Katie Bouman was a PhD student in computer science and artificial intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) when, three years ago, she led the creation of an algorithm that would eventually lead to an image of a supermassive black hole at the heart of the Messier 87 galaxy, some 55m light years from Earth, being captured for the first time.
via Katie Bouman: the 29-year-old whose work led to first black hole photo | Science | The Guardian
Rumor has it Marvel Studios’ upcoming film, The Eternals, could feature the first openly gay character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. No one has confirmed that yet and, in fact, no one has formally confirmed The Eternals is even happening. However, at the recent junket for Avengers: Endgame, we asked Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige about the accuracy of that rumor and if LGBTQ heroes are something fans can expect to see in future Marvel movies.
“Well it’s accurate in that we’ve talked about [it for] a long time,” Feige told io9. “You look at the success of Captain Marvel and Black Panther. We want the movies to reflect the audience and we want every member of our global audience to see themselves reflected on the screen. And that’s what we’ve been doing for a long time. And certainly, that’s what we’re focusing on going forward.”
On Wednesday, Ohio Republicans in the House approved an even more restrictive version of the so-called “heartbeat bill” passed by the state Senate in March, taking the state one step closer towards enacting one of the most draconian abortion restrictions in the country. The state’s Republican Governor Mike DeWine has already promised he will sign the bill into law.
SB 23, which has since been chillingly renamed the “Human Rights Protection Act” by the House’s Health Committee, would prohibit people from getting abortions once a heartbeat can be detected, which can occur as early as six weeks into one’s pregnancy. As Linda Greenhouse pointed out in an op-ed in the New York Times, that six-week cutoff date is so early into a pregnancy that the embryo is “not yet even considered a fetus.” If the bill becomes law, doctors in Ohio who perform abortions after detecting a heartbeat would face being charged with a felony and up to a year in prison, and face additional fines of up to $20,000. While it has an exception if the person’s life is in danger, there is no exception in cases of rape or incest.
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via Ohio's Anti-Abortion Heartbeat Bill One Step Closer to Becoming Law
The senators saw this as a civil rights issue and pointed to recent incidents as examples. Facebook is still facing a charge of housing discrimination after it let advertisers exclude people in ways that could be racist or sexist, while Amazon shut down an automated recruiting tool after it was found discriminating against women. Facial recognition also has bias problems. It’s a modern form of practices like “real estate steering” (where black couples were discouraged from getting homes in some neighborhoods), Sen. Booker said, but more insidious as it’s “significantly harder to detect.” In theory, this would prevent companies from ignoring the potential for bias.
via Senate bill would make tech companies test algorithms for bias
Kirsten Gillibrand, a senator and now-Democratic presidential primary candidate who risked losing the support of big donors and some centrist Democrats by calling for Al Franken’s resignation, will continue to call out Congress for their failure to adequately address sexual assault in the workplace, on college campuses, in the military—and in Congress. She reiterated her support for victims of sexual misconduct at a CNN Town Hall on Tuesday night, and pledged to continue to fight for legislation to combat assault and harassment.
“I believe deeply that we have to end sexual violence in this country. Because fundamentally it goes to a very simple question: do we value women?” she said. “And unfortunately, there’s a lot of evidence that we don’t.”
Democratic presidential hopefuls will face off in a public forum on LGBTQ issues this fall. The event, slated for National Coming Out Day on October 10, marks the first time Democratic candidates have debated queer issues since 2008, when Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich, and Barack Obama faced off in a Human Rights Campaign Foundation forum.
A lot has changed in the past 11 years. For one thing, there’s an openly gay candidate in the race now (South Bend, IN, mayor Pete Buttigieg), reflecting the dramatic shift in attitudes toward LGBTQ people symbolized most prominently in the legalization of same-sex marriage. Whereas only one candidate in 2008—Kucinich, then an Ohio congressman—spoke out in favor of same-sex marriage, there is little apparent daylight between the 2020 candidates’ current stances on LGBTQ rights. There has also been a major cultural awakening around transgender rights and gender identity.
via Here's Every 2020 Democrat's History on LGBTQ Rights
Machine learning and artificial intelligence already powers a deceptively wide sweep of crucial processes and tools like facial recognition, self-driving cars, ad targeting, customer service, content moderation, policing, hiring, and even war. It’s a huge list, and sometimes it’s fun to sit back and marvel at how different all those uses are.
Exactly how those decisions are made and whether or not they’re fair, however, is often opaque or unknowable. That problem has led lawmakers to this attempt to pry open the “black box.”
The new bill would task the Federal Trade Commission with crafting regulations making companies conduct “impact assessments” of automated decision systems to assess the decision making systems and training data “for impacts on accuracy, fairness, bias, discrimination, privacy and security.”
via Democrats Introduce Bill Requiring Tech Companies To Check Algorithms For Bias
“When it comes from people, like Ivanka, I will say, that can post all day pictures of her children that are just in her home and ‘oh my daughter is having trouble in her crib’ or ‘my daughter is doing this’ and ‘my daughter is doing this,’ there are children out there that don’t have that opportunity,” Teigen said, according to The Hill. “There are children that are completely … honestly, I cannot fathom for a second how scared our children would be if they were without us.”
via Chrissy Teigen Tells House Democrats That Women Should Say ‘Fuck You’ More Often
A newly-political Taylor Swift donated $113,000 to a pro-LGBTQ group in her adopted home state of Tennessee.
In addition to the princely sum Swift gave to the Tennessee Equality Project, which “advocates for the equal rights of LGBTQ people in Tennessee,” she also included a nice handwritten note, which read:
via Taylor Swift Donated a Bunch of Money to a Tennessee LGBTQ Advocacy Group
“It was really disrespectful to survivors to have Kavanaugh and everything he represents to teach at a branch of our university,” Sarah Kurian, a sophomore at George Mason and a member of Mason For Survivors, told Jezebel. Kurian, who says she was sexually assaulted her freshman year by a classmate, connected Kavanaugh’s appointment to her own experiences filing a Title IX complaint. She ultimately lost her case, she said, “because it was my statement versus his statement.” Of the law school’s decision to hire Kavanaugh, she said, “It just shows that we really haven’t taken that many steps forward in caring about the issue of sexual assault.” Kavanaugh, she added, “is just a symptom of a bigger issue within our administration.”
via George Mason Students Protest School's Hiring of Brett Kavanaugh
