Zajímavé aktuální zahraniční články

[Vaclav.Parchansky]

What Mark Zuckerberg Thinks People Want

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/ ... nt/584317/

Zajímavý vhled do nové vize Facebooku. Dle článku se zdá, že se bude “utíkat před regulátorem” do oblasti šifrovaných one-to-many konverzací alá whatsapp.

Pro nás je to rizikové, protože hrozí, že budeme jako proponenti soukromí dáváni na stejnou stranu, jako kanály plné fake news, propagandy a kdovíjakého pekelného obsahu co se tam případně objeví a bude regulátorům mimo dosah.

[davkol]

Made in China, Exported to the World: The Surveillance State

In Ecuador, cameras capture footage to be examined by police and domestic intelligence. The surveillance system’s origin: China.

By Paul Mozur, Jonah M. Kessel and Melissa Chan
April 24, 2019
The New York Times

[davkol]

Brazil slashes funding to scientists. The planet may suffer.

The country’s controversial president is cutting funding for research and academia, putting natural wonders like the Amazon at greater risk, critics say.

By Shannon Sims
April 19, 2019
National Geographic

Bolsonaro to hit social science funding

On the same day that Lula gave his interview, Bolsonaro tweeted that the government ought to “decentralise” resources for subjects in the humanities and social sciences, such as philosophy and sociology. The objective should be to focus resources on areas that provide an “immediate return” to taxpayers, such as veterinary science, engineering and medicine.

If there was ever a time when Brazil needed more rather than less social science it is surely now. The Bolsonaro government represents the greatest threat to academic freedom and university autonomy since the dictatorship. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the current direction of government policy is motivated precisely by its fear of the ability of educationalists, researchers, writers, and artists to undermine the ideas and world view that the ultra-right is striving to propagate. But even in an era in which digital social media allow every kind of prejudice and falsehood to be disseminated as a “truth” that requires neither evidence nor coherent argument, Bolsonaro and his ministers may find it difficult to profit from a strategy that tries to reinvent a Brazilian society that never really existed by silencing every dissident voice and driving academics into exile.

By John Gledhill
April 28, 2019

[Janka.Michailidu]

Allegations of mass voter exclusion cast shadow on India election

Activists say 40 million Muslims and 30 million Dalits not on electoral rolls, raising fears of targeted suppression.

Last year, a controversial update to a citizenship list, known as the National Registry of Citizens (NRC), excluded around four million people, effectively stripping them of Indian citizenship.

[davkol]

Why Budapest, Warsaw, and Lithuania split themselves in two. Explaining how the European Union calculates wealth distribution.

On January 1, 2018, Hungary split the region of Central Hungary, or Közép-Magyarország in Hungarian, into two new regions: the Budapest region (containing the capital of the same name) and the surrounding region of Pest.

What if you could split your region in two: one with a higher GDP and one that’s lower, with the latter now eligible for EU catch-up funds? The more developed part of your region was lifting up the GDP to such an extent that the that the region, as a whole, was excluded from the full benefits of EU catch-up funds.

By Maarten Lambrechts
April 18, 2019
The Pudding

[davkol]

Media Release: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’

Current global response insufficient;
‘Transformative changes’ needed to restore and protect nature;
Opposition from vested interests can be overcome for public good
Most comprehensive assessment of its kind;
1,000,000 species threatened with extinction

Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES)

[davkol]

Lessons from a genocide can prepare humanity for climate apocalypse

Catastrophic global climate change, however, is not an event at all, and we’re not waiting for it. We’re living it right now. In August 2018, in a summer of forest fires and shattered heat records, the strongest, oldest ice in the Arctic Sea broke up for the first time on record, presaging the final throes of the Arctic death spiral.

This is not the first time a group of humans has had to deal with the failure of their conceptual framework for navigating reality. This is not the first time the world has ended.

So we have to confront two distinct challenges. The first is whether we might curtail the worst possibilities of climate change and stave off human extinction by limiting greenhouse-gas emissions and decreasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. The second is whether we will be able to transition to a new way of life in the world we’ve made. Meeting the latter challenge demands mourning what we have already lost, learning from history, finding a realistic way forward, and committing to an idea of human flourishing beyond any hope of knowing what form that flourishing will take. “This is a daunting form of commitment,” Lear writes, for it is a commitment “to a goodness in the world that transcends one’s current ability to grasp what it is.”

By Roy Scranton
April 24, 2019
MIT Technology Review

[Janka.Michailidu]

Alex Jones’s Pepe the Frog Copyright Trial Will Help Decide Who Can Use Memes

Jones is the last remaining defendant in a series of lawsuits Furie filed in the past few years. Furie was famously hands-off with the cartoon frog, but started to enforce his copyright claim after a Texas educator released an Islamophobic children’s book starring Pepe in 2017. At the time, far-right media personalities were selling Pepe-branded merchandise and Furie served them with cease-and-desist letters.

[davkol]

Tax Cuts for Whom? Heterogeneous Effects of Income Tax Changes on Growth and Employment

This paper investigates how tax changes for different income groups affect aggregate economic activity. I construct a measure of who received (or paid for) tax changes in the postwar period using tax return data from NBER’s TAXSIM. Variation in the income distribution across US states and federal tax changes generate variation in regional tax shocks that I exploit to test for heterogeneous effects. I find that the positive relationship between tax cuts and employment growth is largely driven by tax cuts for lower-income groups and that the effect of tax cuts for the top 10 percent on employment growth is small.

By Owen Zidar
May 08, 2019
Journal of Political Economy

Je to v prestižním časopise Chicagské univerzity (Friedman), někdo by to mohl vzkázat Svobodným. 😉

[Janka.Michailidu]

Police facial recognition surveillance court case starts

It is a far more powerful policing tool than traditional CCTV - as the cameras take a biometric map, creating a numerical code of the faces of each person who passes the camera.

These biometric maps are uniquely identifiable to the individual.

"It is just like taking people's DNA or fingerprints, without their knowledge or their consent," said Megan Goulding, a lawyer from the civil liberties group Liberty which is supporting Mr Bridges.

However, unlike DNA or fingerprints, there is no specific regulation governing how police use facial recognition or manage the data gathered.