Software that monitors students during tests perpetuates inequality and violates their privacy; MIT Technology Review, August 7, 2020

• Shea Swaugerarchive page

, The New York Times; 

Software that monitors students during tests perpetuates inequality and violates their privacy

"The coronavirus pandemic has been a boon for the test proctoring industry. About half a dozen companies in the US claim their software can accurately detect and prevent cheating in online tests. Examity, HonorLock, Proctorio,ProctorU, Respondus and others have rapidly grown since colleges and universities switched to remote classes.

While there’s no official tally, it’s reasonable to say that millions of algorithmically proctored tests are happening every month around the world. Proctorio told the New York Times in May that business had increased by 900% during the first few months of the pandemic, to the point where the company proctored 2.5 million tests worldwide in April alone.

I'm a university librarian and I've seen the impacts of these systems up close. My own employer, the University of Colorado Denver, has a contract with Proctorio.

It’s become clear to me that algorithmic proctoring is a modern surveillance technology that reinforces white supremacy, sexism, ableism, and transphobia. The use of these tools is an invasion of students’ privacy and, often, a civil rights violation."

How Trump should change the way journalists understand “objectivity”; Vox, August 4, 2020

 Sean Illing, Vox; How Trump should change the way journalists understand “objectivity”

"Some of the most interesting thinking on this topic has come from Tom Rosenstiel, a media scholar and the executive director of the American Press Institute. Rosenstiel recently responded to a terrific essay by reporter Wesley Lowery, who argued that newsrooms are facing a long-overdue reckoning over the very meaning of objectivity.

Lowery’s point — and it’s a good one — is that objectivity has come to mean presenting neutral arguments to an imaginary reader who is “invariably assumed to be white.” And the problem isn’t that objectivity varies according to race, but that this assumption means “the contours of acceptable public debate have largely been determined through the white gaze.”

Rosenstiel, who has co-written a book on the ethics of journalism in the digital age, agreed with Lowery, but used his piece as an opportunity to clarify what “objectivity” has traditionally meant for journalists and how it’s “been turned on its head.” For Rosenstiel, journalistic objectivity was never intended to mean neutrality or balance; instead, it meant something like the pursuit of truth using objective methods. Because journalism is conducted by human beings and therefore can never be truly objective, their methods have to be instead. A journalist’s duty is to write “what they can prove” — and if they can prove one side is lying and the other is telling the truth, that’s what they should write.

I reached out to Rosenstiel by phone to talk about that distinction and why the prevailing misunderstanding of objectivity matters.

On one level, this is a very inside-baseball exchange on contemporary journalistic ethics. But it’s also a discussion about how to tell the truth in a media environment that rewards engagement and clicks above all else — a problem that implicates us all."

Neighbors’ freedom of expression infringed; The Herald, August 15, 2020

DAVID L. DYE, The Herald; Neighbors’ freedom of expression infringed

"The presidential election is still almost three months off, but the campaign already appears to be heating up locally by one measure — stolen election signs.

Mercer County supporters of Republican President Donald J. Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, have reported the theft and destructions of campaign signs for their favored candidates...

The removal of election signs on private property is a criminal offense...

Supporters of both candidates said the sign thefts are leaving them with an increased determination to express their political opinions."

Trump’s attacks on the Postal Service deserve sustained, red-alert coverage from the media; The Washington Post, August 15, 2020

Margaret Sullivan, The Washington Post

; Trump’s attacks on the Postal Service deserve sustained, red-alert coverage from the media
"But if journalists don’t keep the pressure on Postal Service problems, they will be abdicating their duty.

There’s very little that matters more than the Nov. 3 vote. Anything that threatens the integrity of the vote needs to be treated as one of the biggest stories out there — even if it’s not the sexiest."

Trump’s Attack on the Postal Service Is a Threat to Democracy—and to Rural America; The New Yorker, August 11, 2020

Bill McKibben, The New Yorker; Trump’s Attack on the Postal Service Is a Threat to Democracy—and to Rural America

"In 2012, when the Postal Service planned on closing 3,830 branches, an analysis by Reuters showed that eighty per cent of those branches were in rural areas where the poverty rate topped the national average. You know who delivers the Amazon package the final mile to rural Americans? The U.S.P.S. You know how people get medicine, when the pharmacy is an hour’s drive away? In their mailbox. You know why many people can’t pay their bills electronically? Because too much of rural America has impossibly slow Internet, or none at all. These are the places where, during the pandemic, teachers and students all sit in cars in the school parking lot to Zoom with one another, because that’s the only spot with high-speed Wi-Fi. You want the ultimate example? Visit one of the sprawling Native American lands in the West and you’ll see how, as a member of the Mandan-Hidatsa tribe in North Dakota told Vox, the Postal Service helps keep those communities “connected to the world.” Should the government destroy the service, she said, “It would just be kind of a continuation of these structures in the U.S. that already dispossessed people of color, black and indigenous people of color, and people below the poverty line.” The mail, Kleeb said, “is a universal service that literally levels the playing field for all Americans. It is how we order goods, send gifts to our family, and keep small businesses alive. In the era of the coronavirus, mail is now our lifeline to have our voices heard for our ballots in the election. In fact, in eleven counties in our state, they have only mail-in ballots, because of how massive the county is land-wise.”

The Death of a Fake Twitter Personality Reveals the Systemic Rot of Academia; Medium, August 11, 2020

Asher Elbein, Medium; The Death of a Fake Twitter Personality Reveals the Systemic Rot of Academia

"The creation of such an identity — as multiple Native scholars and writers have pointed out — isn’t just deeply disrespectful to the small community of Natives in academia, and it doesn’t just play into a gross American tradition of appropriation. It’s also coming at a time when Native people are being killed by Covid-19 at 19 times the rate of all other populations combined in New Mexico alone. Before McLaughlin was unmasked, Duarte says, she had been avoiding social media, which for those with family in the Four Corners region of the Southwest felt like a rolling obituary. She and Washuta both recalled hearing the news that a Native colleague had died and instantly wondering if it was someone they knew. Killing off a fake Native account through Covid-19 registers as doubly cruel.

“The behavior of this individual Dr. McLaughlin eclipses the actual work of Native colleagues,” Duarte says, as well as the struggles of LGTBQ Native people who themselves suffer disproportionate rates of violence. “It sort of feels like being rendered invisible many times over.”"

The Anonymous Professor Who Wasn’t; The New York Times, August 4, 2020

Jonah Engel Bromwich and Ezra Marcus, The New York Times; The Anonymous Professor Who Wasn’t

A professor at Arizona State University does not exist.

"Among scientists and academics, the shock of mourning was already laced with suspicion. Enough of them had unpleasant interactions with the combative account and were troubled by its inconsistencies and seeming about-turns.

“You have these internal alarms that are like, ‘Oh, I don’t trust you,’” said Julie Libarkin, the head of the Geocognition Research Laboratory at Michigan State University. “Kind of the same as when I worked with BethAnn.”"

Why Parents Should Pause Before Oversharing Online; The New York Times, August 4, 2020

Stacey Steinberg, The New York Times; Why Parents Should Pause Before Oversharing Online

As social media comes of age, will we regret all the information we revealed about our families during its early years?

"A Conflict of Interest

Studying children’s privacy on social media fed both my personal conflicts and my professional passions, so six years ago, I delved deep into the work of studying the intersection of a child’s right to privacy and a parent’s right to share.

What I quickly learned was that the law does not give us much guidance when it comes to how we use social media as families. Societal norms encour­age us to use restraint before publicly sharing personal informa­tion about our friends and family. But nothing stops us as parents from sharing our child’s stories with the virtual world.

While there are laws that protect American children’s privacy in certain contexts — such as HIPAA for health care, FERPA for education and COPPA for the online privacy of children under 13 — they do not have a right to privacy “from their parents,” except in the most limited of circumstances.

Most other countries guarantee a child the right to privacy through an international agreement called the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. The United States signed the agreement, but it is the only United Nations member country not to have ratified it, which means it is not law or formal policy here. Additionally, doctrines like the Right to Be Forgotten might offer children in the European Union remedies for their parents’ oversharing once they come of age."

Libraries’ Buchanan Fellows adapt with new skills during pandemic; Vanderbilt University, August 5, 2020

Vanderbilt University; Libraries’ Buchanan Fellows adapt with new skills during pandemic

"Before the pandemic, the fellows for the Ethics of Information project were scheduled to participate in a library fair on intellectual freedom and privacy issues, according to Andrew Wesolek, director of digital scholarship and communications for the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries.

“Our students were going to staff the information tables and discuss with attendees the various online privacy tools they had learned about in weekly seminars,” said Wesolek, who co-directed the fellowship with Melissa Mallon, director of Peabody Library; Bobby Smiley, director of Divinity Library; and Sarah Burriss, doctoral candidate in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Peabody College. “The fair was cancelled, but students pivoted to create highly informative public service announcements on information privacy that can be viewed online.”

The student-produced PSAs cover everything from preventing unwanted Internet ad pop-ups to the dangers of personal data collection by some of the emerging and unregulated technologies."

Sold: An 1891 Patent by Granville T. Woods, Innovative Black Engineer; Atlas Obscura, July 22, 2020

Matthew Taub, Atlas Obscura; Sold: An 1891 Patent by Granville T. Woods, Innovative Black Engineer

Woods was prolific, but was largely forgotten for many years after his death.

"Beginning during Woods’s lifetime, trade publications and other newspapers took to calling Woods the “Black Edison,” a nickname that reflected the virtual absence of Black Americans in engineering during Reconstruction and the late 19th century. That reality haunted Woods, who, according to a recent belated obituary in The New York Times, often said that he was born in Australia in order to distance himself from the strictures of America’s racial hierarchy. Though Woods found (relatively) more financial success later in life, after selling a series of inventions to the likes of General Electric and George Westinghouse—including an early version of the “dead man’s brake,” which can stop a train with an incapacitated conductor—he was still deprived of the recognition that others in his field enjoyed. In fact, despite working at the top of his field, alongside figures such as Westinghouse, Woods was buried in an unmarked grave in Queens, which only received a stone in 1975.

His life is a lesson not only in science and innovation, but also in the precariousness of legacy. Inventors, says Fouché—both those who enjoy credit and those who are denied it—rarely innovate in isolation. Many brilliant minds work simultaneously on the same problem, and for reasons of prejudice, luck, or law, just a few of them enter the historical record."

Congress forced Silicon Valley to answer for its misdeeds. It was a glorious sight; The Guardian, July 30, 2020

Matt Stoller, The Guardian; Congress forced Silicon Valley to answer for its misdeeds. It was a glorious sight

"As David Cicilline put it: “These companies as they exist today have monopoly power. Some need to be broken up, all need to be properly regulated and held accountable.” And then he quoted Louis Brandeis, who said, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”"

Once Science Fiction, Gene Editing Is Now a Looming Reality; The New York Times, July 22, 2020

Katie Hafner, The New York Times; Once Science Fiction, Gene Editing Is Now a Looming Reality

The prospect of erasing some disabilities and perceived deficiencies hovers at the margins of what people consider ethically acceptable.

"Professor Halley acknowledged the inherent tension between the huge benefits that gene-editing technology could bring in preventing serious diseases and disabilities for which there is no treatment, and what she calls the “potential risk of going down a road that feels uncomfortably close to eugenics.”

Less ethically freighted are therapies to cure serious diseases in people who are already living with them. “I think that there are opportunities to use gene-editing technologies to treat genetic diseases that don’t raise the societal implications of altering permanently patterns of human inheritance,” said Dr. Alex Marson, director of the Gladstone-UCSF Institute of Genomic Immunology in San Francisco."

COVID-19 Fatigue? Don’t Let Your Ethics Guard Down; Esquire, July 28, 2020

Esquire; COVID-19 Fatigue? Don’t Let Your Ethics Guard Down

"But now is not the time to give in or to cut corners professionally. No, now is the time for a quick run-through of a lawyer’s ethical obligations to clients during these challenging times.

The legal profession’s ethical rules do not contain exceptions for pandemics."

Study: Only 18% of data science students are learning about AI ethics; TNW, July 3, 2020

Thomas Macaulay, TNW; Study: Only 18% of data science students are learning about AI ethics

The neglect of AI ethics extends from universities to industry

"At least we can rely on universities to teach the next generation of computer scientists to make. Right? Apparently not, according to a new survey of 2,360 data science students, academics, and professionals by software firm Anaconda.

Only 15% of instructors and professors said they’re teaching AI ethics, and just 18% of students indicated they’re learning about the subject.

Notably, the worryingly low figures aren’t due to a lack of interest. Nearly half of respondents said the social impacts of bias or privacy were the “biggest problem to tackle in the AI/ML arena today.” But those concerns clearly aren’t reflected in their curricula."

15 Ethical Crises In Technology That Have Industry Leaders Concerned; Forbes Technology Council, July 9, 2020

Forbes Technology Council; 15 Ethical Crises In Technology That Have Industry Leaders Concerned

"Growing technologies such as artificial intelligence have incredible potential. However, they also can come with ethical concerns, such as privacy violations and data safety. These issues must be addressed before people can safely implement emerging technologies in their daily lives.

As industry leaders, the members of Forbes Technology Council keep a close eye on issues impacting the field. Below, they share 15 ethical crises they’re concerned about and what can be done to remedy them."

John Lewis, The New York Times; 

Together, You Can Redeem the Soul of Our Nation

Though I am gone, I urge you to
answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe.

Mr. Lewis, the civil rights leader who died on July 17, wrote this essay shortly before his death, to be published upon the day of his funeral.

"Like so many young people today, I was searching for a way out, or some might say a way in, and then I heard the voice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on an old radio. He was talking about the philosophy and discipline of nonviolence. He said we are all complicit when we tolerate injustice. He said it is not enough to say it will get better by and by. He said each of us has a moral obligation to stand up, speak up and speak out. When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something. Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.

Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble. Voting and participating in the democratic process are key. The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it."

How to Inoculate Your Team Against Conspiracy Theories; Harvard Business Review, July 30, 2020

Cynthia Wang, 

Jennifer Whitson, 

Tanya Menon, 

Joongseo Kim and 

Brian D. Webster

, Harvard Business Review; How to Inoculate Your Team Against Conspiracy Theories
"Why does this loss of control make conspiracy theories so appealing? Research shows that when people experience loss of control, they tend to search for illusory patterns in their environment. These patterns are appealing because they reduce the environment’s randomness, uncertainty, and disorder — even if the certainty they offer is both ludicrous and unpleasant (such as governments or tech companies plotting to infect the world).

Luckily, it’s possible to inoculate yourself — and others — from susceptibility to these dangerous conspiracy theories. Our work shows that how people think about control determines their vulnerability to these theories. Specifically, we found that individuals with a “promotion-focused” mindset (i.e., those who tend to focus on achieving their goals and aspirations) are more resistant to conspiracy theories than those with a “prevention-focused” mindset (i.e., those who focus on protecting what they already have), because the promotion focus on shaping their own futures involves a greater sense of control."

This Sandy Hook Father Lives In Hiding Because of Conspiracy Theories Fueled By Alex Jones; Frontline, July 28, 2020

Frontline; This Sandy Hook Father Lives In Hiding Because of Conspiracy Theories Fueled By Alex Jones

"In 2018, Pozner took [Alex] Jones to court, as did other Sandy Hook parents.

“I simply had enough. And that was what needed to be done. I’m proud of bringing the lawsuit, [it] brought a lot more attention to who he really is, and what his show represents,” Pozner said.

Under oath, Jones would say that he suffered from a “form of psychosis” that made him think everything was staged. He would admit, “I’ve had a chance to believe that children died and it’s a tragedy…”

The lawsuit continues.

But for Pozner, Jones’ admission was enough. “As far as I’m concerned, I’ve already won,” he said. “Having Alex Jones admit under oath that Noah did die the way it was reported, in his school, that’s a victory for me. Having Alex Jones say that he was wrong, that it was a real tragedy — that is a victory.”"

Does suppressing online conspiracy theorists work? Experts weigh in; The Guardian, July 30, 2020

Poppy Noor, The Guardian; Does suppressing online conspiracy theorists work? Experts weigh in

"Russell Muirhead, who co-authored the book A Lot of People Are Saying, which digs into how misinformation spreads online, says that social media work to validate and legitimize conspiracy theorizing and misinformation.

“On a platform like Twitter, and to some extent on Facebook and YouTube, repetition comes to substitute validation. If enough people like the tweet, or watch the video, or like the video on YouTube, it confers a kind of legitimacy,” he says.

He gives the example of a common refrain of Donald Trump’s to exemplify this: Trump will say “I don’t know if it’s true but a lot of people are saying it” – as if people simply repeating misinformation means it must have some truth to it.

“That’s very threatening to our ability to understand the world and to democratic politics. Because anything people retweet enough times seems true – regardless of whether or not it is,” he says."

This was the week America lost the war on misinformation; The Washington Post, July 30, 2020

Margaret Sullivan, The Washington Post

; This was the week America lost the war on misinformation

"Some new research, out just this morning from Pew, tells us in painstaking numerical form exactly what’s going on, and it’s not pretty: Americans who rely on social media as their pathway to news are more ignorant and more misinformed than those who come to news through print, a news app on their phones or network TV.

And that group is growing...

They’re absorbing fake news, but they don’t see it as a problem. In a society that depends on an informed citizenry to make reasonably intelligent decisions about self-governance, this is the worst kind of trouble.

And the president — who knows exactly what he is doing — is making it far, far worse. His war on the nation’s traditional press is a part of the same scheme: information warfare, meant to mess with reality and sow as much confusion as possible."

Internet Archive to Publishers: Drop ‘Needless’ Copyright Lawsuit and Work with Us; Publishers Weekly, July 23, 2020

Andrew Albanese, Publishers Weekly; Internet Archive to Publishers: Drop ‘Needless’ Copyright Lawsuit and Work with Us

"During a 30-minute Zoom press conference on July 22, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle urged the four major publishers suing over the organization’s book scanning efforts to consider settling the dispute in the boardroom rather than the courtroom.

“Librarians, publishers, authors, all of us should be working together during this pandemic to help teachers, parents, and especially students,” Kahle implored. “I call on the executives of Hachette, HarperCollins, Wiley, and Penguin Random House to come together with us to help solve the challenging problems of access to knowledge during this pandemic, and to please drop this needless lawsuit.”

Kahle’s remarks came as part of a panel, which featured a range of speakers explaining and defending the practice of Controlled Digital Lending (CDL), the legal theory under which the Internet Archive has scanned and is making available for borrowing a library of some 1.4 million mostly 20th century books."

An Ethics Guide for Tech Gets Rewritten With Workers in Mind; Wired, July 15, 2020

Arielle Pardes, Wired; An Ethics Guide for Tech Gets Rewritten With Workers in Mind

The Ethical Explorer Pack is designed to help Silicon Valley's rank and file—not just CEOs—steer products away from harmful directions.

"Now, the Omidyar Network has a new tool kit, designed to get tech workers talking about the way their products shape society, democracy, and more. The Ethical Explorer Pack, as it’s called, covers many of the same topics and ideas as EthicalOS, but with added guidance on how workers can bring these issues up on their teams—whether to identify red flags early on, to brainstorm solutions to potential problems, or to set boundaries around things like data control, surveillance, or disinformation. The kit, which comes as a free digital download or a physical deck of cards, provides exercises, activities, and prompts that can be used alone or with a group to guide conversations...

The Ethical Explorer Pack might introduce some employees to questions they’d never considered. For others, the prompts might reinforce ideas they were too nervous to bring up. “People can feel like the joy-kill, the person getting in the way of the cool innovation,” says Drinkwater. The kit includes some sample language for making the case to managers and colleagues. That might not be enough to get buy-in when an ethical concern stands at odds with a business’s bottom line, or when a marginalized worker is the only one speaking up. Still, the tool kit encourages workers to make their point in the parlance of Silicon Valley. Slowing down to think through future consequences isn't any different than slowing down to debug code. It might even save startups from a headache, or something bigger, down the road."

Link to Omidyar Network's Ethical Explorer Pack

The Ethics of Reopening; Inside Higher Ed, July 21, 2020

Rev. Dennis H. Holtschneider, Inside Higher Ed; The Ethics of Reopening

"Pandemics rightly invite the language of science and best practice when it comes to the choices we make. If you listen, however, there’s another conversation of right and wrong and assignments of “Who is responsible?” It’s the language of ethics and morality, and, in that vein, I’ve been ruminating on the ethics of colleges and universities reopening for the fall term. Here’s a baker’s dozen."

Reforming Digital Lending Libraries and the End of the Internet Archive; Jurist, July 20, 2020

Binit Agrawal, Jurist; Reforming Digital Lending Libraries and the End of the Internet Archive

"The lack of certainty relating to the legality of CDL as fair use is hampering its growth by creating a chilling effect. Libraries are under the fear of costly litigations. IA itself is under the risk of bankruptcy, as the publishers are not inclined to take back their suit, even after IA stopped ELP. This is the very problem section 108 intended to resolve. Hence, it is pertinent that the section is amended to meet the needs of the digital age and provide certainty in this regard. Some countries have already moved in this direction. While Canada has permitted a limited right to provide digitized copies to patrons of other libraries, the EU has been considering proposals to allow digitization of cultural heritage institutions, including libraries."

Twitter disables video retweeted by Donald Trump over copyright complaint; The Guardian, July 19, 2020

Reuters via The Guardian; Twitter disables video retweeted by Donald Trump over copyright complaint

"Twitter has disabled a campaign-style video retweeted by Donald Trump, citing a copyright complaint.

The video, which included music from the group Linkin Park, disappeared from the president’s Twitter feed late Saturday with the notification: “This media has been disabled in response to a report by the copyright owner.”

Twitter removed the video, which Trump had retweeted from the White House social media director, Dan Scavino, after it received a Digital Millennium Copyright Act notice from Machine Shop Entertainment, according to a notice posted on the Lumen Database which collects requests for removal of online materials."

How 'John Lewis: Good Trouble' serves as a warning; CNN, July 4, 2020

Brandon Tensley, CNN; How 'John Lewis: Good Trouble' serves as a warning

""I tell friends and family, colleagues and especially young people that when you see something that's not right or fair, you have to do something, you have to speak up, you have to get in the way," as Lewis put it in 2018."

If AI is going to help us in a crisis, we need a new kind of ethics; MIT Technology Review, June 24, 2020

Will Douglas Heaven, MIT Technology Review; If AI is going to help us in a crisis, we need a new kind of ethics

Ethics for urgency means making ethics a core part of AI rather than an afterthought, says Jess Whittlestone.

"What needs to change?

We need to think about ethics differently. It shouldn’t be something that happens on the side or afterwards—something that slows you down. It should simply be part of how we build these systems in the first place: ethics by design...

You’ve said that we need people with technical expertise at all levels of AI design and use. Why is that?

I’m not saying that technical expertise is the be-all and end-all of ethics, but it’s a perspective that needs to be represented. And I don’t want to sound like I’m saying all the responsibility is on researchers, because a lot of the important decisions about how AI gets used are made further up the chain, by industry or by governments.

But I worry that the people who are making those decisions don’t always fully understand the ways it might go wrong. So you need to involve people with technical expertise. Our intuitions about what AI can and can’t do are not very reliable.

What you need at all levels of AI development are people who really understand the details of machine learning to work with people who really understand ethics. Interdisciplinary collaboration is hard, however. People with different areas of expertise often talk about things in different ways. What a machine-learning researcher means by privacy may be very different from what a lawyer means by privacy, and you can end up with people talking past each other. That’s why it’s important for these different groups to get used to working together."

Complaint Faults Museum Director for Hanging His In-Law’s El Greco; The New York Times, July 15, 2020

Graham Bowley, The New York Times; Complaint Faults Museum Director for Hanging His In-Law’s El Greco 

A whistle-blower accusation argues that conflict-of-interest rules to prevent self-dealing have been skirted at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

"“It’s a common practice for American museums to engage collectors and patrons asking them to loan paintings,” he said in an interview.

But his answers have failed to satisfy the museum employees who filed the complaint at a time when other concerns, including ones about Mr. Salort-Pons’s management style and about DIA’s treatment of its Black employees, are roiling the institute.

They say that a lack of transparency surrounding the artwork cloaked a situation that could financially benefit the director and his family, since a painting’s exhibition in the institute could burnish its value. 

Some ethics experts, too, said he probably didn’t go far enough in disclosing his family’s interest.

“A museum official (or close relative) who loans an object to the museum for display then sells it after exhibition would likely earn an enhanced price for the object,” said Greg Stevens, director of the Institute of Museum Ethics at Seton Hall University. “And it would also cause the appearance of impropriety to arise — namely, that the museum used its prestige, resources, and reach to enrich the official.”"

YouTube’s algorithms could be harming users looking for health information; Fast Company, July 15, 2020

ANJANA SUSARLA, Fast Company; 

YouTube’s algorithms could be harming users looking for health information

"A significant fraction of the U.S. population is estimated to have limited health literacy, or the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information, such as the ability to read and comprehend prescription bottles, appointment slips, or discharge instructions from health clinics.

Studies of health literacy, such as the National Assessment of Adult Literacy conducted in 2003, estimated that only 12% of adults had proficient health literacy skills. This has been corroborated in subsequent studies.

I’m a professor of information systems, and my own research has examined how social media platforms such as YouTube widen such health literacy disparities by steering users toward questionable content."

Vandals destroy Little Free Library inside children’s memorial garden in Hermitage; WKBN, July 10, 2020

Dave Sess, WKBN; Vandals destroy Little Free Library inside children’s memorial garden in Hermitage 

The Little Free Library was started to remember Danielle Greenburg, a children's librarian who was passionate about literacy

"The Butterfly Garden is dedicated to children who passed away. Greenburg was a children’s librarian, passionate about literacy. Team Danielle was started in her memory.

“As of this week, have donated over $300,000 to Sarcoma Research,” McIntire said.

And that work will continue.

The library was open to all. Take a book, read a book, put it back for the next person. The Little Free Library will definitely return.

“That’s something that will be a priority and putting back into place and refill it with some books,” said Ryan Voisey, with Buhl Park.

“So we’ll fix it and hope they’ve had enough of us and go somewhere else,” McIntire said.

There have been many promises of donations already to rebuild and restock the Little Free Library at Buhl Park. The children’s programs that are held there will continue as well."

AI gatekeepers are taking baby steps toward raising ethical standards; Quartz, June 26, 2020

Nicolás Rivero, Quartz; AI gatekeepers are taking baby steps toward raising ethical standards

"This year, for the first time, major AI conferences—the gatekeepers for publishing research—are forcing computer scientists to think about those consequences.

The Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems will require a “broader impact statement” addressing the effect a piece of research might have on society. The Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing will begin rejecting papers on ethical grounds. Others have emphasized their voluntary guidelines.

The new standards follow the publication of several ethically dubious papers. Microsoft collaborated with researchers at Beihang University to algorithmically generate fake comments on news stories. Harrisburg University researchers developed a tool to predict the likelihood someone will commit a crime based on their face. Researchers clashed on Twitter over the wisdom of publishing these and other papers.

“The research community is beginning to acknowledge that we have some level of responsibility for how these systems are used,” says Inioluwa Raji, a tech fellow at NYU’s AI Now Institute. Scientists have an obligation to think about applications and consider restricting research, she says, especially in fields like facial recognition with a high potential for misuse."

What ‘X-Men’ Pulled Off 20 Years Ago, According to Those Who Made It; Observer, July 14, 2020

Brandon Katz, Observer; What ‘X-Men’ Pulled Off 20 Years Ago, According to Those Who Made It

"Winter hasn’t watched the movie front-to-back in a long time, but has seen sections and clips. “I don’t know if it ages as well as it could. But I think the thematics—Is there a place for me? Will I be discarded?—make the movie relevant whether you’re 14 years old or 84 years old. I think that discussion is still going on today. How do we find a place?”

Donner believes the success of X-Men helped open the doors for Sony’s Spider-Man franchise, which laid the groundwork for Marvel’s eventual shared cinematic universe conquest. But, more importantly, she believes the message of X-Men remains its best contribution.

“The legacy is tolerance,” she said. “We’re all mutants in a way. All of us. Most of us feel like misfits, and this movie shows that we’re all good. We’re all equal in who we are and we should be proud of who we are. Intolerance should not be tolerated.”"