Day: June 10, 2020

In a statement released on Wednesday, Amazon announced that the company would institute a one-year moratorium on police use of Rekognition, the company’s facial recognition software. The move follows IBM’s announcement earlier this week that IBM would no longer offer facial recognition products, citing the technology’s potential for abuse or misuse. As scrutiny of law enforcement ramps up, it looks as though there could be a referendum on the surveillance tools police can access.

This is certainly a sign that the needle of public acceptance of facial recognition is moving. Amazon’s Rekognition technology specifically has been called out by critics, …

Wednesday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing was Congress’s first big forum for discussing the killing of George Floyd, the nationwide protests it sparked, and the country’s problems with police brutality and racism. It was also apparently, in some Republicans’ view, a chance to try to redirect the conversation to some both sides-isms.

About midway through the question-and-answer period of the hearing — which was about a Democratic bill proposing several key policing reforms, including a ban on using chokeholds and creating a national database of officers who are fired for misconduct — Rep. Martha Roby (R-AL) asked George …

Before the coronavirus’s financial onslaught, economists and experts feared a recession would precipitously hurt black entrepreneurs. New data validates the concern. A report published this week by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that “the number of African-American business owners plummeted from 1.1 million in February 2020 to 640,000 in April.”

“The loss of 440,000 black business owners representing 41 percent of the previous level is disconcerting,” writes University of California Santa Cruz economist Robert W. Fairlie. This loss, he argues, means an increase in unaddressed “racial inequality,” with countless opportunities for “job creation, economic advancement, and longer-term wealth” …

Signifying the larger cultural shift felt around the US, Merriam-Webster will now include systemic oppression in its latest definition of racism.

The dictionary, which has long served as a gatekeeper of the English lexicon, made plans for the update after recent Drake University graduate Kennedy Mitchum emailed editors frustrated about the current definition’s inadequacy.

Merriam-Webster’s current definition of racism reads:

a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.”

a: doctrine or political program based on the assumption of racism and designed to execute

Some experts have hypothesized that the novel coronavirus made the jump from animals to humans in China’s wet markets, just like SARS before it. Unsurprisingly, many people are furious that the markets, which were closed in the immediate wake of the outbreak in China, have already reopened. It’s easy to point the finger at these “foreign” places and blame them for generating pandemics. But doing that ignores one crucial fact: The way people eat all around the world — including in the US — is a major risk factor for pandemics, too.

That’s because we eat a ton of …