let’s host him in the region,” Erdoğan added.

Tags: erdogan chomsky turkey

Frankfurt offers a case study of what can cause Uber to draw back in one place even as it expands elsewhere. With a thriving financial center and cosmopolitan population, the city seemed like an ideal place for Uber to operate and grow. Yet the company was forced out by a mix of cultural and legal missteps. Specifically, it miscalculated how best to gain the support of skeptical locals unaccustomed to its win-at-all-costs tactics, and it underestimated the regulatory hurdles of doing business in Europe’s largest economy. “If you want to be successful in Germany, you have to understand the regulation,” said Martin Fassnacht, a professor at the Otto Beisheim School of Management in Vallendar, Germany. “Uber should have taken that more seriously.”

Tags: uber sharing economy computational socialism regulations

The semiotics of curry allows for market segmentation and a premium pricing strategy. This is the genius of capitalism at work. Just rejoice at that news. But what about the workers? The Deliveroo website advertises its need for drivers (of bikes or scooters) promising “flexible shifts” and “competitive pay”. In London those rates are currently £7 an hour plus £1 per delivery (or “drop”, as they slightly worryingly call it. Surely they don’t mean that literally?).

Tags: sharing economy computational socialism labor uber for food

Residents of a central New York village named Whitesboro voted Monday night to keep their town seal, which appears to show a white man choking a Native American.

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Ankara is about to greatly expand its military reachand up the ante in the regions dangerous arms race.

From mass executions to ISIS and the San Bernardino attack, the manifestations of Saudi Arabias Salafi extremism are everywhereand its time for Muslims to fight back.

Tags: ron paul immigration libertarians

Multiple gun rights groups will be joining together this weekend for a mock mass shooting on the University of Texas campus, an event complete with cardboard guns, crisis actors, and fake blood. Now, what could this possibly accomplish?, a reasonable person might be wondering. But as one of the protestors told Statesman.com: “We love freedom, and we’re trying to make more freedom.”

Tags: guns gun control

Tags: Lsd

<p>Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to pour billions of dollars into a high-tech idea that has been billed as the future of learning, but which critics see as a half-baked notion that could jeopardize student privacy and spread ideas despised by public school advocates.</p><p>Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, <a href="http://politico.pro/1Ipjnvy" target="_blank">announced</a> Tuesday night that they’re pouring 99 percent of their Facebook shares into charity through their new Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The shares are currently worth about $45 billion. One of the goals of that initiative, inspired by the birth of their daughter Max, is to advance “personalized learning,&quot; although it isn't clear how much of the money might be invested in that.</p><p>That approach to learning is generating lots of buzz — the Obama administration, for instance, has doled out tens of millions for efforts to use it across the country. But some say personalized learning<b> </b>is a fuzzy idea and there’s little research on its effectiveness — and what’s out there is mixed. </p><p>“Many believe in it and see the future in it,” said Douglas Levin, president of EdTech Strategies, LLC. “But we need to find proof points of where it’s working and then there’s the question of scaling it up.”</p><p>“If I was advising Zuckerberg, I think the question is: Is he searching for a silver-bullet solution?” Levin said. </p><p>Personalized learning involves using technology like computers and tablets — along with help from teachers — to shape instruction that responds to an individual student’s needs. The pace of instruction, the approach to teaching and even what’s taught are all adjusted to how students best learn as well as their interests.</p><p>That can mean collecting data on individual student performance, like how students tackle problems and answer questions, what gives them pause and what they’re able to breeze through.</p><p>Some worry that such large amounts of student data could be used to sell products and would be vulnerable to hackers. That data collection has “tremendous negative implications for privacy,” said Leonie Haimson, a parent and privacy advocate and the executive director of Class Size Matters. </p><p>For example, she said, parents worry about third parties and companies using student data to target ads at their children.</p><p>Critics are also concerned that Zuckerberg will join the ranks of reform-minded billionaires like Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg and Eli Broad who want to shake up what they see as a failing public school system in ways that many teachers and parents may oppose. </p><p>That suspicion is heightened by the fact that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is an LLC, not a nonprofit, which some see as a sign that Zuckerberg may use the organization to lobby on government policy.</p><p>Some of the ideas he supports — such as increased school choice through the expansion of charter schools or holding teachers accountable for student performance through student test scores — were on display with the billionaire’s $100 million donation in 2010 to foundering schools in Newark, New Jersey. Critics have panned it as a failed investment based on ineffective ideas.</p><p>Zuckerberg is also one of the biggest investors in AltSchool, a chain of very small schools centered on personalized learning that started in San Francisco in 2013 that is now extending its program to New York and Chicago.</p><p>“He’s very prepared to use his money to shape public policy,” said Haimson, of Class Size Matters. “I think he’s even more dangerous than the Gates Foundation.” </p><p>Still, his enthusiasm for personalized learning is broadly shared. In an <a href="http://bit.ly/1TwUBuL" target="_blank">example</a> supplied by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, students in a math class at Whittemore Park Middle School in Conway, South Carolina, work on laptops, while others work in small groups or directly with the teacher. Brief daily math exercises on those laptops keep teachers posted on students’ progress and what they might need extra help with.</p><p>he approach has also made waves on Capitol Hill, and has been part of the discussion around replacing No Child Left Behind, the Bush-era education law. More than two dozen education technology advocacy groups recently sent a <a href="http://bit.ly/1HGzcya" target="_blank">letter</a> to major education players in Congress praising them for a compromise bill that would create more flexibility for state testing systems and allow for more creativity with personalized learning.</p><p>Still, there isn’t a lot of research available on the effectiveness of the approach, said Richard Culatta, director of the Education Department's Office of Educational Technology. Some components — such as providing students and parents with real-time feedback and offering students greater choice — have proved beneficial, he said.</p><p>A November 2014 <a href="http://gates.ly/1HGG92e" target="_blank">report</a> on personalized learning from the Gates Foundation and the RAND Corporation found “mixed results,” with some schools performing better than others, but noted that personalized learning generally showed promise. Another 2014 <a href="http://bit.ly/1w0ISwL" target="_blank">report</a> from the National Education Policy Center said personalized learning isn’t always effective or cost-effective, and the term has become such a catchall that it’s nearly impossible to assess what’s working and what’s not.</p><p>The education technology business Amplify could serve as a cautionary tale. Founded in 2011 and led by former New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, Amplify wanted to make personalized learning available for more students through its tablets and digital curriculum. The company had hoped school districts could purchase the tablets, priced at about $200, in large numbers.<b> </b>But NewsCorp <a href="http://politico.pro/1Npp5to" target="_blank">decided to sell off</a> the startup earlier this year after slower-than-expected sales and technical issues with the tablets.</p><p>Culatta, who’s leaving the Education Department at the end of year and whose work has focused heavily on personalized learning, said privacy concerns are valid and must be addressed.</p><p>“We need to be very, very clear about what they’re doing with the data,” he said. “Any data that’s being collected and is being used for purposes not authorized by the school — that would be illegal.”</p><p>Haimson said many parents want their children to spend less time in front of computers, but Culatta said personalized learning is more than “a kid sitting in front of a computer program clicking ‘next’ all day.” It also involves interaction between students and teachers and among classmates, he said.</p><p>There’s also the question of access — a recent <a href="http://bit.ly/1lY5b2Q" target="_blank">report</a> from the nonprofit EducationSuperHighway found that about 21 million students still lack adequate access to high-speed broadband. Some worry that as a result, personalized learning has so far benefited better-off schools and students, leaving poor and minority students in the dust.</p><p>But Culatta said that while it’s important to connect every student in the country to broadband, experimentation with personalized learning can’t wait.</p><p>“We feel like this is something that has been, in some ways, a no-brainer for a long time,” he said. “But doing it has been so complicated because there’s a lot of infrastructure needed to support personalized learning.” </p><p>Keith Krueger, CEO of the Consortium for School Networking, an association for technology leaders in school districts, said Zuckerberg’s contribution is a “game changer in terms of resources … but the devil is in the details.”</p><p>Careful planning will be needed to spend the money well, he said. </p><p>“We’ll have to see exactly how they do it,” Krueger said. “We’ll certainly be watching it closely.”<br /></p><br>

Tags: chomsky sam harris

This seems to us a good week to reprint two famous documents by Mark Twain. They are often quoted, but not often enough, as events of the past few days in Ethiopia demonstrate. The first of these is his description of the development of war hysteria, written many years ago and published in “The Mysterious Stranger”:

There has never been a just one, never an honorable one—on the part of the instigator of the war. I can see a million years ahead, and this rule will never change in so many as half a dozen instances. 

The loud little handful—as usual—will shout for the war. The pulpit will, warily and cautiously, object—at first; the great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there ‘ should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, “It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it.” 

Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently the antiwar audiences will thin out and lose popularity.

Before long you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers—as earlier—but do not dare to say so.

And now the whole nation—pulpit and all—will take up the war cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open. Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.

The other document is his famous “War Prayer,” written thirty years ago and recently circulated again by the Mark Twain Centennial Committee:

O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended through wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sport of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it—for our sakes, who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask of One who is the spirit of love and who is the ever faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset, and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Grant our prayer, O Lord, and Thine shall be the praise and honor and glory, now and ever. Amen.

Five Black Lives Matter protesters were shot Monday night in Minneapolis, and police are looking for three white male suspects. BLM organizers claim the shots were fired by a group of white supremacist counter-protesters.

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ANKARA, Turkey (AP) — Turkey shot down a Russian warplane Tuesday, claiming it had violated Turkish airspace and ignored repeated warnings. Russia denied that the plane crossed the Syrian border into Turkish skies.

"We are looking into the circumstances of the crash of the Russian jet," Russia's Defense Ministry said. "The Ministry of Defense would like to stress that theplane was over the Syrian territory throughout the flight."

Russia said the Su-24 was downed by artillery fire, but Turkey claimed that its F-16s fired on the Russian plane after it ignored several warnings. The ministry said the pilots parachuted but added that Moscow had no further contact with them.

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Tags: chomsky syria isis

Tags: james bond alchoholism funny the onion

shared partly because the model for josephine was roughly predicted by himanshu. Josephine employs the most basic tools of telecommunications to make a market and match “gotta eat” with “wanna cook.” (whereas i guess himanshu was going for matching up "gotta eat" and with "also gotta eat")

Tags: sharing economy uber uber for food computational socialism

When independent traders in a small Welsh town discovered the loopholes used by multinational giants to avoid paying UK tax, they didn’t just get mad. Now local businesses in Crickhowell are turning the tables on the likes of Google and Starbucks by employing the same accountancy practices used by the world’s biggest companies, to move their entire town “offshore”.

Tags: taxes big business tax haven prank political prank

How did it take conservatives so long to realize this?

Tags: israel palestine jeffrey goldberg

<p>I drove up to Fort Dodge, Iowa, from Des Moines Thursday night in search of the Donald Trump magic that has so captivated voters here and nationwide. What I found was a festival of the bizarre and a Trumpian rant for the ages.</p><p>Lines to get into the Trump rally at the Iowa Central Community College stretched deep into the parking lots as hawkers peddled “Make America Great Again” hats, T-shirts and buttons. The faithful, an almost uniformly white and largely blue-collar crowd, braved strong winds and chilly temperatures as they clutched Trump’s latest book and waited to crowd into the small arena.</p><p>“I like him because he says what everyone else is thinking but won’t say,” said Lindie Phipps, a self-described “poor dirt farmer” from Boxholm, Iowa, population 200. “I love the immigration stuff and his confidence and strength.”</p><p>Phipps’s wife Julie, who runs a catering business, said Trump would take the country back for average Americans. “It’s supposed to be ‘We the People,’ not ‘We the Government.’ He’s rich and hasn’t had to go through our struggles, but he understands us.”</p><p>Inside, the scene was more sedate as the 1,500 attendees slipped into the two-tiered auditorium. And then the wait began. An acapella group sang the national anthem. A solider led us in the Pledge of Allegiance. Trump was running late. Local and school officials occasionally popped up to offer remarks and pledge that Trump would take questions from the crowd, something he never ended up doing.</p><br><p>Then Trump, fresh from a CNN interview in which he likened Ben Carson's “pathological temper” to incurable “child molesting,” sauntered onto the stage and began an epic tirade that, if it came from anyone else, would amount to a campaign killer. From Trump? Who knows.</p><p>The real estate billionaire, working without any kind of script or even a basic framework, launched into a rambling series of rants about illegal immigration punctuated by signing books, reading his own tweets, talking about his cuff links and telling often incomprehensible stories. “Does anyone care about borders?” Trump asked. “Without borders, we don’t have a country. What is it?” </p><p>Shortly after this, he talked about his experience with Macy’s, though it was not clear why. “I did very well with ties, shirts, fragrances and all that.” At one point, singling out a man who called out from the audience, Trump said, “Even though you are male, I love you, never been my thing, but I love you. I love everybody.” </p><p>It got much stranger very quickly as Trump railed against “anchor babies” and mocked the political correctness of calling the children of immigrants anything else. And he went into a long attack on Bowe Bergdahl, saying he would have let the Taliban keep him. It was like being stuck at Thanksgiving dinner with a garrulous relative who won't stop talking. </p><p>And Trump was just getting started.</p><p>Toward the end, he went back into the attack he started on CNN, going on for 10 minutes on Carson's incurable &quot;disease.&quot; Of Carson's many tales in his book, Trump asked, &quot;How stupid are the people of Iowa, how stupid are the people of the country to believe this crap?&quot;</p><p>Trump, with great drama, mocked Carson's description of attacking a classmate with a knife, only to have the blade break on the supposed victim's belt buckle. &quot;But lo and behold, it hit the belt! It hit the belt,&quot; Trump said, arms stretching outward. &quot;And the knife broke. Give me a break. Give me a break. Give me a break. The knife broke.&quot;</p><p>Stepping away from the lectern, Trump demonstrated how his belt would move upward or downward if it were struck by a knife, inviting members of the audience to try it out. &quot;It moves this way, it moves that way!&quot; Trump said. &quot;How stupid are the people of Iowa? How stupid are the people of the country to believe this crap?&quot;</p><br><p>The crowd, possibly annoyed that Trump started late, only occasionally interrupted with big cheers. And as the rally went longer and Trump got stranger and deeper into the Carson tirade, the cheers were fewer and some people shifted nervously in their seats and shook their heads to each other. Not everyone in the crowd was already a Trump supporter.</p><p>Several told me they were on the fence and looking closely at Ted Cruz. Several said they liked Ben Carson but were unnerved by the retired neurosurgeon's lack of knowledge on economic issues in the most recent GOP debate. It was not clear if Trump lost anyone in Iowa with his 95-minute stemwinder. But he might have. </p><p>One undecided voter in attendance, who did not wanted to be quoted by name, shook his head at me as Trump was rambling away. “I’m just not sure this guy can win,” he said. </p><br>

It may be flying under your radar, but you should catch up on the epic flailing going on right now among Senate Republicans over Obamacare. It really is a seminal moment in the anti-Obamacare clown show.