"Hersh first gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. During the 1970s, Hersh covered the Watergate scandal for The New York Times and revealed the clandestine bombing of Cambodia. In 2004, he reported on the U.S. military's mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison."
>> Not all of science is interesting to the private sector.
> My research area is famously hard to fund even within academia, so I substantially changed the way that I frame my research and the type of work I was proposing.
I don't see the private sector funding ethnomusicology, philosophy, ecology, social history, ...
You left out ecology (again, which wouldn't be funded by business and I would consider important for society).
The NSF also gets somewhat close to the others via Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, which includes anthropology/archaeology and linguistics.
I am highly suspicious of the need for post-doctoral training in philosophy, ecology, or social history and even more skeptical of the ethics of using tax payer's money to fund those positions.
Ecology is a probably a field where the world would be better off if we re-appropriated post-doc funding to USFS and hired people with bs or even no degrees to do important work on the ground.
Not having access to the js libraries seems like a feature rather than a bug. With rare exceptions, third party code written in javascript distributed via npm is a liability.
The most recent episode (#118) of Law Bytes with Michael Geist (a respected Canadian law professor) goes into the legal nitty gritty about the use of the Emergency Measures Act.
> It's not well known that the (US) CAN-SPAM act does not apply to political and religious organizations.
This is because the politicians in office at the time of writing the "CAN-SPAM" act explicitly wrote in their own exemption for themselves for campaigning purposes. As to why religious orgs. also got included, I don't remember -- one wonders if it was simply to obscure the blatant "we are making ourselves above this law" look for exempting themselves from the law.
They (the politicians that time) did the same thing with the "Do Not Call" phone number list, politicians wrote in their own exemption for themselves for campaigning purposes, and then added an exemption for charity orgs. to the law as well.
Google gmail spam algo is heavily trained by users pressing the spam button. Do spammy things , get marked spam by joe average and do it enough and your emails are marked spam, no explicit action required. It also means that most political email is marked as spam.
I find it to be fairly awful actually. I've noticed over time it's just become what feels like a 5-position slider. I'm hesitant to mark Spam messages as Spam, because I'll immediately start getting a % of legit messages sent to spam. Un mark one of those, and suddenly I'm getting spam again.
> Pichai said “there is nothing in the algorithm that has to do with political ideology”
That’s an interesting non-denial: he never actually says the spam algorithm isn’t biased against conservatives. There could well be a bias, because many ML systems have unintended biases. Google could easily answer the question. It’d probably take an hour max to write and run the mapreduce or whatever they use now.
I'd be very surprised if democratic party emails don't also frequently get marked as spam. I somehow ended up on their list despite not even living in the US, and it was a complete nightmare to get off of it because the unsubscribe link only worked for a specific campaign. I've marked hundreds of their emails as spam by now, and it's entirely their own fault.
I've somehow gotten on mailing lists from candidates and politicians from both major parties over the past several years, and many of them did not seem to respect when I try to unsubscribe, which leads to me marking them as spam. Assuming that I'm not the only one suffering from not respecting my wishes to unsubscribe from lists I never signed up for, I would have to imagine that with enough frustrated recipients making the messages as spam, the algorithm infers that all of the messages from the list are spam. This wouldn't even require the algorithm to even recognize that the messages are political, let alone infer the ideology; I did the same thing with emails trying to sell me sunglasses.
What I find ironic about google's position is they believe implicit unconscious bias permeates all of society, except when it comes to their programmers who are clearly majority democrat....
It should not be ironic, because Google has a history of seeing itself above any flaws, and as the Arbiter of Truth
The algorithm wouldn’t have a bias vs conservatives because it doesn’t include semantic meaning, but it could have a bias vs methods used by this conservative. Which really just comes down on whoever is generating those emails.
I don't know if it does or doesn't, but Republicans and Democrats use different keywords, not just semantics. For example, 'law and order', 'police reform', etc. It's certainly possible for ML to pick up a bias in the presence of such differences.
They also quote each other, without context it’s just word choice not the message. Considering messages are already tailored to different kinds of voters, spam algorithms are just another part of messaging.
What organizations are you thinking of? I'm not an expert in the area, and ones I know of are ActBlue that works only with Democrats, and WinRed which is the Republican clone.
"Hersh first gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. During the 1970s, Hersh covered the Watergate scandal for The New York Times and revealed the clandestine bombing of Cambodia. In 2004, he reported on the U.S. military's mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Hersh