🇬🇧 Algorithms of trauma 2. How Facebook feeds on your fears - a new study by the @panoptykon Foundation led by Piotr Sapieżyński, PhD, of Northeastern University (Boston)
#EU#Ireland#SocialMedia#HateSpeech#Disinformation#Algorithms: "The Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) has sent the European Commission a report urging it to follow Coimisiún na Meán’s example and switch off Big Tech’s toxic algorithms cross the European Union.
The call comes in the wake of a major step taken by Coimisiún na Meán, Ireland’s new broadcasting and online regulator. In its draft rules for video platforms like YouTube and TikTok, the new watchdog has ordered them to stop building intimate profiles about our children – or any person whose age is unproven – in order to then manipulate them for profit by artificially amplifying hate, hysteria, suicide and disinformation in their personalised feeds."
At a time when Republicans (and their allies on the courts) are doing everything in their power to restrict abortion rights, it’s even more important for all Democrats to be champions for reproductive freedom: https://indivisible.org/campaign/abortion-reproductive-freedom
I am creating cryptographic primitives to keep my mind in fettle. I will announce my industrial strength toys from this account. If you are interested in novel ideas then you have come to the right place.
If your jeans don't have room for tools, they're not really jeans; they are denim leotards.
I enjoy lights of every kind: neon, led, candle, lamp, torch, flash, strobe and bright eyes. I enjoy natural lights like fireflies, lightning, and stars at night, rays through fog, and campfires. I am a flashlight geek. I own more flashlights than a shark has teeth.
My imperial hobbies include games with crypto, code, and coffee. My imperial toys include text and smolnet tools. When I am not learning new things I like to fist bump clouds and thunderstorms. Righteo, tornado brah.
There are two great opposing forces in the digital universe: The Skinny Jeans Mafia versus the Baggy Jeans Mafia. My camp shall drive those Skinny Jeansters running away crying over spilled espresso.
#Algorithms#PublicPolicy#Technocracy: "The debacle of RAND’s firefighting algorithm reflected the fallacy described in Seeing Like a State on two levels simultaneously. First, the government, seeking out an objective assessment, tried to simplify urban fires into a set of variables that anyone within that bureaucracy could understand and, if necessary, justify. Second, RAND’s algorithm was going through that exact same process—manipulating measurements, shorn from their real-world context, and pushing them though a digital bureaucracy made of ones and zeroes.
The smartphone you’re reading this article on while sipping your morning coffee (or maybe you’re sitting on the toilet, no judgment, just happy you’re reading) has far more computing power than the mainframes that ran RAND’s 1970s firefighting algorithm. But the problems RAND’s approach embodied—the desire for high-level institutional clarity overwhelming fine-grained, context-based local knowledge—have only gotten worse."
#AI#GenerativeAI#ChatBots#Medecine#Healthcare#Algorithms: "In February, San-Francisco-based Doximity, a telehealth and medical professional networking company, rolled out a beta version of its medical chatbot DocsGPT, which was intended to help doctors with multiple tasks including writing discharge instructions for patients, note taking, and responding to other medical-related prompts ranging from answering questions about medical conditions to performing calculations for health-related medical algorithms like measuring kidney function.
However, as I have reported, the app was also engaging in “race-norming” and amplifying race-based medical inaccuracies that could be dangerous to patients who are Black. Although doctors could use it to answer a variety of questions and perform tasks that would impact medical care, the chatbot itself is not classified as a medical device—as doctors aren’t technically supposed to input medically sensitive information (though several doctors and researchers have stated that many still do). As such, companies are free to develop and release these applications without going through a regulatory process that makes sure these apps actually work as intended.
Still, many companies are developing their chatbots and generative artificial intelligence models for integration into health care settings—from medical scribes to diagnostic chatbots—raising broad-ranging concerns over AI regulation and liability. Stanford University data scientist and dermatologist Roxana Daneshjou tells proto.life part of the problem is figuring out if the models even work."
My year with Mastodon (#MastodonWrapped)
I celebrated my first #Mastoversary a few days ago. It’s been a good first year on Mastodon for me; I like the #Fediverse idea, I like people here, and I like the calm vibe this place offers.
Also, I ditched all of my other #SocialMedia accounts. All but one.¹
As I say, Mastodon is a good #platform to be, however there are a couple of things I’ve been struggling with the whole time. I’m going to put together a brief summary below in hope that someone can help me with them.
¹ I still keep Instagram to exchange cute pics of sloths and pandas, and ice-hockey reels with my sons. 😁
2/
The thing that buggers me the most is boosting.
I know boosting is important because it’s the only way to spread the news around as there are no #algorithms here to force-feed us what they “think” is good for us, and I’m quite a #booster myself, too. But I’ve cut back a bit recently for a simple reason: I can’t hide boosted posts from my #profile.
I mean, when someone views my profile I want them to see my toots first so they can get an idea of who I am and, conversely, when I visit someone else’s profile I prefer to see what they have to say.
If you’re a generous booster but not so creative in the “#ContentCreation” department, just like me, you get a profile full of re-blogged posts where your original #toots are hard to find. And no, #Pinned toots don’t do the trick.
If there’s a #hack to work around this, I would much appreciate if you share it here.
I'm currently looking at annotations / decorations to a research programming language to estimate runtime non-asymptotically (i.e. gimme a number) in a simple execution model. I thought there might be (have been) some similar projects, but I'm not really sure where to look. I vaguely remember some work on proving loop bounds (e.g. polyhedrally). Any hints?
What a privilege to be in the company of such smart, engaged and nice colleagues, friends, keynote speakers, stakeholders at the @algosoc ‘launch’ today. The challenges to ensure public values in the algorithmic society are real. We will all do our best!
"In this #paper, we introduce new #algorithms for #CSS selector matching, layout solving, and font rendering, which represent key components for a fast layout engine. Evaluation on popular sites shows speedups as high as 80x. We also formulate the layout problem with attribute grammars, enabling us to not only parallelize our algorithm but prove that it computes in O(log) time and without reflow."
#RecommendationEngines#Algorithms#Ethics#HumanValues: "Recommender systems are the algorithms which select, filter, and personalize content across many of the world's largest platforms and apps. As such, their positive and negative effects on individuals and on societies have been extensively theorized and studied. Our overarching question is how to ensure that recommender systems enact the values of the individuals and societies that they serve. Addressing this question in a principled fashion requires technical knowledge of recommender design and operation, and also critically depends on insights from diverse fields including social science, ethics, economics, psychology, policy and law. This paper is a multidisciplinary effort to synthesize theory and practice from different perspectives, with the goal of providing a shared language, articulating current design approaches, and identifying open problems. We collect a set of values that seem most relevant to recommender systems operating across different domains, then examine them from the perspectives of current industry practice, measurement, product design, and policy approaches. Important open problems include multi-stakeholder processes for defining values and resolving trade-offs, better values-driven measurements, recommender controls that people use, non-behavioral algorithmic feedback, optimization for long-term outcomes, causal inference of recommender effects, academic-industry research collaborations, and interdisciplinary policy-making." https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3632297
Data from three health repositories show a simple blood test reveals inherited and acquired genetic indicators, analyzed with artificial intelligence, to detect coronary heart disease.
I want to build something and I need to say my plans out loud, but I don't have any friends let alone any that use #Mastodon or #JavaScript so I'm just gonna info dump here:
#Cybersecurity#Algorithms#Encryption#Europe: "The European standards body that was heavily criticized this year for keeping its encryption algorithms secret has decided to make all of the algorithms public for researchers and users to examine them for flaws.
The group’s technical committee voted last month to make them public, though they won’t be released until a later date, a spokeswoman told Zero Day. The group plans to release older algorithms that caused controversy when researchers found serious security flaws with them, as well as a new generation of algorithms that the group developed more recently.
The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) says about 30 member organizations reached full consensus that the time was right to make the proprietary algorithms it created for the TETRA radio protocol public. This will mean independent researchers and government agencies that rely on the algorithms to protect their communications can examine them for security flaws."
#Media#News#Journalism#SentimentAnalysis#Algorithms#Advertising#AdTech: "Spanfeller and Great Hill Partners have, surely, mismanaged Jezebel in ways both big and small, and Spanfeller and G/O haven’t given anyone a reason to take their words at face value, but the subtext here is that Jezebel’s content was hard to sufficiently monetize.
This should not be the case considering that millions of people read it and chose, specifically, to visit Jezebel every month. But this is unfortunately how the internet works now, and has for a long time: News terrifies brands big and small, to the point where “brand safety” and “brand suitability” have become gigantic industries that have brought even giants like Facebook and Google to heel.
In theory, the “free market” should reward publications that are doing important work. The more people care about a given issue the more they’ll read news stories about it, which should give publications covering it traffic and ad dollars. In reality, the advertising industry has singled out the issues the audience cares about most, like reproductive rights, as unsuitable to sell ads against, even though a ton of people want to read about them. This helps explain the precarity of publications like Jezebel, despite it being more vital to its audience than ever."
#Algorithms#AlgorithmicBias#Healthcare#OrganAllocation#Transplants: "Systematic bias in algorithms can crop up for a variety of reasons, from the quality of underlying data used to train the systems — such as the skewed data from the 2019 study — to the unequal weighting of certain variables such as age, gender or race, which can inadvertently disadvantage specific communities. It’s why those who advocate for ethical use of these models, particularly in sensitive areas such as healthcare or policing, call for human oversight of all decisions and an appeal system that allows humans (surgeons, for example) to intervene if things don’t look quite right.
In an organ allocation system, difficult choices must be made. Because there aren’t enough livers for all 700 people on the UK’s list, “transplantation remains a zero-sum game and any adjustment in allocation is simply a case of causing harm to one to help another,” wrote Raj Prasad, a surgeon at Leeds Teaching Hospitals, in the Lancet this year.
But the question Jess was looking to answer was whether her sister was being unfairly and systematically passed over by the NLOS software, precluding her from ever receiving a liver through this method."
How to Stay Smart in a Smart World: Why Human Intelligence Still Beats Algorithms
How to stay in charge in a world populated by algorithms that beat us in chess, find us romantic partners, and tell us to “turn right in 500 yards.”Doomsday prophets of technology predict that robots will take over the world, leaving humans behind in the dust.
As Mastodon has no algorithm, there is no machine pushing posts into your feed. You only see posts from accounts you don’t follow if they are “boosted” (reposted) by those you do follow. This setup is great for users – you see all your chosen peeps in a chronological timeline – but it’s obviously limiting for creators who want to spread their stuff far and wide. So, despite my pref for Mast over all networks, I assumed there is almost no potential to “go viral” here. … #Algorithms#SocialMedia