Linkage

"The problem [is] no-one knows exactly where the harm is," she explains. And, given that companies have saved money by replacing human HR staff with AI – which can process piles of resumes in a fraction of the time – she believes firms may have little motivation to interrogate kinks in the machine. 

"One biased human hiring manager can harm a lot of people in a year, and that's not great. But an algorithm that is maybe used in all incoming applications at a large company… that could harm hundreds of thousands of applicants" – Hilke Schellman

From her research, Schellmann is also concerned screening-software companies are "rushing" underdeveloped, even flawed products to market to cash in on demand. "Vendors are not going to come out publicly and say our tool didn't work, or it was harmful to people", and companies who have used them remain "afraid that there's going to be a gigantic class action lawsuit against them".

I have worked in other war zones. But what I witnessed during the next 10 days in Gaza was not war — it was annihilation. At least 28,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. From Cairo, Egypt’s capital, we drove 12 hours east to the Rafah border. We passed miles of parked humanitarian aid trucks because they weren’t allowed into Gaza. Aside from my team and other envoy members from the United Nations and World Health Organization, there were very few others there.

Entering southern Gaza on Jan. 29, where many have fled from the north, felt like the first pages of a dystopian novel. Our ears were numb with the constant humming of what I was told were the surveillance drones that circled constantly. Our noses were consumed with the stench of 1 million displaced humans living in close proximity without adequate sanitation. Our eyes got lost in the sea of tents. We stayed at a guest house in Rafah. Our first night was cold, and many of us couldn’t sleep. We stood on the balcony listening to the bombs, and seeing the smoke rise from Khan Yunis.

As we approached the European Gaza Hospital the next day, there were rows of tents that lined and blocked the streets. Many Palestinians gravitated toward this and other hospitals hoping it would represent a sanctuary from the violence — they were wrong.

The proposal echoes vehicle restrictions underway in other European Union cities, such as Paris, Amsterdam and Lisbon. And like city leaders elsewhere, the architects of the Dublin plan invoke the “15-minute city” concept — which aims to allow residents to access all major destinations within a 15-minute walk or bike ride — as a key goal. But while efforts to limit car traffic in some city centers across the water in Britain have triggered angry (and conspiracy-tinged) opposition from aggrieved motorists, Dublin’s enjoys overwhelming public support so far. More than 80% of 3,500 respondents in a public consultation published Feb. 7 said they backed the new zone, a ringing endorsement for a city that hitherto has not had a strong reputation for progressive urban policy.

In the first minutes of the new film Judas and the Black Messiah, released Feb. 12, it shows archival footage of the free ambulance service started by the Black Panther Party’s Winston-Salem, N.C., chapter in 1972. And the party’s Illinois chairman Fred Hampton, played by Daniel Kaluuya, sums up the risks of going to a hospital for a Black American, “We think it’s normal for us to go to the hospital with a runny nose and come home in a body bag.”

These scenes are a glimpse at a lesser-known aspect of the Black Panther Party’s community health work of the 1960s and 1970s that has become more widely recognized in recent years. The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement has inspired a new appreciation for the Black Panthers and attempts have been made to recast their image in history and highlight the work they did in their communities, such as serving free breakfast to children and setting up more than a dozen medical clinics nationwide. It’s public health work that also demonstrates the long history of problems activists are still trying to solve today.

To ramp up supply, cities are taking a fresh look at their zoning rules that spell out what can be built where and what can't. And many are finding that their old rules are too rigid, making it too hard and too expensive to build many new homes.

So these cities, as well as some states, are undertaking a process called zoning reform. They're crafting new rules that do things like allow multifamily homes in more neighborhoods, encourage more density near transit and streamline permitting processes for those trying to build.

One city has been at the forefront of these conversations: Minneapolis.

That's because Minneapolis was ahead of the pack as it made a series of changes to its zoning rules in recent years: allowing more density downtown and along transit corridors, getting rid of parking requirements, permitting construction of accessory dwelling units (ADUs), which are secondary dwellings on the same lot.

And one change in particular made national news: The city ended single-family zoning, allowing two- and three-unit homes to be built in every neighborhood.

Researchers at The Pew Charitable Trusts examined the effects of the changes between 2017 and 2022, as many of the city's most significant zoning reforms came into effect.

They found what they call a "blueprint for housing affordability."

Slowly but surely, cities around the world are realising that prioritizing space for cars in land-deficient urban areas might not actually be a good idea.

Cars can be great for travelling longer distances, but in cities, they simply don’t work efficiently.

That’s why many urban planners are increasingly focussing on urban microbility (i.e. prioritizing access for people on bicycles, scooters or on foot), which frees up tonnes of valuable space on city streets, while simultaneously making the area a more enjoyable and safer place to be.

Below, we’ve compiled some before and after photos of city transformations that have gone from focussing on cars to focussing on people.

The results are stunning.

Most Americans fail to recognize widespread public support for climate change action. Here we investigate how this phenomenon differs for Republican supporters versus opponents of several climate change policies. Surveying a representative sample of Republican voters (N = 1000), we find that misperception of in-group support for climate action is primarily restricted to Republicans already opposed to action. Specifically, those in the minority (i.e., Republicans opposed to climate action) were more likely to erroneously perceive other Republicans as holding views on climate change policy similar to their own. While Republican supporters recognize that most Republicans support climate change policy, they may be discouraged from expressing their support due to an information environment disproportionately portraying Republicans as opposed to climate change action.

Pluralistic ignorance—a shared misperception of how others think or behave—poses a challenge to collective action on problems like climate change. Using a representative sample of Americans (N = 6119), we examine whether Americans accurately perceive national concern about climate change and support for mitigating policies. We find a form of pluralistic ignorance that we describe as a false social reality: a near universal perception of public opinion that is the opposite of true public sentiment. Specifically, 80–90% of Americans underestimate the prevalence of support for major climate change mitigation policies and climate concern. While 66–80% Americans support these policies, Americans estimate the prevalence to only be between 37–43% on average. Thus, supporters of climate policies outnumber opponents two to one, while Americans falsely perceive nearly the opposite to be true. Further, Americans in every state and every assessed demographic underestimate support across all polices tested. Preliminary evidence suggests three sources of these misperceptions: (i) consistent with a false consensus effect, respondents who support these policies less (conservatives) underestimate support by a greater degree; controlling for one’s own personal politics, (ii) exposure to more conservative local norms and (iii) consuming conservative news correspond to greater misperceptions.

One is tempted to say that the core of the paradox lies in the individual’s fear of the unknown. Actually, we do not fear what is unknown, but we are afraid of things we do know about. What do we know about that frightens us into such apparently inexplicable organizational behavior?

Separation, alienation, and loneliness are things we do know about-and fear. Both research and experience indicate that ostracism is one of the most powerful punishments that can be devised. Solitary confinement does not draw its coercive strength from physical deprivation. The evidence is overwhelming that we have a fundamental need to be connected, engaged, and related and a reciprocal need not to be separated or alone. Everyone of us, though, has experienced aloneness. From the time the umbilical, cord was cut, we have experienced the real anguish of separation-broken friendships, divorces, deaths, and exclusions.

For a special edition of Downstream IRL, Ash Sarkar is joined by philosopher, author, and one of the world's most cited academics, Judith Butler. Their new book, 'Who’s Afraid of Gender' charts how a transphobic moral panic morphed into an all-our war on so-called ‘gender ideology’. Together, Ash and Judith explore how Britain became TERF island, the limits of self-identification, and what really defines a woman.