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Our mission: To honor, explore, illuminate, nurture and elevate those who illuminate truth, work for the common good, and elevate our collective insight.

Honoring, exploring, Illuminating, nurturing and elevating the, “status of those who use words to illuminate human truth,” “Louise Erdrich[1]

[1]Erdrich, L., in Santlofer, J., & Nguyen, V. T. (2018). It occurs to me that I am america: New stories and art. Touchstone.


[1]Erdrich, L., in Santlofer, J., & Nguyen, V. T. (2018). It occurs to me that I am america: New stories and art. Touchstone.

The Man Who Trapped Us in Databases – The New York Times (nytimes.com)

Brilliant, enlightening, fascinating, seamless, and enthralling article by a master journalist!

McKenzie Funk is a ProPublica reporter in Washington State and the author of the new book “The Hank Show.” His last article for the magazine was about how U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement finds its targets in the surveillance age. Erik Carter is a graphic designer and an art director in New York. His work often plays off an internet aesthetic and mixes media.

From the article:

Many critiques of our increasingly algorithmic world focus on where algorithms fail. One boils down to simple math: Some sample sizes are so small (of terror attacks, for instance) that algorithms can hardly reliably predict what they purport to predict. Another boils down to psychology: As anyone who has ever become lost by blindly following Google Maps can attest, people tend to perilously ignore common sense and trust the machine. A third boils down to checks and balances: Algorithms are often proprietary black boxes, closed to outside scrutiny. A fourth critique points out that algorithms, far from being objective, often just encode and scale up human biases: If a predictive policing system learns that most of a city’s arrests have historically been in a certain majority-Black neighborhood, the computer may decide to deploy more officers to that neighborhood, perpetuating a racist pattern of arrests and violence. Garbage in, garbage out.

But the story of Hank Asher and his creations also raises a different question, one ever more pertinent as the science and machinery of A.I. march continually forward: What happens when this stuff actually works? Is that better or worse?

How Models Can Lead to Misconceptions about the Impact of Global Trade – Vigour Times

Receive free Global trade updatesWe’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Global trade news every morning.One of the most important lessons from the 2008 global financial crisis was the inadequacy of financial models. The belief that complex algorithms could accurately predict balance sheet outcomes based on countless variables and daily
— Read on vigourtimes.com/how-models-can-lead-to-misconceptions-about-the-impact-of-global-trade/

President Josiah ‘Jed’ Bartlet: [to Josh] You know what the difference is between you and me? I want to be the guy. You want to be the guy the guy counts on.

West Wing