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Section 2: Texts

Core

  • Unit Reader
    • Excerpt from “Big Data: Seizing Opportunities, Preserving Values,” United States Executive Office of the President, Public Domain, 2014
    • “Machine Bias,” Julia Angwin, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu, and Lauren Kirchner, ProPublica Inc., 2016
    • “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?,” Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, Elsevier Inc., 2016
    • “What Is Machine Learning?,” Chris Meserole, The Brookings Institution, 2018
    • “Why We Should Stop Fetishizing Privacy,” Heidi Messer, The New York Times Company, 2019
    • “Will Robots Outsmart Us? The Late Stephen Hawking Answers This and Other Big Questions Facing Humanity,” excerpt from Brief Answers to the Big Questions, Stephen Hawking, Spacetime Publications Limited. Used by permission of Bantam Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC., 2018
  • Digital Access
    • “AI Doesn’t Eliminate Jobs, It Creates Them,” Michael Xie, Forbes, 2018
    • “Charts of the Largest Occupations in Each Area, May 2019,” Division of Occupational Employment Statistics, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 2018
    • “GDPR Explained: How the New Data Protection Act Could Change Your Life,” Channel 4 News, United Kingdom, YouTube, May 23, 2018

Optional

  • Digital Access
    • “Are Criminal Risk Assessment Scores Racist?,” Jennifer L Doleac and Megan Stevenson, Brookings Institute, 2016
    • “COMPAS Risk Scales: Demonstrating Accuracy, Equity and Predictive Parity,” William Dieterich, Christina Mendoza, and Tim Brennan, Northpointe Inc. Research Department, 2016
    • “Ethics for Powerful Algorithms,” Abe Gong, Open Data Science, 2017
    • “False Positives, False Negatives, and False Analyses,” Anthony W. Flores, Kristen Bechtel, and Christopher Lowenkamp, Federal Probation Journal, 2016
    • “ProPublica Is Wrong in Charging Racial Bias in an Algorithm,” Chuck Dinerstein, American Council on Science and Health, 2018