Digital Gems

Digital Gems

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Just How Big Could India’s True Covid Toll Be?
Just How Big Could India’s True Covid Toll Be?
The country’s official figures grossly understate the pandemic’s true effects. Our estimates, informed by more than a dozen experts’ research, range from very bad to catastrophic.
Just How Big Could India’s True Covid Toll Be?
The Latest Coronavirus Comes From Dogs
The Latest Coronavirus Comes From Dogs
A newly identified coronavirus may not pose a serious threat, but the finding highlights the need to monitor animal viruses more proactively, scientists say.
The Latest Coronavirus Comes From Dogs
Geographies of Algorithmic Violence: Redlining the Smart City - Safransky - 2020 - International Journal of Urban and Regional Research - Wiley Online Library
Geographies of Algorithmic Violence: Redlining the Smart City - Safransky - 2020 - International Journal of Urban and Regional Research - Wiley Online Library
City governments are embracing data-driven and algorithmic planning to tackle urban problems. Data-driven analytics have an unprecedented capacity to call urban futures into being. At the same time, ...
Geographies of Algorithmic Violence: Redlining the Smart City - Safransky - 2020 - International Journal of Urban and Regional Research - Wiley Online Library
The Society of Algorithms | Annual Review of Sociology
The Society of Algorithms | Annual Review of Sociology
The pairing of massive data sets with processes—or algorithms—written in computer code to sort through, organize, extract, or mine them has made inroads in almost every major social institution. This article proposes a reading of the scholarly literature concerned with the social implications of this transformation. First, we discuss the rise of a new occupational class, which we call the coding elite. This group has consolidated power through their technical control over the digital means of production and by extracting labor from a newly marginalized or unpaid workforce, the cybertariat. Second, we show that the implementation of techniques of mathematical optimization across domains as varied as education, medicine, credit and finance, and criminal justice has intensified the dominance of actuarial logics of decision-making, potentially transforming pathways to social reproduction and mobility but also generating a pushback by those so governed. Third, we explore how the same pervasive algorithmic intermediation in digital communication is transforming the way people interact, associate, and think. We conclude by cautioning against the wildest promises of artificial intelligence but acknowledging the increasingly tight coupling between algorithmic processes, social structures, and subjectivities. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Sociology, Volume 47 is July 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
The Society of Algorithms | Annual Review of Sociology