Confluence Daily is your daily news source for women in the know.
In the category of: Please, someone needs to explain this sh*t.
3 theories on why Donald Trump’s lies don’t seem to faze him (or his supporters)
In the category of: Who’s paying attention?
Algorithms have gotten out of control. It’s time to regulate them.
McDonald’s announced recently that it purchased Dynamic Yield, an AI company it will use to analyze customer habits to try and sell them more food. When a hamburger shack is using algorithms to stoke sales, it’s clear we have entered a new era. But the ubiquity of algorithms is not merely an evolution of technology. Rather, it represents the emergence of a whole new set of questions around ethics, bias, and equity with which we must grapple. Up until now, algorithms have been deployed with relatively little oversight. It may be time for that to change.
Algorithms — complex equations that are used to make decisions — are becoming fundamental to the functioning of modern society. But they also bring with them a heap of problems. For example, a revealing Bloombergpiece recently described how YouTube has a long history of suppressing employee concerns about false or bigoted content on the platform in favor of the AI-based content sorting system that determines which videos the site recommends to users. That’s a problem!
In the category of: It’s all connected.
How Climate Change Is Fuelling the U.S. Border Crisis
In the western highlands of Guatemala, the question is no longer whether someone will leave but when.
The western highlands, which extend from Antigua to the Mexican border, cover roughly twenty percent of Guatemala and contain a large share of the country’s three hundred microclimates, ranging from dank, tropical locales near the Pacific Coast to the arid, alpine reaches of the department of Huehuetenango. The population in the highlands is mostly indigenous, and people’s livelihoods are almost exclusively agrarian. The malnutrition rate, which hovers around sixty-five percent, is among the highest in the Western Hemisphere. In 2014, a group of agronomists and scientists, working on an initiative called Climate, Nature, and Communities of Guatemala, produced a report that cautioned lawmakers about the region’s susceptibility to a new threat. The highlands, they wrote, “was the most vulnerable area in the country to climate change.”
In the years before the report was published, three hurricanes had caused damage that cost more than the previous four decades’ worth of public and private investment in the national economy. Extreme-weather events were just the most obvious climate-related calamities. There were increasingly wide fluctuations in temperature—unexpected surges in heat followed by morning frosts—and unpredictable rainfall.
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