Tag Archives: discrimination

BigBang

Emmy Noether, Mathematician

Emmy-NoetherMost non-mathematicians have probably heard of Euclid, Pythagoras, Poincaré, Gauss, Lagrange, de Fermat, and Hilbert,  to name but a few. All giants in their various mathematical specialties. But, I would hazard a wager that even most mathematicians have never heard of Noether. Probably because Emmy Noether is a woman.

Yet learning of her exploits in the early 20th century, I can see how far we still have to travel to truly recognize the contributions of women in academia and science — and everywhere else for that matter — as on a par with those of men. Women like Noether succeeded despite tremendous (male) pressure against them, which makes their achievements even more astonishing.

From ars technica:

By 1915, any list of the world’s greatest living mathematicians included the name David Hilbert. And though Hilbert previously devoted his career to logic and pure mathematics, he, like many other critical thinkers at the time, eventually became obsessed with a bit of theoretical physics.

With World War I raging on throughout Europe, Hilbert could be found sitting in his office at the great university at Göttingen trying and trying again to understand one idea—Einstein’s new theory of gravity.

Göttingen served as the center of mathematics for the Western world by this point, and Hilbert stood as one of its most notorious thinkers. He was a prominent leader for the minority of mathematicians who preferred a symbolic, axiomatic development in contrast to a more concrete style that emphasized the construction of particular solutions. Many of his peers recoiled from these modern methods, one even calling them “theology.” But Hilbert eventually won over most critics through the power and fruitfulness of his research.

For Hilbert, his rigorous approach to mathematics stood out quite a bit from the common practice of scientists, causing him some consternation. “Physics is much too hard for physicists,” he famously quipped. So wanting to know more, he invited Einstein to Göttingen to lecture about gravity for a week.

Before the year ended, both men would submit papers deriving the complete equations of general relativity. But naturally, the papers differed entirely when it came to their methods. When it came to Einstein’s theory, Hilbert and his Göttingen colleagues simply couldn’t wrap their minds around a peculiarity having to do with energy. All other physical theories—including electromagnetism, hydrodynamics, and the classical theory of gravity—obeyed local energy conservation. With Einstein’s theory, one of the many paradoxical consequences of this failure of energy conservation was that an object could speed up as it lost energy by emitting gravity waves, whereas clearly it should slow down.

Unable to make progress, Hilbert turned to the only person he believed might have the specialized knowledge and insight to help. This would-be-savior wasn’t even allowed to be a student at Göttingen once upon a time, but Hilbert had long become a fan of this mathematician’s highly “abstract” approach (which Hilbert considered similar to his own style). He managed to recruit this soon-to-be partner to Göttingen about the same time Einstein showed up.

And that’s when a woman—one Emmy Noether—created what may be the most important single theoretical result in modern physics.

 …

During Noether’s stay at Göttingen, Hilbert contrived a way to allow her to lecture unofficially. He repeatedly attempted to get her hired as a Privatdozent, or an officially recognized lecturer. The science and mathematics faculty was generally in favor of this, but Hilbert could not overcome the resistance of the humanities professors, who simply could not stomach the idea of a female teacher. At one meeting of the faculty senate, frustrated again in his attempts to get Noether a job, he famously remarked, “I do not see that the sex of a candidate is an argument against her admission as Privatdozent. After all, we are a university, not a bathing establishment.”

Social barriers aside, Noether immediately grasped the problem with Einstein’s theory. Over the course of three years, she not only solved it, but in doing so she proved a theorem that simultaneously reached back to the dawn of physics and pushed forward to the physics of today. Noether’s Theorem, as it is now called, lies at the heart of modern physics, unifying everything from the orbits of planets to the theories of elementary particles.

Read the entire story here.

Image: Emmy Noether (1882-1935). Public domain.

 

tD

Ducks, Politics and God

duck-dynastyUntil last Wednesday (December 18, 2013) the funniest elements of Duck Dynasty were the beards, Uncle Si and Uncle Si’s beard. But then reality hit the reality TV show.

On Thursday, and even more humorous than the show and beards, the patriarch of the family Phil Robertson was suspended for an anti-gay slur. That someone cannot voice a real remark, however obnoxious, on a reality TV show is rather ironic and quite hilarious. Spouses should await a similar suspension from the family for a week for the next household faux pas. Or, could it be that the show is somehow scripted by A&E management anxious to cash in on the next fleeting opportunity?

By Friday the situation has become even more surreal — the politicians and bible thumpers had jumped in. The silly season had begun. The chorus from conservatives has been deafening: “it’s about faith”, “it’s about sin”. But most seem to forget that in our consumer-oriented, market-driven society it’s really about money. So if advertisers blink because one or more members of the Duck Dynasty commercial franchise is a bigot, so be it. That’s free speech and money is the ultimate equalizer. The market has spoken.

That said, one wishes that politicians, pundits and prosletyzers could be suspended as well.

From the Washington Post:

Few could have predicted that the story lines of the hit A&E reality show “Duck Dynasty” and the 2016 presidential contest would converge.

But that unexpected mash-up played out Thursday as conservative politicians rushed to defend Phil Robertson, the shaggy-bearded, homespun star of the breakout series, who was suspended by the cable network after his published comments about gays stirred a storm of controversy.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R), a likely White House contender whose state is home to the show about a family that runs a duck-hunting gear enterprise, called Robertson and his family “great citizens.”

“The politically correct crowd is tolerant of all viewpoints, except those they disagree with,” Jindal said in a statement prominently displayed on his official Web site, adding: “I remember when TV networks believed in the First Amendment.”

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), another probable 2016 candidate, chimed in on Facebook, writing: “If you believe in free speech or religious liberty, you should be deeply dismayed over the treatment of Phil Robertson.” And 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin wrote in a Facebook post that “those ‘intolerants’ hatin’ and taking on the Duck Dynasty patriarch for voicing his personal opinion are taking on all of us.”

Their embrace of Robertson — who in an interview with GQ described “homosexual behavior” as sinful and compared it to bestiality and infidelity — underscored how gay rights remain a potent political issue for many religious voters on the right.

As the same-sex marriage movement has gained steam, many evangelicals and conservative Catholics feel as if they are being asked to give up deeply held beliefs — an effort they perceived in the quick suspension of the “Duck Dynasty” star after his comments were denounced by gay rights groups.

The furor is reminiscent of the protests and counter-rallies of support that swirled around the fast-food chain Chick-fil-A last year after its president said the company supported “the biblical definition of the family unit.”

Conservative Christians “feel like they’re under siege in a culture that is increasingly intolerant and discriminatory toward their views, and they don’t feel represented,” said Ralph Reed, founder of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, who noted that Robertson paraphrased from the Bible’s Book of Corinthians in his interview. “I did not get any impression at all that there was animus expressed,” Reed said

By jumping into the “Duck Dynasty” maelstrom, conservative leaders such as Jindal and Cruz sent a clear message to evangelical voters: We’re on your side.

“Make no mistake,” Reed said, “these voters are paying attention, and they are going to remember who stood up.”

The controversy played out on the very day that opposing cultural forces were on full display. New Mexico’s highest court legalized same-sex marriage, the 17th state to allow gays and lesbians to wed. And figure skater Brian Boitano announced he is gay, making him the third gay member of the U.S. delegation who will travel to Russia in February for the Winter Olympics.

The cross-currents spotlighted the schism over gay rights that persists in parts of the country.

“This shows that there clearly needs to be more engagement of the evangelical community if gay acceptance is going to become a reality,” said Gregory T. Angelo, executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay rights advocacy group.

Still, other gay rights advocates noted the growing number of moderate Republican leaders who have embraced the cause of same-sex marriage. Earlier this year, more than 100 Republicans signed a legal brief urging the Supreme Court to declare that gays and lesbians have a constitutional right to marry.

Fred Sainz, spokesman for the gay advocacy group Human Rights Campaign, said that “the days of making gay a wedge issue are dated.”

“I think they are outliers,” he said of Jindal, Cruz and Palin, adding that he believes they jumped into the “Duck Dynasty” controversy to appeal to “a niche base.”

But that base remains a powerful force in the Republican Party, particularly when it comes to presidential primaries in states such as Iowa and South Carolina.

Conservative activists said that the national push for gay rights could mobilize evangelical voters to the polls in new numbers in 2016, particularly if they feel there is a candidate running who reflects their beliefs.

David Lane, an influential Christian activist based in California who organizes pastor conferences, said he got an e-mail Thursday morning from a top Republican activist in Iowa who credited Jindal for speaking out quickly about Robertson’s suspension.

“What Jindal is doing is absolutely tremendous, from an evangelical and pro-life Catholic standpoint,” Lane said. “Spiritually speaking, we’re in a war.”

And Robertson, the blunt-spoken reality show star, is serving as the unexpected latest flashpoint. (Notably, his comments about gays — including a graphic description of which body parts are more desirable — have garnered substantially more attention than his contention in the same GQ interview that African Americans were happier in the era of Jim Crow laws in the South, calling them “singing and happy.”)

In the interview he said:“Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men.”

Robertson issued a statement Thursday saying that he believes his mission is to spread the Bible’s teachings. “I would never treat anyone with disrespect just because they are different from me,” he said. “We are all created by the Almighty and like Him, I love all of humanity. We would all be better off if we loved God and loved each other.”

Read the entire article here.

Image courtesy of New York Times.

Idea Soup

Everyday Sexism Project

The passing of Nelson Mandela reminds us that while great strides for freedom and justice were made in South Africa much still remains to be done. Unfortunately, racism and discrimination, in all its forms, continue to rear their ugly heads in all nooks and crannies of our world. So, the fight for equality continues; one great example is the Everyday Sexism Project.

From the Guardian:

The campaign for women’s liberation never went away, but this year a new swell built up and broke through. Since the early summer, I’ve been talking to feminist activists and writers for a short book, All The Rebel Women, and as I tried to keep up with the protests, marches and talks, my diary became a mess of clashing dates. The rush was such that in a single weekend in October, you could have attended a feminist freshers’ fair in London, the North East Feminist Gathering in Newcastle, a Reclaim the Night march in Edinburgh, or a discussion between different generations of feminist activists at the British Library (this sold out in 48 hours, was moved to a room four times bigger, and sold out again).

You could have joined one of the country’s 149 local grassroots groups, or shared your experience of misogyny on the site Laura Bates, 27, started in April 2012. Her Everyday Sexism Project has proved so successful that it was rolled out to 17 countries on its first anniversary this year, tens of thousands of women worldwide writing about the street harassment, sexual harassment, workplace discrimination and body-shaming they encounter. The project embodies that feminist phrase “the personal is political”, a consciousness-raising exercise that encourages women to see how inequality affects them, proves these problems aren’t individual but collective, and might therefore have political solutions. This year, 6,000 stories that have been sent to the project about harassment or assault on public transport – the majority never reported to authorities – were used to train 2,000 police officers in London, and create a public awareness campaign. In its first few weeks, says Bates, the reporting of harassment on public transport soared. Everyday Sexism currently has more than 108,000 followers on Twitter. Of course, following a social media account isn’t the same as joining a political party, but to put this engagement in perspective, Tory membership is now at 134,000.

Welcome to the fourth wave of feminism. This movement follows the first-wave campaign for votes for women, which reached its height 100 years ago, the second wave women’s liberation movement that blazed through the 1970s and 80s, and the third wave declared by Rebecca Walker, Alice Walker’s daughter, and others, in the early 1990s. That shift from second to third wave took many important forms, but often felt broadly generational, with women defining their work as distinct from their mothers’. What’s happening now feels like something new again. It’s defined by technology: tools that are allowing women to build a strong, popular, reactive movement online. Just how popular is sometimes slightly startling. Girlguiding UK introduced a campaigning and activism badge this year and a summer survey of Mumsnet users found 59% consider themselves feminists, double those who don’t. Bates says that, for her, modern feminism is defined by pragmatism, inclusion and humour. “I feel like it is really down-to-earth, really open,” she says, “and it’s very much about people saying: ‘Here is something that doesn’t make sense to me, I thought women were equal, I’m going to do something about it.'”

As 2013 unfolded, it became impossible to ignore the rumble of feminist campaigners, up and down the country. They gathered outside the Bank of England in early July, the first burst of a heatwave, dressed as aviators, suffragettes and warrior queens, organised by Caroline Criado-Perez, 29, shouting for women’s representation on bank notes and beyond.

They demonstrated outside the Sun headquarters, organised by Yas Necati, 17, in a protest against Page 3, the biggest image of a woman that appears each day in the country’s biggest-selling newspaper – a teenager or twentysomething smiling sunnily in her pants. Necati, a student at sixth-form college, laughed shyly as she told me about the mocked-up pages she has sent Sun editor David Dinsmore, suggesting feminist comedians, artists and writers to appear on the page instead. One of her favourites showed a woman flashing bright blue armpit hair. The the No More Page 3 petition started by Lucy-Anne Holmes, 37, in August 2012,, has been signed by 128,000 people.

Ikamara Larasi, 24, started heading a campaign to address racist and sexist stereotypes in music videos, just as students began banning summer hit Blurred Lines on many UK campuses, in response to its sexist lyrics. Jinan Younis, 18, co-founded a feminist society at school, experienced online abuse from some boys in her peer group – “feminism and rape are both ridiculously tiring,” they wrote – and wasn’t deterred. Instead, she wrote an article about it that went viral. When I spoke to her in September, she was juggling shifts in a call centre, babysitting for neighbours, preparing for university, while helping out with a campaign to encourage feminist societies in schools countrywide. UK Feminista, an organisation set up in 2010 to support feminist activists, has had 100 people contact them this year, wanting to start their own school group. In late August, their national day of action against lads’ mags included 19 protests across the UK.

Thousands more feminists raised their voices online. Bates and Soraya Chemaly, 47, were among those who set up a campaign against misogynist pages on Facebook, including groups with names such as “raping a pregnant bitch and telling your friends you had a threesome”. Supporters sent more than 60,000 tweets in the course of a swift, week-long push, convincing the social media behemoth to change its moderation policies.

Southall Black Sisters protested outside the offices of the UK Border Agency against racist immigration laws and propaganda – including the notorious “Go Home” vans. They also marched in solidarity with protesters in Delhi, who began a wave of demonstrations following the death of a woman who was gang raped in the city last December, protests against rape culture that soon spread to Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The African LGBTI Out & Proud Diamond Group demonstrated opposite Downing Street after allegations emerged of the sexual abuse of women held at Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre.

The Fawcett Society continued to show how cuts to benefits, services and public-sector jobs pose “triple jeopardy” to women (in 2013 women’s unemployment reached a 26-year high). Rape Crisis South London spearheaded a successful campaign to criminalise the possession of pornography that depicts rape. And 40 Days of Choice challenged the anti-abortion campaigners who have become worryingly prominent in the UK recently.

The Edinburgh fringe hosted a surprising run of feminist comedians, including Mary Bourke, with her show Muffragette. Bourke memorably noted in a BBC interview this summer that the open-mic circuit has become a “rape circle” in recent years. Feminist standups were ready to respond. Nadia Kamil, 29, performed a set including a feminist burlesque, peeling off eight layers of clothing to reveal messages such as “pubes are normal” and “equal pay” picked out in sequins. She also explained the theory of intersectionality through a vocoder, and gave out badges with the slogan “Smash the Kyriarchy”. (She hoped audience members would look up any words they were unfamiliar with later, such as “kyriarchy” and “cis”.)

Bridget Christie, 42, won the Foster’s Edinburgh comedy award with A Bic for Her, in which she railed against sexist comments by racing driver Stirling Moss, and talked about “ethical filing” – taking sexist magazines off shop shelves and dumping them straight in the bin. She wasn’t encouraging other people to do this, she emphasised. She just wanted to point out that she had been doing it for months – months – with no problem at all.

Women marched through London for Million Women Rise and Reclaim the Night, and organised events in 207 countries for One Billion Rising, a day of demonstrations to highlight the UN statistic that one in three women will be raped or beaten in her lifetime. As part of this event, the UK parliament debated whether sex and relationship education should be on the national curriculum, and six months later, in her summer holidays, Lili Evans, 16, started the Campaign4Consent with Necati, calling for consent education in schools.

A chorus rose against online misogyny. Criado-Perez highlighted the string of rape threats sent to her on Twitter, writer Lindy West published the comments she received, (“There is a group of rapists with over 9,000 penises coming for this fat bitch,” read one), and the academic and broadcaster Mary Beard, Lauren Mayberry from the band Chvrches, and Ruby Tandoh from The Great British Bake Off, all spoke out on this issue. If you want to know how deeply some people resent the idea of women’s advancement, the stream of online misogyny has been perhaps the most obvious, ugly backlash yet.

But bald attempts to silence women only made the movement larger and louder. They convinced those who had never thought about misogyny before that it was clearly still alive, and convinced those who were well aware of it to keep going.

Read the entire article here.

 

 

Idea Soup, tD, Technica

Big Bad Data; Growing Discrimination

You may be an anonymous data point online, but it does not follow that you’ll not still be a victim of personal discrimination. As technology to gather and track your every move online steadily improves so do the opportunities to misuse that information. Many of us are already unwitting participants in the growing internet filter bubble — a phenomenon that amplifies our personal tastes, opinions and shopping habits by pre-screening and delivering only more of the same based on our online footprints. Many argue that this is benign and even beneficial — after all isn’t it wonderful when Google’s ad network pops up product recommendations for you on “random” websites based on your previous searches, or isn’t it that much more effective when news organizations only deliver stories based on your previous browsing history, interests, affiliations or demographic?

Not so. We are in ever-increasing danger of allowing others to control what we see and hear online. So kiss discovery and serendipity goodbye. More troubling still, beyond the ability to deliver personalized experiences online, as corporations gather more and more data from and about you, they can decide if you are of value. While your data may be aggregated and anonymized, the results can still help a business target you, or not, whether you are explicitly identified by name or not.

So, perhaps your previous online shopping history divulged a proclivity for certain medications; well, kiss goodbye to that pre-existing health condition waiver. Or, perhaps the online groups that you belong to are rather left-of-center or way out in left-field; well, say hello to a smaller annual bonus from your conservative employer. Perhaps, the news or social groups that you subscribe to don’t align very well with the values of your landlord or prospective employer. Or, perhaps, Amazon will not allow you to shop online any more because the company knows your annual take-home pay and that you are a potential credit risk. You get the idea.

Without adequate safe-guards and controls those who gather the data about you will be in the driver’s seat. Whereas, put simply, it should be the other way around — you should own the data that describes who you are and what your do, and you should determine who gets to see it and how it’s used. Welcome to the age of Big (Bad) Data and the new age of data-driven discrimination.

From Technology Review:

Data analytics are being used to implement a subtle form of discrimination, while anonymous data sets can be mined to reveal health data and other private information, a Microsoft researcher warned this morning at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference.

Kate Crawford, principal researcher at Microsoft Research, argued that these problems could be addressed with new legal approaches to the use of personal data.

In a new paper, she and a colleague propose a system of “due process” that would give people more legal rights to understand how data analytics are used in determinations made against them, such as denial of health insurance or a job. “It’s the very start of a conversation about how to do this better,” Crawford, who is also a visiting professor at the MIT Center for Civic Media, said in an interview before the event. “People think ‘big data’ avoids the problem of discrimination, because you are dealing with big data sets, but in fact big data is being used for more and more precise forms of discrimination—a form of data redlining.”

During her talk this morning, Crawford added that with big data, “you will never know what those discriminations are, and I think that’s where the concern begins.”

Health data is particularly vulnerable, the researcher says. Search terms for disease symptoms, online purchases of medical supplies, and even the RFID tags on drug packaging can provide websites and retailers with information about a person’s health.

As Crawford and Jason Schultz, a professor at New York University Law School, wrote in their paper: “When these data sets are cross-referenced with traditional health information, as big data is designed to do, it is possible to generate a detailed picture about a person’s health, including information a person may never have disclosed to a health provider.”

And a recent Cambridge University study, which Crawford alluded to during her talk, found that “highly sensitive personal attributes”— including sexual orientation, personality traits, use of addictive substances, and even parental separation—are highly predictable by analyzing what people click on to indicate they “like” on Facebook. The study analyzed the “likes” of 58,000 Facebook users.

Similarly, purchasing histories, tweets, and demographic, location, and other information gathered about individual Web users, when combined with data from other sources, can result in new kinds of profiles that an employer or landlord might use to deny someone a job or an apartment.

In response to such risks, the paper’s authors propose a legal framework they call “big data due process.” Under this concept, a person who has been subject to some determination—whether denial of health insurance, rejection of a job or housing application, or an arrest—would have the right to learn how big data analytics were used.

This would entail the sorts of disclosure and cross-examination rights that are already enshrined in the legal systems of the United States and many other nations. “Before there can be greater social acceptance of big data’s role in decision-making, especially within government, it must also appear fair, and have an acceptable degree of predictability, transparency, and rationality,” the authors write.

Data analytics can also get things deeply wrong, Crawford notes. Even the formerly successful use of Google search terms to identify flu outbreaks failed last year, when actual cases fell far short of predictions. Increased flu-related media coverage and chatter about the flu in social media were mistaken for signs of people complaining they were sick, leading to the overestimates.  “This is where social media data can get complicated,” Crawford said.

Read the entire article here.