The final analysis: how the Senate looks after Tuesday

Alternet.org
November 06, 2006
I talked yesterday about the 20 races (of 33) for the United States Senate that have really already been decided, many of which were over before they even started. When you add the expected results from these races to the 67 seats that were not contested in 2006, we stand at 47 seats for the Republicans and 40 for Democrats, with 13 races outstanding.

The conventional wisdom for many months has been that Democrats would need to run the table of all toss-up races to have a net gain of six seats and take control of the Senate.

That's exactly what's going to happen -- here's how:
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Google This: Algorithmic Oppression

Imagine you've forgotten once again the difference between a gorilla and a chimpanzee, so you do a quick Google image search of “gorilla." But instead of finding images of adorable animals, photos of a Black couple pop up.

Is this just a glitch in the algorithm? Or, is Google an ad company, not an information company, that's replicating the discrimination of the world it operates in? How can this discrimination be addressed and who is accountable for it?

“These platforms are encoded with racism," says UCLA professor and best-selling author of Algorithms of Oppression, Dr. Safiya Noble. “The logic is racist and sexist because it would allow for these kinds of false, misleading, kinds of results to come to the fore…There are unfortunately thousands of examples now of harm that comes from algorithmic discrimination."

On At Liberty this week, Dr. Noble joined us to discuss what she calls “algorithmic oppression," and what needs to be done to end this kind of bias and dismantle systemic racism in software, predictive analytics, search platforms, surveillance systems, and other technologies.

What you can do:
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