mathbabe

I was involved in an interesting discussion the other day with other data scientists on the mistake people make when they describe a “racist algorithm”. Their point, which I largely agreed with, is that algorithms are simply mirroring back to us what we’ve fed them as training data, and in that sense they are no more racist than any other mirror. And yes, it’s a complicated mirror, but it’s still just a mirror.

This issue came up specifically because there was a recent Mic.com story about how, if you google image search “professional hairstyles for work,” you’ll get this:

but if you google image search “unprofessional hairstyles for work” you’ll instead get this:

This is problematic, but it’s also clearly not the intention of the Google engineering team, or the google image search algorithm, to be racist. It is instead a reflection of what we as a community have presented to that algorithm as “training data.” So in that sense we should blame ourselves, not the algorithm. The algorithm isn’t (intentionally) racist, because it’s not intentionally anything.

And although that’s true, it’s also dodging some other truth about how we talk about AI and algorithms in our society (and since we don’t differentiate appropriately between AI and algorithms, I’ll use them interchangeably).

Namely, we anthropomorphize AI all the time. Here’s a screenshot of what I got when I google image searched the phrase “AI”:

Out of the above images, only a couple of them do not have some reference to human brains or bodies.

In other words, we are marketing AI as if it’s human. And since we do that, we are treating it and reacting to it as quasi-humans would. That means when it seems racist, we’re going to say the AI is racist. And I think that, all things considered, it’s fair to do this, even though there’s no intention there.

Speaking of intention and blame, I am of the mind that, even though I do not suspect any Google employee of making their algorithms prone to this kind of problem, I still think they should have an internal team that’s on the look-out for this kind of thing and address it. Just as, as a parent, I am constantly on the look-out for my kids getting the wrong ideas about racism or other prejudices; I correct their mistakes. And I know I’m anthropomorphizing the google algorithms when I talk about them like children, but what can I say, I am a sucker for marketing.

I’ve been going to Alt Banking every week for almost 5 years. Here’s what I’ve learned:

There are lots of ways to break up the big banks.

First, there are ways to create incentives for banks to get smaller by themeselves. For example, we could impose more capital requirements on bigger banks than smaller ones, or more regulations, or we could say that banks beyond a specific size couldn’t engage in certain kinds of behavior, or trade certain kinds of derivatives, or we could impose taxes on those trades that are heavier for larger banks. Progressive taxes that max out at 100% profit when the bank is as big as Bank of America.

Next, we could outlaw huge banks. We could do this by simply defining a legal limit to the size of a bank, or its geographic scope, or the amount of risk it carries. We could even say that its connections to the other financial institutions has to be adequately uncomplicated that, in an event of bankruptcy, we could let it fail and it wouldn’t be a biggie. We could give banks 4 years to get compliant.

Or we could go nuts and say that banks are no longer able to “create money” at all, which is to say we could put an end to fractional reserve lending. Or, we could just do that for big banks, where reserve requirements would get larger as banks get larger. We could change accounting laws around banking to make it a lot harder for them to hide risk. We could make it illegal for them to trade derivatives, or impose a new version of Glass-Steagall to make certain things illegal. We could impose all sorts of laws that would blow them out of the water permanently.

Or we could go the other way entirely, and nationalize one of the big banks, or all of them, and let them remain big but treat them like utilities, and make them super duper boring, and pay no bonuses and have the CEO get paid something like $200K.

And I’m not saying what specific we should do – my heart’s probably closest to imposing high capital requirements and limited trading for big banks so they’ll make themselves smaller – but in any case, there are plenty of things we could do that there is no political appetite for. Once again, there’s no shortage of possible plans.

What we do have a shortage of, though, is political will. That’s why we don’t talk about this very much, and we might not have talked about it at all had Sanders not entered the race.

Which is why, when I hear people complaining about Sanders not have a specific enough plan for breaking up the big banks, I think it’s hogwash. What Sanders has, which is sorely needed, in fact is the crucial missing ingredient to any discussion around big banks, is the political will to do something. Once the political will is there, the details can be sorted out by people who think about this stuff all the time.

This is a guest post by Maxwell Feiner, a New York City high school kid interested in math. Maxwell and I have been having fun math conversations on Friday afternoons for a while now, and I’ve been impressed by the tools he uses, so I asked him to write up a description of them for mathbabe.

When I am doing math in my spare time there are three tools that I use heavily to aid in the process. These three being Desmos.com and Wolframalhpa.com for the aid in solving problems, and Brilliant.org for finding great problems to solve.

Brilliant

Brilliant is a fantastic site for users to obtain unique challenging problems, as well as to post solutions to problems posed by others. Think of it as a social site for math. Most of the problems are math, but there are some physics and chemistry problems as well. I like the problems a lot because they require insight beyond what is taught in school classes. They normally cannot be solved using one formula or pre-learned method, but instead require deeper thought and a combination of different concepts in order to be solved. Signing up is required to use the site. It is free. Some sample problems are shown below.

Desmos

Desmos is a great, free, and interactive online graphing calculator. It is simple to use, but at the same time very powerful. Besides just graphing equations, the user can put in adjustable values of variables and watch how the graph changes as the variables do. For example, the user could enter the equation y=a*sin(bx+c) and create adjustable values for a,b, and c, then see how changing them affects the graph of the function.

To change the values of the variables, the user can use either sliders (shown), manually input values, or put in a set of numbers or range, such as c=[1,2], where two graphs will be displayed for c=1 and c=2, or  c=[1,2,…10](also shown), where 10 graphs will be displayed, for every integer from 1 to 10. The sliders can also be used to make animations by continually and smoothly incrementing the value of one of the variables. In the graph pictured below I also used the restrictions capability, allowing me to only show a certain part of the graph.

Another cool feature is movable points, which is demonstrated in two of my own graphs which have links to them below. There are so many features that it would be very hard to explain them all here, so I have provided a link to some of their tutorials on their website and a few examples of some interactive graphs I created. You can create an account and publish your work too.

Here’s a tutorial, and here are some examples of my work:

1. Tangents to a parabola,
2. the equation of a square, and
3. construction of a sine wave

WolframAlpha

WolframAlpha is a powerful computational knowledge engine that can be used for many purposes, both math and non-math related. One thing it is particularly helpful for is graphing 3-D equations. Just type in an equation,1-D,2-D, or 3-D and it will be graphed. Once on the site, some interesting queries to try include the ones pictured below.

Other ones to try (just copy and paste into WolframAlpha or click on the links below)

• 
• 
• area under from 1 to 2
• rotation of 45 degrees
• 
• Parabola vs hyperbola
• (Population of China)/(Population of U.S.)

This is just barely scratching the surface of what can be done with the powerful tool.

Conclusion

After working with these three tools for a while, I, and many others have benefitted so much from using them. If you are looking for aids in solving problems, or more problems to solve, I highly recommend checking them out. 

1. Manpons:

The only thing missing from this ad is something analogous to the “And now it has 5 blades. Because you couldn’t possibly do with only 4 blades” one-upmanship of the men’s razor industry.

2. I am going to this:

The full name of the conference is The Color of Surveillance: Georgetown Law Conference to Explore Racial Bias of Government Monitoring, and I’m looking forward to it. Anyone worried about the dystopian future of government surveillance should learn about what’s happening right now to poor minority neighborhoods.

3. I’m not going to this:

Here’s a ridiculous quote from this conference which, typically, conflates what millennials “like” with what they’ve had to put up with because they were born into a world of enormous student debt and terrible job security (h/t Ernie Davis):

Game technologies are becoming increasingly popular in the workplace since they appeal to the millennial generation who have grown up playing video and computer games together with using mobile devices. But this is much more than fun! Serious games can generate up to millions of data points that can then be fed into machine-learning algorithms to help employers make smart HR decisions to win the war for talent.

4. I’m Worried About Self-driving Cars

Because won’t it encourage enormously wasteful use of cars? If I can go to sleep while I’m in my car and it’s driving to Lexington, Virginia, what will stop me from visiting my buddy Aaron every weekend?

And for that matter, why even be in the car while it’s going somewhere? I can send my car to do errands I don’t want to do, or deliver packages I don’t want to bother sending from the post office.

Last night I had drinks with someone who knows a ton about the Apple vs. FBI case. He explained to me the following:

• The way the FBI eventually figured out a way into the San Bernadino shooter’s phone was extremely involved and expensive, involving things like shaving tiny pieces of hardware apart without dropping anything or exposing anything to too much heat.
• This is a good thing, because that expensive process is extremely hard to scale.
• Also, there was no legal precedent created.
• Moreover, Apple has been making iPhones increasingly secure by default, for example with default encrypted iCloud data in more recent version of its operating system.
• Which means that in a couple of years, most people using iPhones will be pretty well protected from even expensive FBI searches, again as long as there’s no legal requirement to create backdoors.

This story is interesting, but it still leaves me extremely unsatisfied. In particular, I’ve really gotten riled up by stupid media stories that “Apple won”.

I’ve maintained for a while that this story isn’t a story about Apple at all, because Apple is not accountable to the public in any real way; Tim Cook could change his mind tomorrow about whether to care about consumer security and we wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.

I think I have to amend that claim somewhat, though. Because what’s really happening is that Apple, or rather Tim Cook, is pushing through his vision of consumer protection, knowing that there will be very little the U.S. government, or any other government for that matter, will be able to do about it on a technical level, unless they’re willing to make iPhones illegal altogether.

That’s not without precedent. For example, there are some radio scanners that are illegal in the U.S. and other countries. But it’d be hard to imagine what the public’s response would be to being told that they can no longer buy iPhones.

So, the way I see it, it’s Apple vs. everyone, and Apple is feeling pretty good about its chances.

And look, I happen to agree with Apple this time. But it’s a screwed up and tenuous situation, and it’s deeply anti-democratic. We haven’t actually had the urgently needed conversation about whether Americans have the right to encrypted communication. Instead, we’re relying on a private company to make de facto policy for our benefit. What?

Here’s what I’d like to see: a real conversation about what Americans are entitled to. It’s a conversation that Obama started a couple of weeks ago at SXSW:

if the government can’t get in, then everybody is walking around with a Swiss Bank account in their pocket. There has to be some concession to the need to be able to get into that information somehow.

I’ll start. Obama’s comparing the individual’s desire for privacy with a Swiss Bank account is a smear tactic on the one hand – we’re trying to avoid taxes or something, which smacks of the tired line “don’t worry if you have nothing to hide” – and it’s disingenuous on the other hand – acting as if all information is equivalent, when we know that the government may claim access to our financial information, for tax purposes, but should never have access to our love letters. And since both kinds of information is stored on our phone, I think right there we have a pretty great argument explaining why our phones are nothing like Swiss Bank accounts.

Here’s what I’d like to see. A nuanced discussion about what types of data the government should have access to and under what circumstances, where the government has to make its case and the public gets to weigh in, since we care about terrorism too.

1. The life and death of a metric

There’s a problem, or at least potentially a problem. Someone figures out how to measure the problem. The measurement isn’t perfect, and everyone admits that, but nevertheless nobody argues against using it, since knowing something is better than knowing nothing.

That metric is used a few times, and people get used to hearing it, and they mostly forget what its limitations were. Moreover, they start assigning blame to it. Instead of seeing a “bad score” as something the indicates a need for more resources and support, it becomes a moral failing: take responsibility for your terrible score and do something about it.

Stakes get high. People are measured, judged, and rewarded or punished based on their score. They start focusing on improving their score at all costs, and the small imperfections of the scoring system in the first place are magnified and distorted. Cheating happens too.

Before long, it’s all about the score, at least until dissenting voices point out that all this focus on the score hasn’t actually addressed the initial problem. In fact, it’s gotten worse over time. The focus on this metric is given up by some, held on to by others who have found other uses for it, and everyone starts looking around for a new metric to solve the initial problem.

2. Example: education reform

A few decades ago we decided to look into the international competitiveness of our nation’s children. We developed tests to see how much people in different states and different schools knew about certain things. This wasn’t a perfect process, to be sure, since the curriculums varied from state to state and school to school, but it did yield results, and they were numeric, so people trusted them.

The argument for doing this was convincing – how could anyone argue against wanting to know where we stand on education? With this knowledge in hand, surely it would be easier to know where there were struggling schools and give them help.

But instead of coming to the aid of the school systems that needed help, we ended up punishing them, blaming the principals and teachers for the problems. The fact that the scores were extremely correlated to poverty was explained away by saying our teachers had “given up on poor students.”

Thus began the era of high stakes testing for students and teachers, where teachers were “held accountable” for their students’ progress on standardized tests, if not their scores. It’s purely punitive, and a far cry from the original purpose of helping out those who need it. We haven’t equalized funding for schools, for example.

Moreover, it hasn’t helped the students and schools which are struggling. In fact scores overall seem to be going up for everyone, but the rich students, to put it bluntly, are improving faster than the poor ones. And in the meantime everyone is getting sick of all the tests.

3. What’s next in educational reform?

Recent research has shown there might be a new explanation for why some kids do well when others don’t, and it’s all about “character,” or “grit.” Kids who have it in abundance seem resilient in the face of failure, and they thrive even in tough situations.

Hallelujah! Now we can try to develop kids’ grit quotients, or better yet, we can hold teachers accountable for doing so. The only problem with this plan is that it’s actually kind of hard to consistently measure grit.

Until now. Angela Duckworth, who is one of the social scientists that has been studying grit in children and who recently wrote an opinion piece on the subject, has helped develop a scorecard, based on self-assessment, so that kids can be scored.

In her piece, Duckworth warns us that the scoring system isn’t perfect, and she has even said it’s a bad idea to use this scoring system for accountability; it could undermine the very thing we’re trying to promote.

But she’s also said that kids can improve their scores, with help from teachers, and that high scores are good signs for progress in behavioral and academic achievement.

Let’s not go there.

I haven’t been blogging much lately, partly because I’ve been recovering from a stupid bike accident from last Friday, where I fell forward over my handlebars on the West Side bikepath, and partly because, as a result of my accident, I decided to stop and smell the roses a bit, meaning I actually read a novel. It was an amazing experience, reading a novel for the first time in years, especially one this distracting. It’s called Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel, and if you have time, please read it.

I’m mostly recovered now, and I have to say, my one week of detox from the normal news cycle has been freaking amazing. I feel restored. Restored enough to read the recent Flint Water Advisory Task Force Report.

And, holy crap. It’s really good, and places the blame squarely on the State of Michigan, Governor Snyder, and in particular on the Emergency Management system that cares only about money over public health. I’ve blogged about the fucked up and racist system of Emergency Managers in Michigan before.

For a summary of the time-line of events which led to the widespread lead poisoning, take a look at pages 16 through 21. After that, if you want to get something else done this morning, jump to the following excerpt from page 54 which gets to the very heart of the issue:

Environmental justice embraces two fundamental principles: (1) the fair, non-discriminatory treatment of all people; and (2) the provision for meaningful public involvement of all people— regardless of race, color, national origin or income—in government decision-making regarding environmental laws, regulations and polices. Environmental justice or injustice, therefore, is not about intent. Rather, it is about process and results—fair treatment, equal protection, and meaningful participation in neutral forums that honor human dignity.

Environmental injustice is not about malevolent intent or deliberate attacks on specific populations, nor does it come in measures that overtly violate civil rights. Environmental injustices as often occur when parties charged with the responsibility to protect public health fail to do so in the context of environmental considerations.

The facts of the Flint water crisis lead us to the inescapable conclusion that this is a case of environmental injustice. Flint residents, who are majority Black or African American and among the most impoverished of any metropolitan area in the United States, did not enjoy the same degree of protection from environmental and health hazards as that provided to other communities. Moreover, by virtue of their being subject to emergency management, Flint residents were not provided equal access to, and meaningful involvement in, the government decision-making process.

The occurrence of environmental injustice in the Flint water crisis does not indict or diminish other public and private efforts to address Flint’s many challenging circumstances. However, irrespective of the intent of the parties involved, the simple reality is that the Flint water crisis is a case of environmental injustice.

Also, there’s this on page 56:

Among African American seniors, the protracted Flint water crisis echoes the tragic Tuskegee syphilis study and the decision not to treat smallpox among freedmen in the aftermath of the American Civil War. From this perspective, it is noted that measuring blood lead levels without removing the sources of lead from the environment—in this case, lead-tainted water—appears the equivalent of using Flint’s children (and adults) as human bioassays.

I’m so glad this work was done.

Today’s guest post is by Wolfie O’Neil, my 7-year-old son whom I most recently wrote about in this post, and who learned to bike this week . 

When you think of currency in the digital age, stop thinking money, not even Bitcoin. Start thinking about data.

There’s a reason Google, Facebook, and Amazon dominate their respective markets, and it’s not just because they have lots of customers. In fact it’s the opposite: they have better products through better and more personal data about their customers.

Take Google as an example. When people have tried to argue that Google is anti-competitive, the counter-argument is that “people could just use Bing.” But that exposes the fallacy that we searchers are Google’s customers. We’re not, we’re just its product, or rather our data is. Google’s customers are the companies that buy ads on Google’s search results page and on other websites where Google places ads.

And, as Nathan Newman points out, Google’s control over people’s data is anti-competitive, and Bing or any other search engine (ad engine) cannot actually compete with Google, because Google has a corner on the currency in this particular market.

See what I mean? Google controls the world’s search and email data, and similarly Facebook controls the world’s social interaction data, including photos, and Amazon controls the world’s – or at least the country’s – purchase data and supply-chain data.

That’s why they’re so big and powerful. It’s not simply a question of how often we use their services, it’s a question of how much data they can extract from us while we do so. And that’s why the White House is trying to get them to help them fight terrorism, because they have all the resources needed.

Which brings me to my subject of today, namely Amazon’s recently filed patent for using facial recognition to authorize purchases (hat tip Mike Lawler).

This is a pure play for a new dataset, that so far only Facebook has had access to. When someone uploads a photo to Facebook, sometimes they do Facebook the service of labeling the people in the picture, which helps Facebook create a rather large database of pictures of people, and in particular how the same person can look slightly different in different pictures or at different times of their lives.

[How helpful we are to supply these companies with their data! Recently I’ve been taking to labeling my pictures with ridiculous names just as a small and useless protest against this overwhelming force.]

So, Amazon wants in on the facial recognition game, and they’re going to make it a condition to get your stuff: you want to empty your shopping cart? You’ll have to give us more data, thanks. We’ll collect it all and we’ll be able to compete with Facebook in this specific realm of data.

Do you know who else really likes the idea of good facial recognition data? People who do video surveillance. That’s why we take our pictures in passport control nowadays when we enter the country. That’s why there are cameras everywhere we walk in New York City.

So far the facial recognition technology isn’t very good, but it could get better fast if we take a selfie video every time we buy a can of coffee online. And if that happens, we won’t need the GPS in our phones to give away our locations, because just by having faces we will be doing enough.

I’ve resigned myself to lots of data collection, but this selfie stuff is going too far. I’d like us to resist, which means having a plan before it begins in earnest.

Any suggestions?

I was quite annoyed this morning to read this recent advice column about parenting teenagers by Lisa Damour, entitled The Best Way to Fight With a Teenager. In first four paragraphs of this column, she never talks about what parents do, only what teenagers do. An excerpt:

Adolescents who favor either of the first two routes — escalating fights or stubbornly refusing to engage in them — are the ones most likely to be or become depressed, anxious or delinquent.

As if adolescents actually favor refusing to engage in disagreements. What a ridiculous notion.

Actually, it’s more like this: parents regularly attack and/or discipline their children for thinking differently, having dissenting voices, and generally speaking trying to establish their independence. I’m not going out on a limb when I propose the majority of teenagers who “refuse to engage” are reacting entirely rationally to being previously shut down for expressing an ounce of opinion.

Parents think that they have difficult teenagers, but the reverse is just as often the case: teenagers have difficult parents. Instead of a column for parents to think about all the dysfunctional ways their teenagers deal with disagreement, there should be a book for teenagers to learn how to deal with parents who cannot deal with being challenged. Maybe I’ll write it.

I’ll go further, in fact. Teenagers are easier to deal with if for parents who like their views challenged and who can react positively to having their hypocrisies pointed out to them. Because that’s what teenagers do, and god bless them, they are the most honest critics in the world. By the time they’re grown up they’ve learned to lie to make people feel better, but I’d rather spend time with a teenager any day of the week.

So, here’s my parenting advice, folks: listen to your teenager, because he or she is probably telling you something honest and true, in fact something so honest and so true that you can barely recognize it and it sometimes hurts. Don’t kill the messenger.

This Sunday our friend Tom Adams visited the Alt Banking group and talked to us about how the high-end NYC real estate bubble is due to burst soon, if it hasn’t already.

He introduced his topic with an analogy from oil. When credit was super easy to obtain, post-crisis and during the era of quantitative easing, there was an incredible amount of investment in fracking and drilling. Everyone wanted a piece of the action, and the secondary junk bond and CLO markets were more than happy to oblige with plentiful cash.

The result was an over-supply in an economically stagnant era of low demand. Instead of seeing the economic law of supply and demand kicking in, however, we saw the opposite, at least temporarily: companies that were in need of cash to pay their creditors regularly pumped as much oil as possible to make their payments, resulting in even more supply and the collapse of the market.

According to Tom, we’re seeing a similar dynamic in NYC luxury housing, and for a similar reason: too much easy money for developers to buy and develop luxury housing, without regard for the demand. But, whereas in the case of oil the markets are relatively transparent and move quickly, the real estate market is famously opaque and sly, with information leak managed by real estate brokers who have skin in the game. And while ultra luxury condos are a “hard asset” they aren’t really a commodity: no one “needs” a $20 million condo like they need oil or wheat. It’s really more like art, where the market is whimsical and changes when a particular collector or two die or lose interest.

Even so, it’s possible to do some basic reckoning. If you count the number of very rich people who are on the market for Manhattan apartments that cost more than $100 million, or even $10 million, you’ll soon realize they mostly already bought them. That means that hundreds of units which have come on to the market in the past couple of years, and that are due to come on to the market this year (5126, the most since 2007, of which 63% are luxury, defined here as $2400/square foot or more), are essentially going to just sit there, with no buyers in sight.

Just to give you some apples to apples comparisons, there were a total of 177 apartments sold for $10m or more in 2015, down 13.7% from prior year (205 in 2014). According to streeteasy.com, there are 520 units currently listed for sale over $10m.

How could this have happened? It’s a market failure, but according to Tom it’s not that hard to believe given the availability of cheap, overseas loans and expensive land prices. Everyone and their uncle wanted a piece of the luxury real estate market, which has been a gold mine for developers for years, to the point where they’ve been building like crazy without looking around them for indications to pause.

The dynamic of success has made land prices so high that it’s become unattractive to build affordable housing, and moreover the labor with which the luxury apartment building is built is non-union to save on costs. The developers argue that they simply cannot afford to pay their builders well.

There are already signs that the bubble is bursting. First, look at the number of recently sold new apartments that are already listed as for rent. There are 6700 of them, which is a high since 2005. Also, the count of new listings are up 9% for luxury apartments – while going down 3% for non-luxury housing – to 4,055 units, and the time on the market is also way up.

There’s another connection between oil and real estate markets. Namely, the people who buy the stuff. Lots of the luxury apartments are being bought – often through shell companies – by international elite who got rich in part through their investments in oil and other commodities. So the drop in the price of oil, although great for the average consumer who buys gas (and not great at all for the environment), means that there are fewer potential buyers looking to invest in apartment-shaped commodities. The recent problems in China aren’t helping either for the supply of billionaires.

So, what can we expect? First, a wave of developer defaults, like we recently saw in Harlem, which will slow down or stop the new construction. Second, the apartments that already exist will be rented or sold at below-luxury rates, cannibalizing the market at that level. At some point we might even see land prices going down far enough for developers to consider addressing the needs of the middle class, whatever that might mean in New York City. Fingers crossed.

Most importantly, the impending luxury housing crash should be an opportunity for community groups to demand a new conversation about what land and housing are supposed to be for, hopefully convincing city officials that they represent all New Yorkers, not just the super rich.

Thank goodness Jared Bernstein wrote this op-ed in the New York Times so I didn’t have to. An excerpt:

The defense of globalization rests on viewing Americans primarily as consumers, not workers, based on the assumption that we care more about low prices than about low wages.

When you hear someone talk about free trade, you can count on them to talk about cheaper products but to sidestep all the American jobs that have been lost through free trade agreements, and more generally the loss of power of workers and unions, which leads to worse jobs, fewer hours, shittier benefits, and lower salaries.

This topic is obviously a huge part of what appeals to Trump supporters (as well as Bernie supporters), and the faster we understand, discuss, and address this the better.

In other words, free trade agreements don’t only talk about taxing goods on their way to other places. Just that, alone, would likely be net bad for the world’s economies, although there are obvious exceptions, for example agricultural industries in poor countries that cannot compete with Monsanto.

Free trade agreements also relate directly to jobs being moved over borders. And that’s where America, by being a rich nation relative to others, will lose out, while countries like China and Bangladesh gain. Because if you’re a t-shirt company in the US, it’s cheaper to have your products made in Bangladesh than in the US, so that’s what happens when there are free trade agreements allowing it.

It’s also not true that this off-shoring is necessarily bad overall. It’s clearly true that the Chinese people working to make iPads are thankful for their jobs overall. But in this case it’s not a win-win situation; it’s more of a win-lose, where Chinese workers win huge and American workers lose medium.

Say it another way: imagine that the rest of the world consisted of a bunch of countries like Sweden, where the minimum wage is high and working conditions are good. In that case free trade agreements would attract jobs to the US, and American workers would be psyched, and would demand better conditions. That’s not the world we live in, though. Free trade means we enrich other countries with opportunities that they’d hungry for and are willing to do for less.

To be clear, I’m not saying this aspect of free trade is something we should necessarily stop altogether. I care about poor Chinese people as well as poor Americans. But I do think it’s time for people – especially economists – to acknowledge that the people who have been damaged or threatened by free trade in this country are many; possibly a majority.

They have a real gripe, and they don’t see, and possibly don’t care about the benefits to Chinese workers that their suffering represents, and they’re super pissed off. We need to start coming up with ways to mitigate the problems before Trump or someone like him becomes president.

Not sure if you’ve read this article, entitled She Was Asked to Switch Seats. Now She’s Charging El Al With Sexism. Well I have, and I have to say what the woman is saying makes a lot of sense. I share her annoyance. Favorite line:

I think to myself, here I am, an older woman, educated, I’ve been around the world, and some guy can decide that I shouldn’t sit next to him. Why?

Let me clarify: I had read that article, a couple of weeks ago, before my recent flight to London for a talk.

I’ve been traveling too much lately: Brussels last month, Amsterdam and London these past two weeks. I’m behind with my consulting work, and I was desperate to catch up when I boarded my Norwegian Air flight in London. I worked on my computer after getting through security in Gatwick, and I was happy to have secured an aisle seat with an empty seat next to it on the plane so I could be somewhat comfortable while I worked on the 8 hour flight. Norwegian Air doesn’t make it easy to arrange your seat, but I’d gotten early to the airport to do it, and I got on the plane and immediately cracked open my computer and started coding.

Leave me the hell alone, world. I’m working.

So you can imagine my mood when a flight attendant approached me and asked me to switch my seats with another so that an orthodox Jew could sit in my seat, away from women.

Until that moment, obviously, I hadn’t been looking around, but now I did. There was a man on the other side of the empty middle seat next to me, and across the aisle was another overweight middle-aged woman like myself.

Suddenly I found myself wondering how in the world someone like me, or my aisle mate, could possibly be so sexually attractive that some man would lose control around us. Then, in the next moment, I remembered the above article. I said to the flight attendant, “you know there’s a lawsuit around this very issue, right?” to which she replied, “I’m not making you move! I’m asking you if you’d like to.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re not making me. That makes me feel better. I find the request inappropriate.”

I honestly thought the conversation would be over at that point, but the flight attendant then mentioned that I “wouldn’t be losing an empty middle seat” since the orthodox man also had an empty middle seat next to him. But that made even less sense, of course, because if anything the woman across the aisle from my seat was closer to me than the man next to me across the middle seat. And he wasn’t making her move too, right? What. The. Fuck.

It is surprising to me how annoyed I got. I thought of myself as accommodating until that very moment – just as I used to think of myself as nice until people corrected me a few years ago.

But here’s the thing, I’m not accommodating. At least not anymore. I think it has to do with the fact that I no longer want to have children.

After having my third son in 2008, I agreed with my husband that we wouldn’t have any more kids. But, to be honest, I still wanted more kids. There was some part of my lower brain that was thinking, maybe….

About a year ago, that changed. Maybe it was the book. Writing a book is something like having another kid. Maybe I realized I didn’t need more kids, I could instead just write more books. Maybe get a dog. I might eventually have grandchildren.

For whatever reason, all of a sudden I actually didn’t want more of my own kids. And that changed my relationship with the world, and specifically with men.

I’m just being honest here – after all, it’s a blog – but there was something in my head that I didn’t even recognize until it was gone, something that made me size up every man I met as a potential baby daddy. Hey there, you look goooood.

And because of that response, I would find myself accommodating men, especially young, healthy, charming men. They honestly could get away with saying dumb or even offensive things around me and I’d instantly forgive them. I didn’t even notice doing it. It’s like I was drunk on their youth.

It’s seems ludicrous to me now. It’s not like I’d ever have actually had a child with someone besides my husband. It was not an articulated plan. It wasn’t even a plan. But I can tell you this: the moment I stopped wanting kids, I stopped accommodating men.

It’s a subtle but deep change. Attractive men – and for that matter, women – are extremely remote concepts to me nowadays. It’s like I’ve lost a sense of smell, but one that distracted me from observing people in other ways. Now I listen to what people say and I can focus on whether it makes sense, and honestly, the news isn’t always great. I have become immune to the charm of beautiful people.

But – don’t get me wrong!! – I’m still completely in love with funny, gregarious, and smart people, especially when they have deep empathy and/or can hold a karaoke tune. I haven’t stopped crushing on people, it’s just that the nature of the crushes, or at least the cause of the crushes, have changed.

So anyway, back to my airflight. I am glad I refused to move. To me it’s unreasonable to interrupt a bunch of women’s lives to accommodate a man, especially when we’re trying to get some goddamn work done.

Today I’m flying to London to join a the QCon conference, which is for professional software folks. I’m speaking on Wednesday afternoon in the Data Science vertical, and the title for my talk is, “How Do We Audit Algorithms?“. They also interviewed me for the conference.

The speaker before me is discussing the nitty gritty of recidivism modeling, otherwise known as algorithms that help judges and parole boards decide what to do with prisoners depending on their “risk of returning to the justice system”. Given how deeply racist and anti-poor our justice system is, it’s a big question whether or how data-driven studies or algorithms can improve it.

In other words, the need for auditing algorithms could not be more front and center given the talk before mine. So I’m going to use it as a use case.

As for how we actually do audits, I’m cobbling together stuff that is known, current research, and a long list of to-dos. A very recent paper that I’ll talk about is entitled, Discovering Unwarranted Associations in Data-Driven Applications with the FairTest Testing Toolkit, and it seems to contain a pretty good set of tools – written in python, no less – that can help a curious person audit a data-driven system. However, it seems to lack real tools in the case where the “protected user attributes,” are not supplied.

So, if you have a dataset showing the history of a bunch of prisoners, their recidivism scores, and their subsequent sentencing lengths, you’d like to know whether the algorithms was biased against blacks or against poor people. But if you don’t have the column “race” or “income,” it’s a lot harder to do that analysis.

Best thing you can do, besides trying to collect such data in the future, might be something along these lines, where you do your best to infer race from zip codes and last names. But not all modelers even have that, so it gets tricky pretty fast.

As usual all thoughts and references are deeply appreciated.

Well folks, as I announced yesterday, I became a lead plaintiff on the New York State tampon-tax case. The press conference was fun, and the best part was posing with the products themselves and looking serious:

Things are progressing fast, too: Governor Cuomo has said the following through a spokesperson: “We agree that sales tax on these products should be repealed and will work with the legislature to do so.”

I hope it’s soon, because according to my Twitter feed there are a whole bunch of people who are willing to protest the ongoing tax by free bleeding on the subway, which could get mighty sticky come July.

I kid. But not really. One thing I’ve figured out through all this is that the squeamishness alone – exhibited mostly by men – is a large part of why the unfair tax exists in the first place. It’s like, if we don’t think about it, it won’t exist.

To be honest the tax thing is great, and it’s progress, but I’d be unsatisfied if we stopped there. If men had periods, I’ve always said, then tampons would be free; or at least as free as toilet paper. Instead, I’ve spent countless hours and dollars desperately locating a tampon in the middle of a conference or workday, because there are very few bathrooms that bother to supply these cheap little wads of cotton balls. What gives?

Fuck this. Let’s not stop until they are freely accessible, especially to poor women, and especially especially to homeless women. Right now you can’t even purchase them (or pads) with food stamps. They are somehow considered unnecessary and/or non-medical, even though they directly concern blood.

Which brings me back to the free bleeding on the subway plan. It’s starting to sound a bit more like a viable thing.

Exciting news, today I can officially announce myself as a lead plaintiff on the New York State class-action tampon tax case. I’ve been talking about this unfair tax for years with my friend and Columbia Law School JD Laura Strausfeld, who developed the legal theory for this class-action suit.

I’m going to a press conference about this at 11am, but for now you can read this:

We’re having the wrong conversation about privacy in the U.S.. The narrative is focused on how the bullies at the FBI are forcing the powers for good over at Apple to hand over data that they’d rather protect for the good of all.

Here’s the conversation I’d rather be having: why our government is not protecting our privacy. Instead, we are reduced to relying on an enormous, profit seeking corporation to make a stand for our rights. At the end of the day this argument dumbs down to “Apple good, government bad” and it’s far too easy and concedes far too much. We need to think harder and demand more.

Keep in mind a few things. Apple is not accountable to us. They are a private company. When people want to argue otherwise, they say that we “vote with our dollars” for Apple. But that just means that consumers affect gadget design, which includes safety and security features. At the end of the day, though, Apple is accountable to the laws of the land, and they will and have turned over all kind of private data about users when the law forces them to. They are not heroes, because they cannot be, even if they wanted to be.

I want to stop talking about Apple, and its operating systems, and so on. That’s all a sideshow. I want to talk about demanding a government that will acknowledge that its duty is to protect privacy while investigating risks. Right now the FBI is falling far short, trivializing the risk to the rest of us when backdoors are created and used at scale. They have made an internal calculation that the trade-offs are well worth the risks, without really having a conversation with the public in which they even measure the risks. And those risks are our risks.

And yes, that is complicated, nuanced, and there are plenty of conflicts of interest involved, which are hard to balance. But that’s the thing about governing in a democracy: we need to have the conversation, and the government needs to stay accountable to all of us. Let’s stop talking about Apple and start talking about democracy in the era of big data.

I’ve been (slowly) reading my friend Ernie’s newest book called Mathematics, Substance and Surmise. It’s been published by Springer and is available now for purchase or what looks like a free download (update! I get it free because I’m on Columbia internet).

Actually he wrote it with his dad, which is freaking adorable, and also it’s actually not strictly written by them: it’s a collection of delightful essays on the ontology of mathematics from all sorts of perspectives.

Full disclosure: Ernie is a friend of mine, who was a generous and patient reader for my forthcoming book, and as such I am of course disposed to love his book. He even mentions my book in the introduction to his, so obviously he’s written an amazing book. But here’s the thing: actually, he has written an amazing book.

Fuller disclosure: I haven’t read the whole book yet. I tried to wait until I was done before blogging about it, but I just couldn’t because I am bubbling over with excitement, and as we all know bloggers are notoriously bad at impulse control. But I also feel like I could blog separately about each essay, so there’s always the possibility I might blog again later on about the rest of the book.

It’s a long book, too, chock full of entirely different ideas and perspectives. Which means that what I have read of this book, I have taken in slowly, because it’s really dense and fascinating and I haven’t wanted to miss anything. Whether it’s thinking about how mathematics and mathematical collaboration is done now versus in the olden days, or how computers have become full partners with mathematicians (what does it mean to “know” a formula for the 4th power of pi is true without having a proof for it?) or how robots should think about space – an unreasonably entertaining and delightful essay written by Ernie himself, which involves pictures of cheese graters and string bags – or indeed thinking about whether mathematical objects exist (is the number 2 a noun or an adjective? Is mathematics about the world or only about itself?), the book consistently makes you think differently, while also giving you substantive and grounded mathematical context in which to do your thinking.

One thing that excited me while reading it yesterday was the possibility that I’ve finally found the space in which to discuss my long-held theory that the sun actually goes around the earth. Not that I think this is a precise and accurate statement, but rather that it’s imprecise yet true, and that when someone corrects me and tells me the earth goes around the sun, that becomes another statement which is of course more precise and accurate statement but still not entirely precise and accurate! So why am I wrong and they’re right? What do humans mean when they say something’s right, anyway?

So I guess what I’m asking is, can I get together with all the people who wrote all the essays in this book and have a long series of dinner parties with them? And I know that’s a common evanescent urge that people have when they read books and really like them, but in my case I actually mean it.

Please, authors of the essays in Mathematics, Substance and Surmise, come by my house any time (give me like 3 hours warning) and discuss stuff with me about the way we think about and do mathematics. I’ll cook.

Don’t know about you, but I think neoliberalism, which has been a prevailing ideology for the past 40 years, is being challenged this year like never before.

Let me start my argument with a discussion of the newest AltBanking essay, entitled Freedom in the Neoliberal Eden. In the essay, we make the case that the citizens of Flint, Michigan and Ferguson, Missouri are living lives of extreme freedom and liberty, at least if you define those concepts as a neoliberalist would. They are extreme cases, to be sure, but also 100% natural consequences of their political and economic environment. From the essay:

When nothing trickles down, when boats don’t rise, here is the explanation that follows: it is not the system that it is at fault, but the character of those people who failed to prosper in it. In this supposedly radically free landscape, you will find yourself entwined in an unsatisfiable obligation. Yes, there is the ever-present Prosperity Gospel stuff we hear from the Christian right, but there is also an even wider-scale acceptance of financial responsibility, credit worthiness, and general economic success – whether earned or not – as equivalent to moral uprightness.

Feel free to read the entire essay, which is powerful.

It’s also not entirely pessimistic. It ends with the hopeful thought that the Ferguson Report was, after all, generated by our Justice Department. Perhaps it can or will be seen as an inflection point in the history of neoliberal politics in the U.S..

In fact, there are more hopeful signs if you look for them.

For example, yet another attempt at social impact bonds, which is a way to hand huge social problems over to “the private sector” to solve, has failed. I’ve written about this before as a bad idea, so I won’t go into all my reasons that Goldman Sachs won’t solve mass incarceration (key word: gaming).

More generally though, we shouldn’t expect a neoliberalized private sector economy to address problems that stem from inequality. If you find yourself trying to financialize things like incarcerated teens and early childhood education for poor kids, you’re likely not going to see the point of long-term investments like GED preparation classes for prisoners, which cost money now but have few easily measurable benefits.

Simply stated, there are some things that government should actually provide to everyone, like education and economic opportunity, where private companies will always want to pick and choose who will be more profitable. I think this is sinking in, slowly.

Here’s another spark of hope: politics. I know, it’s hard to find much inspiration in that chaos, but one obvious point to make is that voters are not entirely buying into the standard SuperPAC-funded corporatist politics. Granted, it’s taking an ugly turn on the GOP side, but it’s interesting nonetheless. And since I’m looking for good news, I’ll consider this as such.

Finally, the recent Congressional action that removed No Child Left Behind is a concession from policy makers that educational institutions do not benefit from being run like businesses, and naive metrics of success when it comes to truly difficult problems only serve to distract and trivialize.

In his new book The Only Game In Town, Mohamed El-Erian describes two possible near futures for the world economy: in the first, we go to hell in a hand basket characterized by economic stagnation, radicalized politics and social unrest, destructive inequality, and resource wars between nations.

In the second possible future, the elected governments of the world acknowledge the major roles they play in a peaceful future. They pick themselves up off their collective asses, take their responsibilities seriously – and in particular take the economic reins from central bankers – and start providing the services, infrastructure, progressive tax systems, and opportunities that their constituents need.

I’m hoping the second thing happens.

Last night I had a strange but vivid dream that Archie Bunker had just been elected president. He had brought along all of his racist, misogynistic, antisemitic, and homophobic thoughts and mannerisms. In this alternative dream world, the influence of his liberal son-in-law Mike was nowhere to be found.

Now, keep in mind that Archie Bunker, the main character of the TV show All in The Family, was popular when I was a newborn baby – I was born in 1972 – and that the opinions expressed by the title character were laughably old-fashioned at the time. And yet, I think my dream makes sense.

Why do I say that? When I woke up, I was intrigued and looked up Archie Bunker on wikipedia. Did you know:

• Show creator Norman Lear originally intended that Bunker be strongly disliked by audiences
• It didn’t work: Archie Bunker was hugely beloved by viewers and was even voted TV’s #1 character in 2005
• Rather than being motivated by malice, he is portrayed as hardworking, a loving father and husband, as well as a basically decent man whose views are merely a product of the era and working-class environment in which he has been raised
• There was something called the “Archie Bunker voting bloc” in the 1972 presidential elections
• as well as a parody “Archie Bunker for president” campaign

I guess my question is, how much of a parody is this really?

As a child, I didn’t get why people liked Archie Bunker. But I did love the opening song.