clean your room

me:

At this point, Maggor asked Chai what she was going to do.

“I’m going to give the best damn speech of my life,” Chai told her.

Chai stripped down to her bra and underwear and walked back into the theatre room, where she performed the entirety of her thesis presentation in the same state of undress.” (Cornell Daily Sun)

Chai wore the same outfit with the ‘too short’ shorts to her official thesis presentation two days later, and proceeded to strip down a second time

over two dozen others in the room then undressed as well

Maggor has apologized for her comments to Chai and her other students

a group of students from the original class who were present for the initial comments have written a letter (included in linked articles below) both in support of Letitia’s protest and in defense of the prof

Letitia Chai is a goddamn legend. What a power move. 

There’s an algorithm that can reliably predict, from aggregate facebook posts, the onset of a manic episode in a person suffering from bipolar disorder – more reliably even, than a trained psychotherapist, who only has access to the information a patient provides them in therapy sessions. 

“Won’t technology like that help people with bipolar disorder?”

Theoretically, it could. But this algorithm wasn’t designed to help people with bipolar disorder.

This algorithm was designed to sell plane tickets to Las Vegas.

The presenter, Tufecki, couches it as a hypothetical: “What if the system that we do not understand was picking up that it’s easier to sell Vegas tickets to people who are bipolar and about to enter the manic phase. ... They could do this, and you’d have no clue that’s what they were picking up on.”

She talked over this example with a group of computer scientists at one point, and afterward one of them approached her to say that he was worried about publishing a very similar program to what the OP describes--a means of identifying “the onset of mania from social media posts before clinical symptoms.” The program “had worked, and had worked very well,” Tufekci says. She does not make any claims that it works better or more reliably than trained psychotherapists.

The closest she comes to asserting this is a real-life example is the following quote, at 8:05: “Now, the problem isn't solved if he doesn’t publish it, because there are already companies that are developing this kind of technology, and a lot of the stuff is just off the shelf.” Somewhat vague. 

There is plenty in Tufekci’s lecture to worry about, but being specious about and exaggerating the reality of specific examples doesn’t help anyone. Try watching the rest of the video, where she talks about the potential for voter manipulation by Facebook, and what’s happened in that arena already.