Brewster Kahle: what I think we’re missing out there are tools for context and citation

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/AU79zwAvKa0″ frameborder=”0″ allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture” allowfullscreen></iframe>
69:40
necessarily know about so Wikipedia is
69:45
still primarily created by Western young
69:49
male contributors they tell the story of
69:55
you know the worst knowledge from an
69:58
extremely limited and privileged
69:59
standpoint there are ridiculous gaps in
70:04
this knowledge and then skews what a my
70:07
favorite example is that there are
70:10
20,000 articles on French Wikipedia
70:13
about individual asteroids but a
70:15
language like Hausa that is spoken by 30
70:18
million people in Central Africa doesn’t
70:20
have an entry on the universe so if you
70:23
think that the the sum of all knowledge
70:26
representing Wikipedia and you look at
70:28
where it comes from and who created it
70:30
it’s ridiculously skewed and slanted
70:33
towards the demographic of the
70:35
contributors the problem with that is
70:37
not just with Wikipedia Wikipedia not
70:40
many people they know but the contents
70:43
get translated into our
70:45
d/f via a project like dbpedia they’re
70:49
then propagated to the rest of the
70:51
internet and basically every single
70:53
linked data system they used today what
70:57
is like a search engine for music or
70:59
biomedical information gets its entities
71:02
gets is like a fundamental relations
71:04
from Wikipedia so biasing by us out the
71:10
fact that is a small population of
71:12
contributors that are creating data and
71:16
information that powers the entire
71:18
ecosystem that AI relies upon I think
71:21
the fundamental problem that we all
71:22
should be worried about I’ve been very
encouraged by watching some of the
studies of how people use the web people
are very particular and very peculiar
nobody wakes up in the morning saying
hey I want to live a biased life or hey
I really want to go to the biased and
unfair news channel what I think we’re
missing out there are tools for context
and citation we’ve made it hard for
people to actually know what the hell
they’re looking at that we’ve made it so
that it’s really difficult to go and
understand is this some babble that just
has been bouncing around for a long time
and long discredited or is this um
something that actually is real and I
have trusted sources behind it
so I’m encouraged by people want to have
access to this stuff the Internet
Archive gets three four or five million
people a day coming and using its
72:24
service as best we can tell it’s about
72:26
the three hundredth most popular is is
72:29
about the first the fifth most popular
72:31
okay I’m a little envious um but it does
72:34
indicate that there’s a lot of interest
72:37
in finding deeper information than it’s
72:41
casually available so people want it
72:44
that’s the good news
72:46
now we need to build some of the tools I
72:48
would suggest for citation for context
72:51
and embed it and that’s what this whole
72:53
conference is about I’m really glad to
72:55
be here
72:57
sorry one last note on context I think
72:59
you’ve gotten to the heart of a really
73:01
really big problem which we missed out
73:02
on the entire problem of knowledge
73:05
production is about context not just
73:07
merely switching from one platform to
73:09
another but you know to take a perhaps a
73:12
banal example at a researcher who read a
73:17
paper of a lab that performed a set of
73:21
experimental conditions that requires a
73:24
context change for if you are working on
73:27
a different organism if even if you’re
73:29
trying to validate and reproduce those
73:30
results that is a context change which
73:32
requires translations so big new big
73:35
problem we should definitely work on
73:37
this I think with that we will wrap it
73:41
up and just want to say thanks to the
73:43
panelists and for coming up here and
73:45
sharing
73:47
[Applause]

The greatest album covers of jazz

Blue Note captured the refined sophistication of jazz during the early 60s, giving it its signature look in the process.

yeah that is dynamite. One of the things
that amazed me was what I call the
pullback effect. Take Hank Mobley’s no
room for squares. There was a new subway
station that was built. It was unlike any
other subway stop. It had these metal
concentric circles. Now try to find the
final album cover there. It is the
pullback shows you the whole image and
it gives you an insight into the eye of
the designer that I think is absolutely
amazing

The Rise of the Amnesty Thugs

Franco was an unauthorized immigrant who had been working in this country for over a decade. His wife, Anne, is from a Pennsylvania Dutch family that has been in this country for generations. They were married in 2013 and have three American children, Max, Javier and Valentina.

In the spring of 2017, Franco got in a minor traffic accident near his Pennsylvania home. A few weeks later as he was leaving for work, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement swarmed him, took him away and deported him to Guatemala.

.. This is an example of ICE going after a perfectly productive member of society. I got the anecdote from a series of reports that Deborah Sontag and Dale Russakoff did for ProPublica and The Philadelphia Inquirer. They found that 64 percent of the immigrants arrested by ICE in the agency’s Philadelphia region had no prior criminal conviction.

.. There are 11 million unauthorized immigrants in this country. Every past administration has used some discretion in targeting whom to deport. They targeted those who were destroying society, not building it. They tried to take account of particular contexts, and they tried to show some sense of basic humanity.

.. today, discretion and humanity are being stamped out. The Trump administration has embraced a “zero tolerance” policy. In practice that means that all complexity has to be reduced to uniformity. Compassion is replaced by a blind obedience to regulations. Context is irrelevant. Arrests are indiscriminate. All that matters is that the arrest numbers go up, so human beings in the system are reduced to numbers.

.. The Trump administration immigration officials have become exactly the kind of monsters that conservatism has always warned against.

For centuries, conservatives have repeated a specific critique against state power. Statism, conservatives have argued, has a tendency to become brutalist and inhumane because a bureaucracy can’t see or account for the complexity of reality.

.. Statist social engineering projects cause horrific suffering because in the mind of statists, the abstract rule is more important than the human being in front of them. The person must be crushed for the sake of the abstraction.

.. People like Stephen Miller are not steeped in conservative thinking and do not operate with a conservative disposition. They were formed by their rebellion against the stifling conformity they found at liberal universities. Their primary orientation is not to conservative governance but to owning the libs. In power they take the worst excesses of statism and flip them for anti-liberal ends
.. Here’s how you can detect the anti-liberal trolls in the immigration debate: Watch how they use the word “amnesty.”
.. Any serious reform has to grapple with tangled realities, and any real conservative has an appreciation for that complexity. But if you try to account for that complexity before an anti-immigration troll, he or she will shout one word: Amnesty!
.. This is what George Orwell noticed about the authoritarian brutalists: They don’t use words to illuminate the complexity of reality; they use words to eradicate the complexity of reality.
.. Look at how the Republican candidates for the G.O.P. Senate nomination in Arizona answered questions about a provision to keep families together at the border. They responded with inhumane abstractions: “I try not to get swayed by what the emotions are or the pressure
.. “Compromising on the rule of law to grant amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants is the wrong path to take,”
.. “Amnesty” has become a club the trolls use in their attempt to stamp a rigid steel boot on the neck of the immigration debate. It’s the sign of a party slowly losing its humanity.