1. Building A More Ethical High-Tech Economy, November 3, 2016: http://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2016/11/03/app-economy-smart-phone-ethics

  2. November 2016: Fake News and Facebook

    * Did fake news impact the 2016 US national election?

    * Does Facebook have a responsibility to monitor fake news distributed by its users?  If so, is an "artificial intelligent" process appropriate to automatically remove fake stories?

    * Consider this excerpt from a recent article in the New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/28/obama-reckons-with-a-trump-presidency) - what is your take?

    The new media ecosystem “means everything is true and nothing is true,” Obama told me later. “An explanation of climate change from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist looks exactly the same on your Facebook page as the denial of climate change by somebody on the Koch brothers’ payroll. And the capacity to disseminate misinformation, wild conspiracy theories, to paint the opposition in wildly negative light without any rebuttal—that has accelerated in ways that much more sharply polarize the electorate and make it very difficult to have a common conversation.”

    That marked a decisive change from previous political eras, he maintained. “Ideally, in a democracy, everybody would agree that climate change is the consequence of man-made behavior, because that’s what ninety-nine per cent of scientists tell us,” he said. “And then we would have a debate about how to fix it. That’s how, in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, you had Republicans supporting the Clean Air Act and you had a market-based fix for acid rain rather than a command-and-control approach. So you’d argue about means, but there was a baseline of facts that we could all work off of. And now we just don’t have that.”

  3. More on Drones

    The Forum, BBC, November 13, 2016:  Drones and their Impact on the World, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04fdtf9

    * notice the numerous comments to the effect that "people will eventually adapt to the technology"

    BBC November 2, 1016: Engineers using drones to farm crops, http://www.bbc.com/news/business-37851565

    * notice the reference to "efficiency" ... but there is a twist ... is one type of "efficiency" now being replaced with a different type of "efficiency"?

  4. Ted Radio Hour >> December 9, 2016

    Advance to 47:25 and listen to an excellent comment regarding the negative effects replacing direct human communication with electronic ones (the comment is made by psychologist Daniel Goleman, who is introduced at 41:39)

  5. TBA

Last modified: Sunday, 11 December 2016, 9:52 PM