Science & Technology

Black communities will be disproportionately saddled with billions of dollars of losses because of climate change as flooding risks grow in the coming decades, according to research published Monday. The United States faces a 26-percent increase in flood risk within the next 30 years, according to the study. Writing in the journal Nature Climate Change, […]

Humans are error-prone and biased, but that doesn’t mean that algorithms are necessarily better. Still, the tech is already making important decisions about your life and potentially ruling over which political advertisements you see, how your application to your dream job is screened, how police officers are deployed in your neighborhood, and even predicting your […]

Amazon on Monday became the latest tech company to face criticism for sharing public-facing statements supporting police reform and the Black Lives Matter movement while continuing internal policies and business practices that perpetuate the status quo. Amazon on Twitter has called for an end to “the inequitable and brutal treatment of black people” in the […]

In the new investigative documentary Seeking Mavis Beacon, director Jazmin Jones and producer Olivia McKayla Ross offer a unique exploration of technology, representation and digital identity for Black millennials.   For many, their first introduction to the keyboard was through Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, the computer software featuring a beautiful, seemingly successful Black woman as the […]

Amazon’s face surveillance technology is the target of growing opposition nationwide, and today, there are 28 more causes for concern. In a test the ACLU recently conducted of the facial recognition tool, called “Rekognition,” the software incorrectly matched 28 members of Congress, identifying them as other people who have been arrested for a crime. The […]

The excruciatingly painful medical experiments went on until his body was disfigured by a network of scars. John Brown, an enslaved man on a Baldwin County, Ga., plantation in the 1820s and ’30s, was lent to a physician, Dr. Thomas Hamilton, who was obsessed with proving that physiological differences between black and white people existed. […]

AI is sending people to jail—and getting it wrong  MIT Technology Review Source link

“Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhumane.” – Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “With Henrietta (Lacks) unconscious on the operating table in the center of the room, her feet in stirrups, the surgeon on duty, Dr. Lawrence Wharton Jr … sat on a stool […]

Slate is making its coronavirus coverage free for all readers. Subscribe to support our journalism. Start your free trial. When cities started collecting COVID-19 infection rates in their areas, some started breaking the data down by ZIP code to see who was most at risk. Then they went even further to break down the caseload […]