unit 3 - readings (5 mcs) Flashcards
shotspotter
“The only places these devices are installed are in poor Black communities, nowhere else,” he said. “How many of us will end up in this same situation?”
Police chiefs call ShotSpotter a game-changer. The technology has been installed in about 110 American cities, often disproportionately placed in Black and Latino communities. Law enforcement officials say it helps get officers to crime scenes quicker making their neighborhoods safer.
This is especially apparent in law enforcement, which has turned to technology like acoustic gunshot detection. One such firm, ShotSpotter, says its evidence has increasingly been admitted in courtrooms, now some 200. ShotSpotter’s website says it’s a leader in policing technology solutions that helps stop gun violence by using algorithms to classify 14 million sounds as gunshots or something else.
…Police chiefs call ShotSpotter a game-changer. The technology has been installed in about 110 American cities, often disproportionately placed in Black and Latino communities. Law enforcement officials say it helps get officers to crime scenes quicker making their neighborhoods safer.
theranos
…In 2003, Holmes launched a company which she would come to name Theranos, a combination of the words “therapy” and “diagnostics.” She officially dropped out of Stanford University during her second year of college to pursue her business full time.
Pathologist Dr. Stephen Master explained why alleged cherry-picking of data is extremely problematic. “Imagine that your machine is actually failing half the time… if you keep rerunning your quality control… eventually you’ll find those happy times [due to chance] when it seemed to work and you’ll tell me that everything’s working perfectly. But that other half of the time patient results might be being released and that’s going to be wrong,” he said.
But despite these failures, Cheung said Theranos was still processing patient samples and that a supervisor instructed her not to speak up. As she saw these problems escalate without being addressed, Cheung eventually left the company only seven months after she started, and later filed a formal complaint with regulators…
After the [news] publication, the fallout happened quickly. Within two weeks…federal lab inspectors issued a warning that Theranos’ blood tests “pose immediate jeopardy to patient health and safety”….federal regulators banned Holmes…from running a laboratory for two years…Theranos…voided tens of thousands of test results…
who owns the data
…the stock photo company said it believes that Stability AI “unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright” to train its software and that Getty Images has “commenced legal proceedings in the High Court of Justice in London” against the firm…
AI firms claim this practice is covered by laws like the US fair use doctrine, but many rights holders disagree and say it constitutes copyright violation…..
A group of artists has filed a class-action complaint against the companies behind a trio of A.I. art generators, saying the services violated copyright and unfair competition laws.
Chiefly, the artists’ complaint states that A.I. generators have used their artworks without consent or compensation to build the training sets that inform the platforms’ algorithms. In particular, these services rely on the LAION-Aesthetics dataset, created by a German company and commissioned by Stability A.I.
greenwashing
Until this week, shoppers could go on to H&M’s website and check the environmental impact of 655 of its garments, as rated by the Higg Materials Sustainability Index (MSI), a suite of tools launched last year by a global nonprofit alliance, the Sustainable Apparel Coalition (SAC).
However, the SAC has announced that it is “pausing” its product-labeling tool after the Norwegian Consumer Authority (NCA) warned H&M Group two weeks ago against using the Higg index to support its environmental claims.
…Norway’s consumer watchdog did not investigate H&M’s claims, it did so with those of a Norwegian outdoor brand, Norrøna (who also used the Higg index on its website). It concluded that the data was misleading to consumers and the claims unsubstantiated.
For example, there is no information about whether a garment will release microplastics, or is biodegradable. “The Higg SMI does not enable consumers to make informed decisions,” added Grogan…
“…they’re misleading consumers by attaching this wildly inaccurate data to clothes and footwear.”
Higg CEO Jason Kibbey is the first to admit that the tool does not account for all the metrics that determine a product’s environmental footprint. That was intentional, he says, because the goal was to create a platform to allow users to compare different materials…and to ensure the information was digestible…Climate change is a big problem. Having data around it is not,” he says. “Saying that the data is not available in 2022, when the whole world is trying to focus on climate change — it’s not available because the fashion industry [hasn’t prioritized it]…Is it even reasonable to simplify and aggregate environmental impact data into a simple chart or database? That can help expedite decision-making, but can be surface level at a time when experts say the industry needs more nuance, not less. Should such databases instead include as much detail as possible — which risks overloading people with more information than they can handle?.
j and j risperdal
Dr. David Kessler, commissioner of the FDA from 1990 to 1997, recently filed a report in the litigation that claims Janssen controlled and influenced the findings of a 2003 study that looked at the potential side effects of Risperdal on children, concluding that there is no direct correlation between prolactin elevation caused by Risperdal and breast development among boys, which is known as gynecomastia.
Kessler…indicated that those conclusions were misleading or outright lies
Risperdal is a billion-dollar antipsychotic medicine with real benefits — and a few unfortunate side effects.
It can cause strokes among the elderly. And it can cause boys to grow large, pendulous breasts; one boy developed a 46DD bust.
Yet Johnson & Johnson marketed Risperdal aggressively to the elderly and to boys while allegedly manipulating and hiding the data about breast development. J&J got caught, pleaded guilty to a crime and has paid more than $2 billion in penalties and settlements. But that pales next to some $30 billion in sales of Risperdal around the world.
In short, crime pays, if you’re a major corporation.
At the same time, J&J was also expanding into another forbidden market: children. The company began peddling the drug to pediatricians, so that by 2000, more than one-fifth of Risperdal was going to children and adolescents.
knowledge vs proximal
high knowledge/low proximal: theranos
low knowledge/low proximal: shotspotter
high knowledge/high proximal: takada airbags and greenwashing
high knowledge/high proximal: johnson and johnson risperdal
