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Category: Book Review

Pandemics, Birthday, and Life Before Snark

Today marks about the 45th day I’ve been stuck in the house and it happens that my birthday was last week, so I’ve been doing a lot of reading and reflecting on things. The last few weeks have been really up and down. I’ve been doing a lot of puttering around the house and working on silly projects like replacing the headlight gaskets on my MGA, which also involved painting the headlight buckets, cutting off rusty screws and redoing wiring, but I digress. Despite being home all the time, I’m finding it very difficult to get any meaningful work done.

Before

After

On the up side, I’ll be doing some new online classes with O’Reilly starting around the end of May! The topics relate to coding practices and data visualization, so stay tuned!

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Book Review: Technically Wrong

I recently completed Technically Wrong by Sara Wachter-Boettcher.  Let me start by saying that I’m glad that Ms. Wachter-Boettcher wrote this book. The tech industry has a lot of issues which need to be brought out into the open and it is definitely a positive development that people such as Ms. Wachter-Boettcher are bringing these issues to the forefront.  It really is only recently that people are discussing the continuous erosion of privacy, misogyny in the tech industry, lack of diversity and many other issues. Whilst I would not deny any of these issues, I felt Wachter-Boettcher’s analysis was somewhat lacking and didn’t really get at the realities of working in the tech industry.  Wachter-Boettcher cites numerous examples of tech gone wrong, such as a smart scale telling a two year old that he needs to lose weight, FaceBook denying a Native American person an account because it felt that their name was not legitimate, and the abhorrent use of proprietary, black box algorithms to make parole recommendations.

Again, it is definitely a positive development that Wachter-Boettcher and others are writing about these issues, but the alternatives and solutions she proposes seem a bit simplistic.   While she doesn’t state this directly, much of the book seems to suggest that all of technology’s woes are caused by the lack of diversity in the tech industry.  Specifically that “white guys” from elite universities are running everything.  I don’t have an electronic copy of the book, but after about half way through this, I wanted to count the number of times the phrase “white guys” appears in the book.  Sometimes this phrase includes Asians, sometimes not.

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Book Review: Automating Inequality

I recently read Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks and would like to share some thoughts.  This review is the first of several book reviews I’ve been working on about books relating to the problems which are emerging from technology. I’ll keep this brief…

The Good:

I am glad that the conversation about social problems caused by technology is expanding.  Books like Automating Inequality are good contributors to that discussion.  In this book, Eubanks highlights a few situations where technology has negatively affected people’s lives, primarily poor people.  This technology also serves to limit poor people’s lives and opportunities, creating what she refers to as a digital poorhouse.

The use of machine learning can be a powerful tool for developing predictive analytics to  One abuse which I found particularly troubling was cited on pg. 137 which is a risk model which calculates a risk score for unborn children.

Vaithinathan’s team developed a predictive model using 132 variables–including length of time on public benefits, past involvement with the child welfare system, mother’s age, whether or not the child was born to a single parent, mental health, and correctional history–to rate the maltreatment risk of children in MSD’s historical data.  They found that their algorithm could predict with “fair, approaching good” accuracy whether these children woudl have a “substantiated finding of maltreatment” by the time they turn five.

 

What I Found Lacking:

What I found lacking in Automating Inequality was the lack of alternative proposals.   It is easy to criticize a technical solution, but these systems are often deployed against complex problems and finding a solution often requires a lot of vigilance, persistence and iteration.  Eubanks discusses the issue of welfare abuse, and seems to downplay the fact that welfare fraud is in fact a major issue in this country.  With some basic research on Google you can unfortunately find countless cases of individuals convicted of welfare fraud.  Clearly, welfare programs should make efforts to reduce fraud and make sure that their resources are going to people who truly need the assistance.

What Eubanks seemed to miss was what went wrong in the implementations that she highlighted.   In two cases, Eubanks highlighted several systems designed to improve the efficiency and efficacy of welfare programs.  From the book, it sounded as if the designers of these programs implemented various technical systems to automate the intake process for benefits.  What didn’t happen, and what Eubanks didn’t discuss in the book, was what was missing in these programs: continuous improvement.  The government agencies that implemented these programs took the approach that one would take when one is building a bridge or tunnel: get it done and once its done, move on to the next project.  This doesn’t work for information systems because they are never done.  Once you start using them, there will always be faults and opportunities to improve.  If an organization can rapidly iterate and improve the solution over time, they will end up with an effective solution.

Eubanks ends the book with a proposed code of ethics for data scientists and other technologists.  I wrote my own code of ethics for data scientists, and it is always interesting to me what others write on the subject.   I particularly liked these points from Eubanks’ Code of Ethics

  • I will not collect data for data’s sake, nor keep it just because I can
  • When informed consent and design convenience come into conflict, informed consent will always prevail.  (If only it were so… )

Overall, I found the book to be quite thought provoking, but I did disagree with some of the conclusions.

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