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Group issues 12-point plan calling for stricter immigration rules for care workers, students and refugees
Rishi Sunak is facing demands from “red wall” Conservative MPs to slash the number of overseas care workers, foreign students and refugees allowed into the UK in time for the next election.
The MPs from the 2017 and 2019 intake, who call themselves the New Conservatives, have issued a 12-point plan to cut net migration to Britain from 606,000 to 226,000 before the end of 2024.
A cap of 20,000 on the number of refugees accepted for resettlement in the UK.
Caps on future humanitarian schemes such as the Ukraine, Afghanistan and Hong Kong schemes should the predicted 168,000 reductions not be realised.
Implementation of the provisions of the illegal migration bill, which it is claimed would lead to a reduction of at least 35,000 from LTIM.
A raise in the minimum combined income threshold to £26,200 for sponsoring a spouse and raising the minimum language requirement to B1 (intermediate level). This should lead to an estimated 20,000 reduction in LTIM, the MPs claim.
Making the migration advisory committee report on the effect of migration on housing and public services, not just the jobs market, by putting future demand on a par with labour requirements in all studies.
A 5% cap on the amount of social housing that councils can give to non-UK nationals.
Raising the immigration health surcharge to £2,700 per person a year.
Continue reading...In the last of this series of posts about this year's Annual Meeting, SSP's Marketing and Communications Committee asked members of our community what the conference meant to them.
The post Ask the Community: What Did SSP 2023 Mean to You? appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
An unlucky cohort of undergraduates has been plagued by Covid restrictions, education strikes and finally a marking boycott
Emily Smith, a final-year geography student at Durham University, never imagined her already heavily disrupted university experience could end like this. She won’t be graduating this summer because half her work remains unmarked owing to a national marking boycott by lecturers.
She refuses to attend the “completion ceremony” Durham has offered her instead. Without an actual degree classification it seems like a “farce”. Like so many in this deeply unlucky cohort of students, she feels this is the last straw.
Continue reading...We check in with scholarly publishing vendors for their experiences at the 2023 SSP Annual meeting in Portland.
The post Ask the Vendors: SSP 2023 Annual Meeting appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
We ask the 2023 SSP Fellows: “What was the highlight of attending SSP 2023 for you?”
The post Ask the Fellows: SSP 2023 Annual Meeting appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Robert Harington talks to Annie Callanan, Chief Executive of Taylor & Francis, in this new series of perspectives from some of Publishing’s leaders across the non-profit and profit sectors of our industry.
The post Chefs de Cuisine: Perspectives from Publishing’s Top Table — Annie Callanan appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
There is nothing more important in our world than water. However, our world, with us in it, is currently in a serious water crisis which has elicited all sorts of debates and discussions as to how we can better manage our water supplies and sources. Or whether we will be able to continue to sustain life as we know it without the water that we have become accustomed to. It is a topical issue and one that needs to be openly discussed to make more people aware of the situation and the possible solutions.
This article looks at the source or reasons for the water crisis and details a few ideas and insights that can be used to affect water scarcity positively.
Across the world, about 785 million people don’t have access to clean drinking water. Still, even those who do have access to clean drinking water are beginning to experience a reduction in water quality and a dwindling of available water supplies. In the USA, the number of people who don’t have easy access to clean drinking water is about 2.2 million, and about 44 million have inadequate water systems, which in the year 2023 is a disgrace. Therefore, something needs to be done, and the argument herein is that we can all do something positive to make a difference in the current crisis.
Climate change:- the change in the seasons over time and the fluctuation of the usual and expected rainfall have affected the total amount of water available.
Increase in high water use in agriculture and industry:- agriculture that is water-intensive to produce out-of-season fruit and vegetables, as well as in industries that use a huge amount of water, such as data centers and cooling systems for EV battery production.
Exhaustion of ground water:- The increase in housebuilding and homes that need to be plumbed and tapped water has exhausted the available groundwater.
Poor maintenance of existing water systems:- There has been a poor level of maintenance of municipal water systems and water sources.
Knowing where the water comes from is one of the best pieces of advice for those who want to make conscious and competent decisions about their water usage, whether business or home use. The fact that we drink it and use it for cooking or to make food products means that knowing where it comes from is in our own best interest. Knowing where your water comes from will allow you to be able to get involved in its maintenance as well as being able to diversify these sources.
The same should go for businesses, and regardless if it is not for human consumption and if it’s not treated, the use of water, where it comes from, and how it is returned to the water cycle must all be considerations that are made. It’s a means to develop your green business credentials.
Maintaining your local water supplies may seem like something that the municipalities and state governments will do. However, knowing what needs to be done to maintain good water or how your runoff can affect groundwater is important. Click here to learn more about how well water can be maintained and its importance.
Maintaining water at a local level is everyone’s responsibility. It will entail how grey water is dealt with as well as limiting paved areas to reduce unnatural runoff.
Understanding what you use water for and then knowing how much you use is the start of a mindful way to use water going forward. Unless you know how much water you use, you won’t be able to make any adjustments or critique the usage itself and determine whether you need to make any changes.
You can easily read your water bill to see usage or keep a pad and track the numbers on top of your water meter. Then simply calculate exactly how much water you use every month. This will allow you to adjust the usage downwards and also see if our usage is with the tolerance of the amounts of water used by others. Leaks can also be more easily identified if you understand how much water you normally use.
Its easy to be nonchalant about water as long as you can access yours or buy sufficient drinking water whenever you need it. However, if you want to be mindful and make the right kind of impact on our water supplies then you may need to adjust some buying decisions. Only buy fruit that is in season, no imported avocados, and avoid products that overuse water in their production or manufacture. You will have to do some further reading about the fruit and vegetables that use too much water and those that have been imported from places that use too much water. It’s a global problem, so your research needs to be detailed enough to understand where your food comes from and how much water it requires to produce it.
Everyoneis all in this together and face a water crisis that involves scarcity, the reduction in water quality and an overall reduction in the amount of water available to us. The first step is to understand this water crisis, and why it is happening, and then to be clear as to what it is that you can do as an individual household or a business to make a positive contribution to this situation. Lastly, you may find it strange that as an individual, you can make decisions that can affect water provision and availability for others and question your own local water providers as to what’s in the water you drink and use in your home, but you can, so follow up with more research and question your local governing bodies about it, and make your neighbors aware as well. People can make come together to make a difference and call for change.
Image credit: Gyan Shahane via Unsplash
This article received an honourable mention in the graduate category of the 2023 National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics
Written by Kyle van Oosterum, University of Oxford student
Section 1 – Introduction
Many of us are part of or aware of the existence of widespread echo chambers on social media. Echo chambers seem concerning because their members are led to believe bizarre things and disagree viciously with others. For example, some people genuinely believe the Earth is flat. Others disagree about basic political reality as we saw with those who stormed the U.S. Capital on January 6th 2021 and, more recently, the Brazilian congress. A great deal of this may be attributable to the way social media algorithmically sorts us into echo chambers. However, this sorting is partly so effective because we have not become disposed to exit echo chambers or deal well with the individuals who inhabit them. Even if we change these algorithms, we may also need to change our dispositions to better deal with these individuals.
In this paper, I argue that Confucius’ ideal of harmony provides us with practical dispositions that help with the problems posed by echo chambers. In brief, my view is that echo chambers threaten our social relationships which can undermine social stability. As such, maintaining social stability may require managing these social relationships. Confucius’ ideas are well-suited to making these points.
To that end, I start by briefly defining what echo chambers are (Section 2). I then introduce Confucius’ idea of harmony and how it helps diagnose what is wrong with echo chambers (Section 3) and prescribes how we can live harmoniously with echo-chambered individuals (Section 4).
Section 2 – What is an Echo Chamber?
The concept of an ‘echo chamber’ is still being figured out in academic circles. However, almost all philosophers and non-philosophers agree there is something wrong with being in an echo chamber.[1] If we suggest a person is in an echo chamber, this is usually meant as a criticism either of what they believe or how they have come to believe it. This might be quite obvious, but it raises an interesting question about people in echo chambers. Why would people be part of something that they know is wrong or problematic?
My explanation for this starts from the observation that people in echo chambers probably do not think there is anything wrong with the environment they are in. In fact, given how confident people in echo chambers tend to be, they will think they have joined (or remained in) the echo chamber for good reasons. Perhaps they think they are more likely to discover the truth about something, so they join the echo chamber to obtain knowledge. Alternatively, they may join the echo chamber to obtain the good of a community who share their values. These are perfectly good reasons that motivate much human behavior. However, given our shared fallibility, we sometimes make mistakes in pursuit of what we think is good. I think this last point is crucial for understanding what echo chambers are. An echo chamber looks like the kind of social environment in which goods like knowledge or community can be obtained, but, in reality, they frustrate our access to these goods. In other words, they are troubling social environments that are parasitic on ones from which we can obtain certain goods. This squares well with what we think of a typical echo chamber member. Despite their efforts, they tend to have false beliefs and viciously dislike people who do not share their beliefs and values. In short, from understanding why individuals join these environments – to pursue goods they think they will achieve – we get a better understanding of what echo chambers are.
Section 3 – Introducing Harmony
Harmony or 和 (pronounced ‘her’) is a crucial concept in Confucian thought rendered in different ways over time and by different thinkers (Li, 2008). In keeping with the methods of the Confucian tradition, the concept of harmony is best illuminated with an analogy. The oldest analogy relies on the similarity between governing harmoniously and making a good soup. When one makes a soup, there are a variety of ingredients that one needs to add and different quantities of each ingredient must be added carefully to achieve a dish that is balanced in flavor. Similarly, a ruler should solicit many different points of view on what an acceptable policy is and take note of the dissenting and approving verdicts and determine an optimal balance of preferences. ‘Harmony’ is explicitly referred to in Analects 13.23:
The Master said, “The gentleman harmonizes without being an echo. The petty man echoes and does not harmonize.” (Confucius, 2014: 13.23).
The thing to avoid in making soup, ruling a country, or trying to reconcile different things that are in tension is to have too much ‘echoing’ or ‘sameness’. For example, having too much of the same opinion in government or having too much of the same ingredient in a soup. The problem with this, to reference an ancient Chinese thinker, is that “this is like trying to improve the taste of water with more water. Who would want that?” (Confucius, 2014: ‘Commentary on 13.23’). Harmony in the broadest sense is a process by which different things are brought together into a constructive whole (Wong 2020). In this context, I will work with harmony as a moral ideal which implores us to reconcile our inevitable differences with other people in a constructive manner and without conforming to what others believe or how they act.
The ideal of harmony sheds light on the problem of echo chambers. Whether we are in or exposed to them, echo chambers show us individuals with whom we viciously disagree yet must co-exist. Their members ‘echo’ each other too much and those outside the echo chamber become too frustrated or bitter to try to break up these echoes. Over time, echo chambers cause damage to these interpersonal relationships and to the prospect of managing our differences with others. Research by political scientists confirms these ideas; people are far too polarized around their partisan political views and continually told their ideological opponents are not to be trusted (Jamieson and Capella, 2008; McCarthy, 2019; Nguyen, 2020). This is a familiar problem and Confucius recognized a version of it, though perhaps not remotely on the same scale as today. Nevertheless, Confucius would urge that we manage the delicate relationships we have with others – relationships to our family, friends, and civic peers – to which echo chambers cause much damage. Why must we learn to do this? Insofar as we are interested in maintaining social stability, we can work on maintaining the social relationships that together constitute a society. As such, harmony offers a plausible way of diagnosing the echo chamber as partly one of fractured moral relationships with one another, which, over time, may threaten social stability.
Section 4 – Harmonizing with Others
So far, we know that harmony is a kind of moral ideal or standard, but it is not yet clear how we ought to harmonize with others. Which actions or which ways of acting count as satisfying the standard of harmony? Confucius does not offer direct advice on this question, but David Wong (2020, MS) suggests that harmony can be elaborated through the idea of accommodation. Accommodation is a moral value whose emphasis is on maintaining a constructive relationship – of respect and concern – in the face of continuing disagreement. It comes into play because societies, in their best attempts to maintain convergence on moral values and ideas, will nevertheless disagree on how to interpret the weight of their shared values and how those values interact when they conflict (Wong, 1992). Human life is marked by significant disagreement and to accommodate is to live with such disagreement rather than seek, unsuccessfully, to dissolve it.
Accommodating others involves three things. First, it involves having an epistemic openness to the possibility of expanding one’s view of the good life or at least trying to understand other ways of life. Second, it involves a tactfulness to act on your moral opinions and values in ways that aim to minimize damage to your relationships with others who have opposed views. Third, it involves amenability. This is the willingness to compromise on what we hope to gain for our moral views for the sake of sustaining relationships with disagreeing others (Wong 2020: 133). Accommodation is key to living harmoniously with others, but does it help us deal with echo chambered individuals? I will argue that it does.
The value of epistemic openness is readily seen when dealing with run-of-the-mill echo chambers containing political partisans. Some philosophers have argued that the chances that one will be right about everything are often very slim (Joshi, 2020). When one is a stubborn political partisan and, I would argue this is true of echo-chambered individuals, one believes those outside the echo chamber are systematically getting things wrong. This is a belief that it will be hard to find a rational justification for. To move forward will involve being epistemically curious and being genuinely prepared to change one’s mind, which may help others become open and curious to make such changes too.
Openness does not always require one to change one’s moral beliefs for these may be foundational to one’s identity. But the importance of our moral beliefs and values does not entitle us to insult or denigrate those who oppose us in attempts to ‘score points’ for our views. This is unfortunately how much discourse in echo chambers and social media in general takes place. Just as we would hope that others not denigrate our views, exercising a similar tactfulness towards them builds the relationship within which these difficult conversations can take place. Relatedly, the familiar injunction to ‘pick one’s battles’ becomes relevant here too – never being amenable frustrates the relationships with these disagreeing others and robs us of the potential to find some degree of harmony. In short, harmony recommends we become disposed to being open, tactful, and amenable in accommodating those with whom we disagree. As such, it is a useful prescription for dealing with echo-chambered individuals with whom we encounter serious disagreement.
Of course, one might doubt whether harmony requires us to be open, tactful, and amenable with echo chamber members whose views are beyond the pale. I am referring to the ones that espouse controversial conspiracy theories and morally offensive political ideologies. The temptation may be either to ignore or ‘force’ such individuals to change their mind. Even in these cases, I argue one should maintain their epistemically open disposition. It is likely those individuals are mistaken about the good life, but curiosity and tactful question-asking may help them become aware of the implications and difficulties of holding their beliefs. Empirical evidence in psychology suggests this approach may nurture their motivation to change their mind, which may be more effective than acting on the temptations above (Itzchakov et al., 2018; Wong, MS). More to the point, taking this step does not foreclose the opportunity of living harmoniously.
However, missing from this is the element of courage one needs to harmonize with others. This is especially true in online environments where much disagreement takes place that is fueled by echo chambers. Acting in a harmonious manner is demanding, the gains are often not visible to us and the costs are unpleasant and even dispiriting. As a result, harmonizing with disagreeing others – whether in Confucius’ time or ours – must involve some degree of courage to be open, tactful, and amenable in the face of these obstacles.
Conclusion
I have argued that Confucius’ notion of harmony offers (i) a diagnosis of why echo chambers are problematic and a (ii) prescription for how to manage our social relationships with echo-chambered individuals through openness, tactfulness, amenability, and courage.
This prescription highlights the final point that I want to make, namely, that the problem with echo chambers is not only an epistemic one to do with what people believe. As I hope to have shown, the problem is also profoundly ethical. It is equally about what we owe to our disagreeing others and how we can relate to them better. Confucius’ ideas practically orient us toward managing these social relationships, the flourishing of which contributes to a stable society where people can co-exist despite persistent disagreement.
—
Notes:
[1] Well, not every philosopher agrees with this, see Lackey, 2018; Elzinga, 2020; Fantl, 2021. However, that is not unique to this issue.
References
Confucius (2014) The Analects (Lunyu): Translated with an introduction and Commentary by Annping Chin. Translated by A. Chin. New York: Penguin Books.
Elzinga, B. (2020) ‘Echo Chambers and Audio Signal Processing’, Episteme, pp. 1–21. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2020.33.
Fantl, J. (2021) ‘Fake News vs. Echo Chambers’, Social Epistemology, 35(6), pp. 645–659. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2021.1946201.
Itzchakov, G. et al. (2018) ‘The Listener Sets the Tone: High-Quality Listening Increases Attitude Clarity and Behavior-Intention Consequences’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 44(5), pp. 762–778. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167217747874.
Jamieson, K.H. and Capella, J. (2008) Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Joshi, H. (2020) ‘What are the chances you’re right about everything? An epistemic challenge for modern partisanship’, Politics, Philosophy & Economics, 19(1), pp. 36–61. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/1470594X20901346.
Lackey, J. (2018) ‘True Story: Echo Chambers are not the Problem’, Morning Consult. Available at: https://morningconsult.com/opinions/true-story-echo-chambers-not-problem/.
Li, C. (2008) ‘The Philosophy of Harmony in Classical Confucianism’, Philosophy Compass, 3(3), pp. 423–435. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-9991.2008.00141.x.
McCarthy, N. (2019) Polarization: What Everyone Needs to Know. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nguyen, C.T. (2020) ‘Echo Chambers and Epistemic Bubbles’, Episteme, 17(2), pp. 141–161.
Wong, D.B. (1992) ‘Coping with Moral Conflict and Ambiguity’, Ethics, 102(4), pp. 763–784. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1086/293447.
Wong, D.B. (2020) ‘Soup, Harmony, and Disagreement’, Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 6(2), pp. 139–155. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/apa.2018.46.
Wong, D.B. (MS) ‘Metaphor and Analogy in Early Chinese Thought: Governance within the Person, State and Society’.
The workers at eBay-owned TCGplayer, a marketplace for trading card games such as Magic: The Gathering, have voted in favor of joining a union. eBay purchased the company in 2022 for a deal valued up to $295 million, but the website continues to operate independently. Now that all 272 non-supervisory workers at the company's authentication center in Syracuse, New York are represented by the Communications Workers of America, they've become the first group to form a union at eBay in the US.
The organized workers, who are responsible for ensuring the accuracy and quality of all shipments in and out of the company, filed for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board back in January. They wanted to unionize in a bid to have a voice within the company, and they were also seeking pay raises to account for inflation, a fair and comprehensive sick leave and absence policy, as well as inclusive career advancement opportunities, fair and transparent hiring practices, and clearly defined job roles and expectations.
In the CWA's announcement of the union victory, it said TCGPlayer workers first tried to unionize in 2020. However, the company hired a union buster to "spread disinformation," and the workers ultimately withdrew their petition for a vote due to the pandemic. While they were successful this time around, their employer reportedly tried to get them to back down again. CWA filed an unfair labor practice charge against the company in January for illegally surveilling union activity. It filed more charges just last week, accusing the company of threatening workers for supporting unionization efforts and forcing them to attend anti-union meetings, as well. The unionized workers are still waiting for the NLRB's decision on those complaints.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/tcgplayer-workers-form-ebay-first-union-095615128.html?src=rss
Playing trading card game
Playing trading card game
Algorithms were supposed to remake the American justice system, but data can discriminate, says Ngozi Okidegbe, an expert on data and the law.
Championed as dispassionate, computer-driven calculations about risk, crime, and recidivism, their deployment in everything from policing to bail and sentencing to parole was meant to smooth out what are often unequal decisions made by fallible, biased humans.
But, so far, this hasn’t been the case.
“In theory, if the predictive algorithm is less biased than the decision-maker, that should lead to less incarceration of Black and Indigenous and other politically marginalized people. But algorithms can discriminate,” says Okidegbe, associate professor of law and an assistant professor of computing and data sciences at Boston University. Her scholarship examines how the use of predictive technologies in the criminal justice system affects racially marginalized communities.
As it is, these groups are incarcerated at nearly four times the rate of their white peers. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, an arm of the US Department of Justice, there were 1,186 Black adults incarcerated in state or federal facilities for every 100,000 adults in 2021 (the most recent year for which data are available), and 1,004 American Indians and Alaska Natives incarcerated for every 100,000 adults. Compare these to the rates at which white people were incarcerated in the same year: 222 per 100,000.
In recent papers, Okidegbe has studied the role of algorithms in these inequities and the interwoven consequences of technology and the law, including researching the data behind bail decisions.
In their most basic form, algorithms are problem-solving shortcuts. Engineers can train computers to digest a large amount of data and then produce a simple solution to a complex problem. Spotify, for example, uses algorithms to suggest songs the company thinks its listeners might enjoy, based on what they’ve listened to previously. The more data a computer model has to go on, the more nuanced and accurate its results should be.
But a growing body of academic research—including by Okidegbe—and news reports show that algorithms built upon incomplete or biased data can replicate or even amplify that bias when they spit out results. This isn’t a huge deal if, for example, your toddler’s Peppa Pig obsession leaks into your suggested Spotify playlists, but it can have devastating effects in other contexts.
Consider a judge, says Okidegbe, who receives an algorithmically generated recidivism risk score as part of a report on a convicted criminal. This score tells the judge how likely this person is to commit another crime in the near future—the higher the score, the more likely someone is to be a repeat offender. The judge takes this score into account, and assigns more jail time to someone with a high recidivism score. Case closed.
A sprawling report by the nonprofit news organization ProPublica found that because these scores feel impartial, they can carry a lot of weight with the judges who use them. In reality, these scores are neither impartial nor airtight. ProPublica found that one particular system used by courts across the country guessed wrong about two times as often for Black people than for white people: it mislabeled twice as many Black people who didn’t reoffend as being at high risk for doing so.
In a recent article for the Connecticut Law Review, Okidegbe traces this inconsistency back to its source, and identifies a three-pronged “input problem.”
First, she writes, jurisdictions are opaque about whether and how they use pretrial algorithms, and often adopt them without consulting marginalized communities, “even though these communities are disproportionately affected by their utilization.” Second, these same communities are generally shut out of the process for building such algorithms. Finally, even in jurisdictions where members of the public can lodge opinions about the use of such tools, their input rarely changes anything.
“From a racial-justice perspective, there are other harms that come out of the use of these algorithmic systems. The very paradigm that governs if and how we use these algorithms is quite technocratic and not very diverse. Kate Crawford has noted AI’s ‘white guy problem,'” Okidegbe says, referring to a principal researcher at Microsoft and cochair of a White House symposium on AI and society who coined the term to describe the overrepresentation of white men in the creation of artificially intelligent products and companies.
From the very outset, Okidegbe says, algorithmic systems exclude racially marginalized and other politically oppressed groups.
“I’ve been looking at the decision-making power of whether and how to use algorithms, and what data they are used to produce. It is very exclusionary of the marginalized communities that are most likely to be affected by it, because those communities are not centered, and often they’re not even at the table when these decisions are being made,” she says. “That’s one way I suggest that the turn to algorithms is inconsistent with a racial justice project, because of the way in which they maintain the marginalization of these same communities.”
In addition to producing biased results that disproportionately harm marginalized communities, the data used to train algorithms can be messy, subjective, and discriminatory, Okidegbe says.
“In my work, I’ve contended with what I think is a misconception: that algorithms are only built with quantitative data. They’re not, they’re also built with qualitative data,” she says. Computer engineers and data designers will meet with policymakers to figure out what problem their algorithm should solve, and which datasets they should pull from to build it, Okidegbe says.
In the criminal and legal context, this might mean working with judges to determine what would help them deliver prison sentences, for example. Once again though, it’s much less likely that data engineers would meet with incarcerated people, say, as part of their early information-gathering process. Instead, as Okidegbe writes in an article for a recent edition of the Cornell Law Review, most large datasets used in pretrial algorithms are built upon and trained on data from “carceral knowledge sources,” such as police records and court documents.
“That puts forth this narrative that these communities have no knowledge to add toward the broader question,” Okidegbe says.
Really delivering on the promise of algorithms in the criminal justice system—the promise that they make the process more uniform and less biased than humans otherwise have—requires a radical rethinking of the entire structure, Okidegbe says. It’s something she encourages her students to consider as they shape the future of law and criminal justice.
“It means actually accounting for the knowledge from marginalized and politically oppressed communities, and having it inform how the algorithm is constructed. It also means ongoing oversight of algorithmic technologies by these communities, as well. What I am contending requires building new institutional structures, it requires shifting our mindset about who is credible and who should be in power when it comes to the use of these algorithms. And, if that is too much, then we can’t, in the same breath, call this a racial justice project.”
Source: Boston University
The post Criminal justice algorithms still discriminate appeared first on Futurity.
FTX founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried may be stuck using a dumb phone for the foreseeable future. In a letter seen by Bloomberg, prosecutors involved in his criminal case said Friday that Bankman-Fried’s lawyers had agreed to modify the terms of his bail agreement. Provided the judge overseeing the case agrees to the changes, SBF will be restricted to using a “non-smartphone” without internet connectivity. Unless a lawyer is present, he will also be forbidden from contacting current or former FTX and Alameda Research employees. Additionally, SBF won’t be able to use encrypted messaging apps, including Signal.
The proposed restrictions come after Bankman-Fried allegedly attempted to contact the general counsel of FTX’s US subsidiary over Signal at the start of the year. “I would really love to reconnect and see if there’s a way for us to have a constructive relationship, use each other as resources when possible, or at least vet things with each other,” he said in one message, according to the Justice Department.
Earlier in the week, Nishad Singh, FTX’s former director of engineering, pleaded guilty to federal fraud and conspiracy charges. Singh is the third of Bankman-Fried’s inner circle to cooperate with prosecutors in the case against him. At the end of last year, former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison and FTX co-founder Zixiao "Gary" Wang pleaded guilty to fraud charges and said they would cooperate with investigators.
According to Bloomberg, District Judge Lewis Kaplan threatened to revoke Bankman-Fried’s bail and send him to jail before the start of his trial after learning that the disgraced entrepreneur may have influenced potential witnesses. Last month, Kaplan also banned Bankman-Fried from using a virtual private network (VPN) after his lawyers said he used one to watch a football game. According to Reuters, Kaplan said he did not want SBF "loose in this garden of electronic devices.”
Under the modified bail agreement, SBF would be allowed to use a laptop to surf the web, but his access would be filtered through a VPN that would limit him to two categories of websites. One category would include resources his defense team says are critical to his case. The other features a list of 23 websites SBF could use to order food, read the news and watch streaming content. No word yet if the proposed restrictions would limit him from playing League of Legends.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/justice-department-wants-sam-bankman-fried-to-use-a-flip-phone-for-the-rest-of-his-bail-201356652.html?src=rss
USA-BANKMANFRIED/
Former FTX Chief Executive Sam Bankman-Fried, who faces fraud charges over the collapse of the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange, arrives to the Manhattan federal court in New York City, U.S. February 16, 2023. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY
Dozens of Google Japan employees have organized under the Tokyo Managers' Union. It's the first labor union at Google Japan, according to Meiji University Assistant Professor Ken Yamazaki, who also posted a copy of the group's statements from a press conference. Apparently, the employees chose to organize out of fear that they could be abruptly laid off, especially since some of them are in Japan on work visas.
Their concerns stemmed from the tech giant's announcement back in January that it's cutting 12,000 jobs — that's six percent of the company's overall workforce — around the world. They said their counterparts in the US were terminated with just an email sent in the middle of the night, and that the Japanese office's employees were left anxiously awaiting for the ax to fall over the past few weeks. The workers said they joined a labor union in response to that announcement and to news about the fate of the company's employees in other countries.
For a dismissal to be legal in Japan, a company has to prove that it has reasonable grounds to terminate an employee. However, some companies terminate employees without good reason by claiming to have problems with the worker. The group is hoping that joining a union would protect them from sudden termination. In the US, one of the divisions most affected by the job cuts was the company's Area 120 in-house incubator, which works on experimental apps and products. The division used to develop 20 projects simultaneously, but that's now down to three after most people in the team lost their jobs.
When Google announced it was going to let 12,000 workers go, Chief Executive Sundar Pichai said he was "deeply sorry" and that he takes "full responsibility for the decisions that led [the company] here." He admitted that the tech giant went on a hiring spree over the last few years, but that Google "hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today." According to the company's latest earnings report, its revenue for the fourth quarter of 2022 grew one percent from the year before, but its quarterly net income was down 34 percent year-over-year.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/google-workers-in-japan-joined-labor-union-064417794.html?src=rss
Google Japan Head Office in Shibuya Stream Building at night...
TOKYO, JAPAN - 2021/10/15: Google Japan Head Office in Shibuya Stream Building at night. (Photo by Stanislav Kogiku/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
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