Tag: racial issues

All In: The Fight for Democracy – Documentary

By now, everybody knows that if I am not blogging for a couple of days, it means that I have a crisis at work. This is precisely what’s going on now, plus – the chapter deadline is only two days away, and I have a big chunk of it still not written, plus it needs a lot of formatting rework. Nevertheless, when the Amazon screening of the new documentary was announced, I signed up because I could not not to see it! And I was watching it, while fixing stuff in production and while editing our current chapter.

It is brilliant. It is timely. It is eye-opening. I have an urge to make people who dare to lament about BML being too violent, about “how much longer we should beg pardon and feel sorry,” to watch this documentary from start to finish. Because the answer is – forever. At least for the foreseeable future.

And I may be biased towards a certain population of zero-generation immigrants. Still, way too often, I feel that they do not know these parts of American history, which were not publicized in history textbooks. They were not here, and their parents were not here, and when they come, they are too busy to get settled in their new life. They do not want to look around, question, and step away from their stereotypes, from the presumption that they know everything. 

I will stop now:), but I want to share the official trailer and a review from Tribune, which I really liked!

Continue reading for the full text of the review (the link to the article is here)

Continue reading “All In: The Fight for Democracy – Documentary” →

A Follow-up To The “Critical Race Theory” Post

About three weeks ago, I wrote a blog post about racially skewed Google search results and received some thoughtful comments. Since then, I have tried to write a more detailed post in response to these comments and never did. Here is it, finally.

Why Google search results might be different: Google search is a VERY_VERY_VERY complex thing, and I am sure I do not know even half of the factors contributing to the results. Yes, it depends on geography, but not just a country or state. It depends on zip code, which defines the socioeconomic majority, on the computer, operating system and browser, on emails you recently received, on web sites you visited, on recent searches from your computer and your zip code, on what news sites you visit, what Kindle books you read and what audiobooks you listen.

And yes, mostly it depends on who pays :). 

All of the above explains what we mean when we say that searches should be properly tested. When we run tests on the application code, we have some test cases, and we know how to tell whether the code works correctly. How we can test whether a search works correctly? It works correctly if we receive expected results. But what results are expected? Should we expect to find pictures of white families on exotic beaches when the search is initiated in my zip code? Or should we expect to receive diverse results? More importantly, which search results a local five-grader should expect? 

My Canadian follower results were most likely different from mine because Canada is more progressive than the US. On the other hand, the fact that she received very few results with all-black families might mean that there are not that many homogeneous black communities in Canada compared to the US. To summarize, the search results reflect at least in part what’s going on in people’s minds—both in the minds of those who use the search engines and those who make them work.