Author: Thomas Brewster; Publisher: Forbes; Publication Year: 2015. The following article discusses how for over a year, SilverPush, an Indian firm, was secretly using inaudible sounds that would play through people’s televisions and get picked up by their cell phones. The imperceivable sound would tune during commercials and get picked up by phones that had SilverPush’s technology embedded in various applications…
Author: Patricia A. Soranno, Kendra S. Cheruvelil, Kevin C. Elliott, Georgina M. Montgomery; Publisher: National Library of Medicine; Publication Year: 2015. The following article discusses how as data-sharing policies and ethics have become more prevalent in the sciences, the field of environmental sciences has not really caught up. This article further describes how in order for environmental science to be a more inclusive field, the scientists need to make the datasets that are serving as a basis for their…
Author: Sahana Rajan; Publisher: Suyati; Publication Year: 2015. The following article discusses how as big data becomes more common, what are the boundaries of data ethics? Intricate data processing can open up the possibility of gaining access to private data. We are influenced daily by big data through personalized advertisements. We need to redefine the boundaries of data accessibility. Every time we click…
Author: Patrick Lin; Publisher: TED-Ed; Publication Year: 2015. The following video breaks down a real-life ethical decision that has to be made when utilizing automated systems, particularly self-driving cars. The author presents a scenario in which a self-driving car is boxed into a lane, with 2 cars on each side of him and a dump truck ahead of him. Heavy items begin to fall out of the dump truck that will possibly…
Author: Patricia A. Soranno, Kendra S. Cheruvelil, Kevin C. Elliott, Georgina M. Montgomery; Publisher: BioScience; Publication Year: 2015. The following article discusses how many times we are concerned with the ethics of oversharing data, but there are also ethical issues when it comes to undersharing. In many scientific fields we are seeing an increase in data being shared, however, when it comes to environmental science, very little is being shared. While many scientists feel that it is their…
Author: Brent Daniel Mittelstadt, Luciano Floridi; Publisher: National Library of Medicine; Publication Year: 2015. The following paper provides an ethical assessment of emerging Big Data practices and a framework for governance. The authors discuss 2 main ideas: epistemology and the big data gap. The big data gap describes how small companies are unable to compete with larger companies as datasets become increasingly complex because they do…
Author: Lilly Irani; Publisher: Public Books; Publication Year: 2015. The following article describes how when things in the technology world become automated, the work that is being “replaced” is not actually replaced, but displaced. For example, a manufacturing process that has been automated may replace the individual workers, but over the long term, it just displaces them to monitor the machines and facilitate…
Author: Jake Porway; Publisher: O’Reilly Media; Publication Year: 2015. The following video discusses how data for good is becoming very popular, but many people are not thinking deeply about ethics as they do it, and as such, many of them miss the mark. Jake Porway mentions several principles for ethical data science: 1). Remember that finding problems can be harder than findings solutions; 2). Communication…
Author: Clifton B. Parker; Publisher: Stanford News; Publication Year: 2015. The following article highlights the benefits and risks of data analytics in sports. In 2015, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) launched an investigation searching for hacking in the St. Louis Cardinals’ organization. The article calls major league baseball teams to not “talk the talk” but “walk the walk” when it comes to…
Author: Ben Schmidt; Publisher: Ben Schmidt (Personal Website); Publication Year: 2015. The interactive visualization here allows users to input words to query 14 million Rate My Professor reviews and see the splits in occurrence for gender across different school departments, as well for positive and negative reviews. Negative words generally occur more often for female professors, such as ‘horrible’, ‘awful’…