(flip)
"Alewife garage to open for Monday commute, but will close at night and next weekend" by John Hilliard and J.D. Capelouto Globe Correspondents August 12, 2018
CAMBRIDGE — The MBTA’s Alewife parking garage reopened in time for the Monday morning commute, though there will be no overnight parking available and it will shut again next weekend for additional work, the agency said in a statement Sunday night.
An engineering and safety assessment of the condition of the garage, which underwent repairs after falling concrete damaged a parked car, found it was “safe for use,” the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority said in the statement. An independent engineering consultant along with MBTA personnel conducted the assessment, the agency said.
The building will be closed during the week from 1 to 5 a.m. so the MBTA can conduct nightly inspections to monitor ongoing repairs, the statement said. The garage will also be closed next weekend for a “thorough follow-up assessment,” the statement said. The agency is urging customers to remove their vehicles before the end of service each weeknight.
The Alewife station garage is the T’s largest with about 2,600 parking spaces and is the northernmost stop on the Red Line service, making the garage a crucial step in commutes for residents of many communities north and west of Boston.
“The MBTA apologizes for the temporary displacement of parking spaces and appreciates customers’ patience while the work took place,” the agency said.
What choice do they really have?
Crews worked through the weekend to shore up the structure ahead of a more extensive $5.7 million repair project expected to start next month.....
One guy said his car was damaged by falling concrete smashed in February 2017 and that they should have acted sooner.
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They didn't mention the parking rates going up.
So I turn the corner and God, look what I run into:
Counterprotesters were seen behind a police line (MICHAEL REYNOLDS/EPA/Shutterstock).
Quoting scripture, are they?
Did Jesus advocate profanity and middle fingers?
‘Unite the Right’ rally: low attendance and an early exit by white nationalists in D.C." by Noah Weiland and Andy Parsons New York Times August 12, 2018
WASHINGTON — The rally ended after about a half hour, and police ushered the attendees into white vans and drove them away from the angry counterdemonstrators. They were driven to the Rosslyn Metro station and then taken by train to Vienna, Va., where they were offered police escorts to their cars.
The group’s organizer, Jason Kessler, stood on a platform with a microphone, addressing attendees who arrived at Lafayette Square before the event was scheduled to begin. His words were mostly drowned out by the shouting and booing of counterprotesters.
Yeah, he quickly vanished and was unavailable for an interview request, probably because he didn't want to face questions about being a controlled-opposition agitator.
Many in the crowd of counterprotesters wore the black masks, helmets, and body armor of the Antifa movement, which clashed violently with supremacists in Charlottesville last year.
Yeah, they believe that skulling you with a club is cool if they don't think like you do. The pre$$ loves 'em so they are probably funded by $oro$, et al, but the point is the extreme racists and white nationalist groups are being pitted against each other by the same group of overlords. It's a staged and scripted show, paid professional protesters and flash mobs for hire to drive wedge issues and division to the fore.
Even after the main rally ended, as rain began to fall and lightning lit the sky, protesters bearing signs and shirts deploring racism and anti-Semitism remained in the square, chanting across rows of police officers, Several counterdemonstrators clashed with police who tried to disperse them.
Anjali Madan Wells, a middle school teacher from suburban Montgomery County, Md., said it was “common sense” for her to come out and protest against the supremacists.
“The idea that people were gathering in my city to spread a message of intolerance,” she said, adding that “I talk to my students about standing up for what is right.”
What is shocking is they are so filled with hate they can't see their own hypocrisy. And that's who is teaching the kids.
The rally in Washington on Sunday was expected to have up to 400 people, according to the permit the group received from the National Park Service, but it was much smaller.
In addition to Kessler, who helped organize last year’s Charlottesville rally, the supremacists heard from David Duke, the former politician and Ku Klux Klan leader.
You make what you want of Duke. He's a professor now, and his greatest sin is questioning the Holocau$t™.
The chance of spontaneous mayhem led to weeks of planning among Washington’s law enforcement agencies to guard the marches leading to the rally and the rally itself, as well as to deal with any confrontations that followed it in the streets of Washington.
In Charlottesville, dozens of State Police officers formed a barricade that blocked protesters from moving outside a checkpoint. With no sign of white supremacists, tensions were confined to interactions between the left-leaning protesters and law enforcement. At least four arrests had been made.
That pretty much tells it it all.
As a steady rain began in the early evening, police officers began breaking down barricades and reopening streets, apparently convinced that the threat of a serious disturbance had waned.....
The supremacists melted like snowflakes in the rain.
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"Security out in force in Charlottesville, Va., on anniversary of white supremacist violence" by Michael Kunzelman Associated Press August 11, 2018
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Police blocked off streets Saturday and mobilized hundreds of officers for the anniversary of white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Va.
The security measures alarmed activists but reassured others who said they have painful memories of last year’s chaos.
Local and state authorities framed the weekend’s heightened security as a necessary precaution.
On Saturday morning, when many businesses in a popular downtown shopping district were beginning to open, law enforcement officers outnumbered visitors.
Concrete barriers and metal fences had been erected, and police were searching bags at two checkpoints where people could enter or leave.
Nearby, dozens of officers carrying helmets and with gas masks strapped to their belts stood watch in the park where hundreds of white nationalists gathered last summer at a rally planned in part to protest the city’s plans to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee. The event descended into violence, with clashes erupting between attendees and counterprotesters.
Some community activists were concerned that this year’s heavy police presence could be counterproductive.
An independent investigation of the rally violence, led by a former federal prosecutor, found the chaos stemmed from a passive response by law enforcement and poor preparation and coordination between state and city police.
Lisa Woolfork, a University of Virginia professor and Black Lives Matter Charlottesville organizer, said police are mounting a ‘‘huge, overwhelming show of force to compensate for last year’s inaction.’’
‘‘Last year, I was afraid of the Nazis. This year, I’m afraid of the police,’’ Woolfork said. ‘‘This is not making anyone that I know feel safe,’’ but some business owners and downtown visitors said Saturday they were comforted by the security measures.
‘‘It’s nice that they’re here to protect us,’’ said Lara Mitchell, 66, a sales associate at Ten Thousand Villages, a shop that sells artwork, jewelry, and other items.
Kyle Rodland, 35, took his young sons to get ice cream downtown late Saturday morning.
Rodland said he felt much safer than last year, when he left town with his family and stayed with his parents after seeing people armed with long rifles walking around outside his home.
Saturday marked the anniversary of a march by torch-toting white supremacists a day ahead of the larger event in downtown. The group paraded through the University of Virginia’s campus, shouting racist and anti-Semitic slogans.
On Saturday morning, the university hosted a ‘‘morning of reflection and renewal,’’ with musical performances, a poetry reading, and an address from James Ryan, the university’s president.
Ryan recalled how a group of students and community members faced off against the white supremacists near a statue of Thomas Jefferson on campus, calling it a ‘‘remarkable moment of courage and bravery.’’
OMG!
They don't know history, and how could they (are making progress on those fires, though)?
Later Saturday, students and activists were holding a ‘‘Rally for Justice’’ on campus.
Other events were also planned throughout the weekend, including on Sunday, the anniversary of the violence that erupted on the streets of Charlottesville.
I'm sorry, I have painful memories.
Jason Kessler, the primary organizer of last summer’s rally, sued the city of Charlottesville after it refused to issue him a permit for another event this weekend. However, Kessler dropped his lawsuit last week and vowed to forge ahead with plans for a ‘‘white civil rights’’ rally Sunday in Washington.
On Wednesday, Governor Ralph Northam and the city both declared states of emergency, citing the ‘‘potential impacts of events’’ in Charlottesville during the anniversary weekend. The state’s declaration allocates $2 million in state funds and authorizes the Virginia National Guard to assist in security efforts.
The city closed downtown streets and public parks and restricted access to a downtown ‘‘security area,’’ where visitors were prohibited from wearing masks or carrying certain items, including skateboards, catapults, glass bottles, bats and knives.....
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Of course, Trump is to blame:
"One year on, Trump still fuels racial divide" by Julie Pace Associated Press August 11, 2018
WASHINGTON — There has been no reset, no moment of national healing.
One year after blaming ‘‘both sides’’ for violent clashes between white supremacists and counterprotesters, President Trump still flirts with racially tinged rhetoric — and feels little blowback from Republican leaders or GOP voters when he does.
Black leaders and Democrats argue Trump’s tone and actions on race have gotten even worse in the months since the clashes in Charlottesville, Va.
The result is a starkly segregated political landscape where there is scant punishment for racially loaded rhetoric and, at times, clear reward, and Republicans’ best chance of holding off a Democratic wave is strong turnout among the conservative white voters who helped sweep Trump into office and often cheer his willingness to dive into hot-button issues with racial overtones.
Trump has told associates that he believes at least one of those issues — his criticism of black NFL players who kneel during the national anthem — is a political winner because it energizes his white base. He revived the matter on Friday, tweeting that the players are expressing outrage ‘‘at something that most of them are unable to define.’’ Players have said they are protesting police killings of black men, social injustice, and racism.
Is it kickoff yet?
Trump’s rise to power can be traced through a series of statements that invoke racial stereotypes. In 1989, he called for the death penalty for the Central Park Five, five black and Hispanic teenagers accused of raping and beating a white woman; they were later exonerated through DNA evidence, but Trump has suggested he still believes they’re guilty.
Is that the one that got Al Sharpton into trouble?
For years, Trump promoted the lie that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya.
Actually, it was the Clinton campaign (via surrogates) that got first got that going, just like the Steele dossier.
Who is lying again?
Over the past year, from his perch in the White House, he’s repeatedly questioned the intelligence of prominent black figures, including Representative Maxine Waters, a California Democrat, basketball star LeBron James and CNN anchor Don Lemon, whom he called ‘‘the dumbest man on television.’’
‘‘One of the oldest strategies is to call into question the intellect of African-Americans,’’ said Mitch Landrieu, the former Democratic mayor of New Orleans. ‘‘It’s just sad and awful.’’
At least he didn't incite violence and tell people to get a mob going if you see someone in a restaurant, supermarket, or convenience store like Maxine. Of course, she has been laying low and nearly invisible since.
NAACP president Derrick Johnson said the black community has ‘‘never seen this level of tone deafness or this total disregard’’ from a modern American president.
Even against that backdrop, Trump’s response to Charlottesville stood out.
In his initial remarks about the violent clashes that killed counterprotester Heather Heyer, the president said there were ‘‘very fine people on both sides.’’
Two days later, reading carefully from a written statement, he condemned the KKK, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis. Yet in an unscripted moment the next day, he again said there was ‘‘blame on both sides.’’
Charlottesville prompted some Republican leaders to condemn him. Some business leaders abandoned White House advisory panels, and some West Wing aides let it be known that they contemplated quitting, but, ultimately, the outrage from those corners subsided. Washington moved on. GOP leaders who criticized the president at the time still largely back his agenda, well aware that polling shows there was no sustained damage to Trump’s popularity among the party’s voters after Charlottesville.
And his general popularity after Helsinki is near 50%, thus the ma$$ media hasn't talked approval ratings much lately.
According to a CBS News poll taken in the days after the Charlottesville clashes, a wide share of Democrats — about 7 in 10 — said Trump’s policies encouraged racial division in the country, little different from a poll conducted earlier in the year. By comparison, more than 8 in 10 Republicans said the president’s policies either had no effect on race relations or encouraged unity.
Trump’s job approval among blacks has shown little change, consistently stuck around 10 percent in most surveys.
I hate to pick at the mole, but that's a lie.
Related:
"Omarosa Manigault Newman secretly taped John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, as he fired her in December in the Situation Room, a breach of security protocols but one that revealed him suggesting that she could face damage to her reputation if she did not leave quietly. The recording was played Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” where Manigault Newman, a former adviser to President Trump, promoted her new book, “Unhinged.”
Russert must be rolling at light speed in his grave.
In the memoir, about her relationship with Trump going back to her time on “The Apprentice,” she describes the world around the president as a cult in which he creates his own reality.
Remember Rove telling that to Susskind?
Manigault Newman explained to Chuck Todd, host of “Meet the Press,” that she recorded that conversation, as well as others she has played for reporters and book publishers featuring her conversations with Trump, because “this is a White House where everybody lies.”
Where she going next, corporate newsrooms?
The Situation Room is supposed to be devoid of personal electronic devices, which signs outside the room make clear. Former national security officials said it was not clear whether Manigault Newman had broken any laws, but she certainly violated the rules around what is supposed to be one of the most secure rooms in the capital.
She is a real piece of work.
Privately, officials who worked with Manigault Newman said it was the type of damn-the-rules behavior she had engaged in for months and which bothered many of her colleagues — but not Trump had to be cajoled into letting her be dismissed.
Oh, man, this is becoming a FARCE!!
People close to the White House said that she was a difficult colleague and even Trump had begun wearying of Manigault Newman’s omnipresence in meetings by the middle of his first year, those people said. “The very idea a staff member would sneak a recording device into the White House Situation Room shows a blatant disregard for our national security — and then to brag about it on national television further proves the lack of character and integrity of this disgruntled former White House employee,” the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said in a statement late Sunday.
Looks CRIMINAL to me.
No White House official offered an explanation for why Manigault Newman was hired in the first place if people had such concerns about her. When Todd asked Manigault Newman if she had ever heard the president say the slur, she said, “You know, I was in his presence when he said inappropriate things, but he has never said the N-word in my presence. Ever.” She did not say which “inappropriate things” she had heard, but Manigault Newman said that, after finishing her book, she had gone to Los Angeles to visit a person who had a copy of the tape in which Trump is said to use the slur. “I heard his voice, as clear as you and I are sitting here,” she told Todd, adding: “It confirmed that he is truly a racist.” As Todd read quote after quote over several years in which Manigault Newman defended Trump in public, she said she had played a role in selling the administration’s version of reality to the public, calling herself “totally complicit. In fact, I had a blind spot where it came to Donald Trump,” she said......"
NBC should be ashamed of themselves for having invited her on the program. I'm glad I never watch that crap anymore, and now we have the Cohen tapes, the Trump tapes, and the Manigault Newman tapes, all taping each other, all illegal(?), and poor Kellyanne Conway had to make the talk show rounds and talk hush money payments.
The White House did not respond to questions about whether Trump has any regrets about his handling of the Charlottesville protests or other racial rhetoric.
I wrote about it all last August, and yeah, it does feel like a deja vu. You just move a few numbers around.
--more--"
Related: President Trump’s caustic racial comments dovetail with harsh policies
Also see: Fewer Births Than Deaths Among Whites in Majority of U.S. States
Yeah, the whites are slowly dying off and have been for a long time, so I'm sure that will make some people happy.
*********
"Ige wins Hawaii Democratic governor primary" Associated Press August 12, 2018
HONOLULU — Despite a challenging first term marked by both natural and human-caused disasters, Governor David Ige of Hawaii won the Democratic primary in his bid for a second term in office Saturday, defeating US Representative Colleen Hanabusa.
Ige’s administration fumbled through a false missile alert that sent the state into a panic in January, a major embarrassment for his administration, but the governor’s handling of Kilauea volcano’s latest eruption — which destroyed more than 700 homes, displaced thousands, and caused devastating flooding on Kauai — got him back on track and he said he expects to win the general election in November.....
Oh, right, the volcano that is still active, but ‘‘the most important thing about the election is the fact that we gave people choices, and the people have spoken. It was about giving people the choice.’’
That must make the people of Wisconsin feel good. The people of Guatemala, not so much. That was another volcanic situation that quickly quieted down. I wonder what they will find under the lava, and yeah, you can't send her home now even though help is on the way.
Wasn't that right after they transferred their embassy?
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Time to be swimming along:
"Orca abandons dead calf after two-week journey" Associated Press August 12, 2018
FRIDAY HARBOR, Wash. — An endangered killer whale that drew international attention as she carried her dead calf on her head for more than two weeks is finally back to feeding and frolicking with her pod, researchers said.
The whales have been struggling because of a lack of salmon, and J35’s calf died soon after birth on July 24. The mother carried the baby on her head for at least 17 days, in an image of grief that struck an emotional chord worldwide. She finally abandoned the carcass as it decomposed.
Yeah, it did with me, too. It's like the elephants having to be torn away from their young when they perish on long treks and stuff. What it tells you is the animals are sentient beings and perhaps mankind is not as superior as its arrogant ruling class thinks.
Center for Whale Research founder Ken Balcomb said he was relieved to see J35 returning to typical behavior.
The birth should have been a happy milestone for the pod of orcas.
(Aaaah, blog editor overcome with emotion)
The number of killer whales roaming between Vancouver and San Juan Island has dwindled to 75 members over the decades. Humans have reduced the stock of salmon, driven ships through the whales’ hunting lanes, and polluted their water.
I can't help but wonder what effect 300 tons of radioactive seawater being dumped into the Pacific for the last seven and half years has had.
The 400-pound, orange-tinted baby was the first live birth in the pod since 2015. It lived about half an hour. The display of mourning was not unprecedented, but researchers said it was rare to see a mother whale carry a body for so long.....
Didn't want to let it go, huh?
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**********
Time to rise above it all:
"Seattle plane theft shows gaps in security" by Alex Horton Washington Post August 13, 2018
WASHINGTON — The stunning theft of a large commercial airplane from a major US airport Friday night took no other lives than the pilot’s, but the incident has heightened worries about gaps in American aviation security.
Ah, the overwhelming stench of staged sh*t!
The theft and fatal crash of the 76-seat Bombardier Q400 near Seattle has raised questions about how a Horizon Air ground crew member could take control of an aircraft, get it in the air, and fly it willy-nilly over a major US metropolitan area for nearly an hour.
The 29-year-old hijacker, who officials identified as Richard B. Russell, performed midair stunts over Puget Sound after taking off from Seattle’s main airport.
We have now been told he learned through video games!!
When the control tower urged him to attempt to land the empty turboprop plane, he worried about harm to others on the ground. Better to take a nose dive, he said, ‘‘and call it a night.’’
I'm starting to wonder if this thing wasn't remote-controlled with this alleged mechanic some phonyed up fake.
Within minutes of the theft, two F-15s were scrambled from their Portland air base to intercept the aircraft, according to the North American Aerospace Defense Command.
Officials declined to describe the circumstances in which they would bring down an aircraft with a missile, citing operational security, but Air Force Captain Cameron Hillier, a NORAD spokesman, did say any decision would involve ‘‘a lot of collaboration’’ among pilots, commanders, on the ground, and others.
Remember Dick Cheney snapping his head at some staffer when he asked about shooting down Flight 77 or whatever it was approaching the Pentagon on 9/11 when he was in the WH situation bunker during the war games exercises?
The F-15 pilots attempted to divert the aircraft toward the Pacific Ocean while maintaining radio communication with controllers. The jets flew close enough to make visual contact, Hillier said.
Like they did with Payne Stewart, right?
Russell eventually plunged the aircraft into woods on sparsely inhabited Kentron Island, 25 miles south of the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
Brad Tilden, the CEO of Alaska Airlines, which owns Horizon Air, told reporters Saturday the incident ‘‘is going to push us to learn from this tragedy,’’ but he and other airline executives declined to say what measures they could take to prevent someone with security badges from doing it again.
Tilden said his industry operates on the principle of checking the backgrounds of employees, not locking down airplanes in secure areas.
Congress is already seeking to tighten the screening of airport employees and may do so with more urgency now, said Mary Schiavo, the former inspector general of the US Transportation Department......
THERE YOU GO!
They want more gun control, a horrific mass shooting occurs.
Got a Patriot Act ready to go with an Afghan war plan on your desk?
Bang, 9/11!
This happens with far too much frequency to be random coincidence, sorry!
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Yeah, gotta keep those skies quiet.
You might as well be walking on the sun, bah-bah-bah-bah-bah!!
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"She moved to the state last year. Now she’s running for Congress. Can she win in N.H.?" by James Pindell Globe Staff August 12, 2018
MANCHESTER, N.H. — On paper Maura Sullivan may be the perfect Democratic congressional candidate: Iraq War veteran, two Harvard degrees, and prominent roles in the Obama administration. She counts US Representative Seth Moulton and political adviser David Axelrod as allies, and she has raised more money than any other New Hampshire candidate for Congress in history.
There’s just one thing: Sullivan moved to the state three months before announcing her campaign, and she has almost zero ties to New Hampshire.
They used to call that carpetbagging!
To be fair, no one expected US Representative Carol Shea-Porter to announce her retirement. In fact, just a few months before Sullivan moved to New Hampshire, she was reportedly recruited to run for Congress in the Chicago suburbs where she grew up, but if she pulls off a win in the Sept. 11 primary — something local political observers say is increasingly possible — she would further upend the state’s parochial political culture built on grass-roots activism. In the district that includes Manchester, the Seacoast, and the state’s Lakes Region, she faces 10 candidates, many of whom, unlike her, have been embedded in the state party ranks for decades.
“The defining narrative in this race has been about Sullivan, someone who came out of state and is raising all this out-of-state money,” said University of New Hampshire political science professor Dante Scala. “New Hampshire’s self image already took a huge hit when Donald Trump won the last Republican presidential primary without going through the traditional retail politics motions, but this could take it to another level.”
She is one of a long list of Deep State Democrats running for House Seats, including Alexandra Chandler, a transgender woman with a background in naval intelligence, Gina Ortiz Jones, a former Air Force officer, and Abigail Spanberger, a well-credentialed former CIA officer (they make it sound like some remote experience; once they got you, they got you for life), all agents of change who can use their gender as a value-added credential in this, the ‘‘Year of the Woman’’ -- and if they don't win, they will holler fraud and Russian interference again!
Among the others running for the nod in the First District are Shea-Porter’s chief of staff, Naomi Andrews; former Somersworth mayor and longtime county prosecutor Lincoln Soldati; the son of a two-time former nominee for governor, tech businessman Deaglan McEachern; the longtime head of the New Hampshire AFL-CIO, Mark MacKenzie; and state Representative Mindi Messmer. Also in the race: The son of US Senator Bernie Sanders, Levi Sanders, who lives in Claremont, which is more than an hour outside of the district, but observers say the Democratic nomination will probably come down to two candidates: Sullivan and Executive Councilor Chris Pappas, both of whom are 38 years old.
It's a family business, but he was fired.
Pappas hails from a well-known Manchester family who own the Puritan Backroom restaurant, a local haunt for politicos. Both of the state’s US senators have endorsed him, and he has benefited from some outside money, with interest groups such as Equality PAC hoping to make him the first openly gay person to win major office in the state history.
Sullivan and Pappas are the only candidates airing television ads and are far ahead of competitors when it comes to staffing and campaign infrastructure. There has not been any recent public polling in the race.
Last week offered a capsule into the race: Pappas held a press conference Tuesday with Senator Jeanne Shaheen, who officially endorsed him. At the same moment, Sullivan was holding campaign events with former US secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius. No other campaign held public events that day.
Pappas doesn’t directly refer to Sullivan’s loose ties to the district, but he does hint at them. For example, his campaign suggested in June that all candidates in the race take the “Homegrown Campaign Pledge,” in which they vow that a majority of campaign funds would come from the district.
Early in the race, every media interview with Sullivan included questions about her residency. Sullivan would reply she has fond memories of vacationing in the state as a kid and that she once knocked on doors for Shea-Porter in 2006 when she was at Harvard.
More recently, she dismisses the issue, saying it is not what voters care about.
OOPS!
They do!
New Hampshire voters have seen outsider candidates before. In 2014, Republicans nominated Scott Brown — a former US senator from Massachusetts — over three local candidates. That same year, Republicans picked as their candidate for governor Walt Havenstein, who barely survived a residency challenge to remove him from the ballot, but there’s a key difference: Republicans, struggling for a strong contender to challenge Shaheen and then-governor Maggie Hassan four years ago, recruited Brown and Havenstein, whereas Democrats this year note there are plenty of local options for the First District.
The First District has been dubbed “the swingiest swing district” because it has switched party hands in every election since 2008. In 2016, both Trump and Shea-Porter, a Democrat, won the district.....
So who sat there when she didn't, and why isn't he running now?
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Related: In race for Suffolk DA, residency questions swirl
Also see: Is change coming to Massachusetts politics this fall?
We'll see how the dance turns out.
Well, my stop is approaching and the birds are singing.
*********
"Can artificial intelligence take the bias out of hiring?" by Rebecca Greenfield and Riley Griffin Bloomberg News August 12, 2018
Artificial intelligence promises to make hiring an unbiased utopia.
There’s certainly plenty of room for improvement. Employee referrals, a process that tends to leave underrepresented groups out, still make up a bulk of companies’ hires. Recruiters and hiring managers also bring their own biases to the process, studies have found, often choosing people with the ‘‘right-sounding’’ names and educational backgrounds.
Why don't we just do away with all the humans except the ruling cla$$ because that's what you guys seem to want.
Across the landscape, many companies lack racial and gender diversity, with the ranks of underrepresented people thinning at the highest levels of the corporate ladder. Fewer than 5 percent of chief executives at Fortune 500 companies are women, and there are only three black CEOs. Racial diversity among Fortune 500 boards is almost as dismal; four of five new appointees to corporate boards in 2016 were white.
Related: Netanyahu defends contentious law after Arab protest
Well, you know.
Some racism is more acceptable than others.
AI advocates argue the technology can eliminate some of these biases. Instead of relying on people’s feelings to make hiring decisions, companies such as Entelo and Stella IO use machine learning to detect the skills needed for certain jobs. The AI then matches candidates who have those skills with open positions. The companies claim not only to find better candidates, but to pinpoint those who may have previously gone unrecognized in the traditional process.
Stella IO’s algorithm assesses candidates based only on skills, for example, said founder Rich Joffe. Entelo has released Unbiased Sourcing Mode, a tool that further anonymizes hiring. The software allows recruiters to hide names, photos, schools, employment gaps, and markers of someone’s age, as well as to replace gender-specific pronouns — all in the service of reducing various forms of discrimination.
Like a blind date!
You won't know who you have hired until they get there!!
Yeah, algorithms and apps are the solution to all the world's problems! They will help us create an egalitarian Marxist society where everyone is equal!
AI is also being used to help develop internal talent. CorpU has formed a partnership with the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business to build a 20-week online course that uses machine learning to identify high-potential employees. Those ranked highest aren’t usually the individuals who were already on the promotion track, said Alan Todd, the CEO of CorpU, a technology platform for leadership development, and often exhibit qualities such as introversion that are overlooked during recruiting.
‘‘Human decision-making is pretty awful,’’ said Solon Borocas, an assistant professor in Cornell’s Information Science department who studies fairness in machine learning, but we shouldn’t overestimate the neutrality of technology, either, he cautioned.
I'm tired of the misanthropy coming from the elites in my pre$$, although he is right. Promoting the invasion of Iraq was a real bad idea.
Borocas’s research has found that machine learning in hiring, much like its use in facial recognition, can result in unintentional discrimination. Algorithms can carry the implicit biases of those who programmed them. Or they can be skewed to favor certain qualities and skills that are overwhelmingly exhibited among a given data set.
Why ruin it now?
I'm more than halfway through the article.
Not all algorithms are created equal — and there’s disagreement in the AI community about which algorithms have the potential to make hiring more fair.
One type of machine learning relies on programmers to decide which qualities should be prioritized in candidates. These ‘‘supervised’’ algorithms can be directed to scan for individuals who went to Ivy League universities or who exhibit certain qualities, such as extroversion.
Oh, no, the algorithm itself can be prejudiced?
‘‘Unsupervised’’ algorithms determine on their own which data to prioritize. The machine makes its own inferences, based on existing employees’ qualities and skills, to determine those needed by future employees. If that sample includes only a homogeneous group of people, it won’t learn how to hire different types of individuals, even if they might do well in the job.
So it's just like a person?
Companies can take steps to mitigate these forms of programmed bias. Pymetrics, an AI hiring startup, has programmers audit its algorithm to see if its giving preference to any gender or ethnic group. Software that heavily considers ZIP code, which strongly correlates with race, is likely to have a bias against black candidates, for example. An audit can catch these prejudices and allow programmers to correct them.
Can't we just get rid of the humans, and is this the same stuff in charge of censoring Facebook and Google stuff?
Stella IO also has humans monitoring the quality of the AI.
Got get rid of that!
There is no need for QC with machines on the job!
‘‘While no algorithm is ever guaranteed to be foolproof, I believe it is vastly better than humans,’’ said founder Joffe.
Joffe, huh?
AI for editing must have cut this off.
Boracas agrees that hiring with the help of AI is better than the status quo. The most responsible companies, however, acknowledge they can’t completely eliminate bias and tackle it head-on. ‘‘We shouldn’t think of it as a silver bullet,’’ he cautioned.....
Yeah, but at it won't be ‘‘people picking who they like based on unconscious biases.’’
It's a great idea for editing newspapers, too. Then they wouldn't be filled with supremacist garbage and elitist insult.
--more--"
Did you download the app?
"Venture capital for online ad firms falls as they struggle against Google, Facebook" by Claire Ballentine New York Times August 13, 2018
NEW YORK — Online advertising companies have struggled for several years as Google and Facebook have solidified their grip on digital dollars, slowing revenue for others.
Now, many ad tech companies and their investors are throwing up their hands.
Venture capital money going into ad tech startups is falling sharply, helping to push a wave of consolidation, and the pace of contraction has been quickening considerably. This summer has seen a flurry of activity.
“While all industries go through a maturation curve, this one faces a particular need for consolidation,” said Terry Kawaja, chief executive of LUMA Partners. “So many of these companies were not profitable.”
Although many consumers have never heard of ad tech firms, people’s online activity is influenced every day by these companies as they battle for a share of ad impressions on phones, tablets, and laptops. The “Mad Men” style of advertising workers has been replaced by the “math men” of ad tech startups, which specialize in gathering data on consumer preferences.
Advertising, the economic juice behind the Internet, has long been an attractive area for startups. In the past 10 years, the ease of forming companies and the availability of cheap venture capital led to a flood of ad tech startups, pushing boundaries on where and how ads were delivered. They introduced technologies such as the automation of ad buying — called programmatic advertising — and header bidding, in which many ad exchanges bid on publishers’ space simultaneously.
Overall spending for online ads continues to rise, to more than $88 billion in 2017, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, but more than 90 percent of that growth in 2017 went to Google or Facebook.
Ari Paparo, chief executive of ad tech startup Beeswax, said he had noticed a distinct decline in venture capital funding for ad tech firms just in the past two years. “The private market is influenced by the public market, and you saw so many fail as publicly traded entities,” he said.
There were 260 deals between ad tech companies and venture capital firms in 2014 but only 122 in 2017, according to PitchBook. In the first half of 2018, there have been 53 deals.
The fear is that when investment dries up, innovation will die.
Small startups are crucial to the industry because they often serve as catalysts for technological advances, said Doug Knopper, a founder of the ad tech platform FreeWheel, which was sold to Comcast in 2014.
“There’s still more innovation to come, but if VCs don’t put money into it because they don’t see a path to exit, does innovation stall?” he said, referring to venture capitalists.
Some are hoping a third big competitor could help the industry. Eric Adelman, president and one of the founders of Three Pillars Recruiting, said while the AT&T acquisition consolidates power in fewer places, the deal could help make AT&T a rival to Google and Facebook.
“Having three giants in the industry is much better than having two giants,” he said.
Is it?
Amazon is also making inroads into advertising, with a new advertising arm, raising the possibility it will become a top competitor. Its trove of data on consumer spending habits could make it a formidable opponent. The company recently reported that it generated $2.2 billion in revenue from its advertising business in the second quarter, more than twice as much as in the same period a year earlier.
He wants a $lice of the pie.
Not all smaller players are giving up. Kevin Hunt, senior vice president for the ad platform SpotX, is betting his company’s focus on video advertising will set it apart.
Eric Franchi, one of the founders and a former executive at digital advertising company Undertone, isn’t giving up on ad tech, either. After the software company Perion acquired Undertone in 2015, Franchi teamed up with Joe Zawadzki, chief executive of MediaMath, to fund an ad tech-focused venture-capital fund called MathCapital that helps the little guys.
“We want the best entrepreneurs that want to build ad tech companies to come to us,” Franchi said. “Over time, hopefully we can be a force for good in the space to help these companies get started.”
This is gro$$ $h*t.
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So what happens when the recession starts?
You going to move to YWCA?
