Becca Ricks
@baricks
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Research, art, public interest technology. ☺︎ Public interest tech @ Data & Society. Previously: open source research @mozilla @HRW @ITP_NYU. she/her.
Joined September 2008
Hi! After 16 years of posting on this platform (🤡), I'm closing up shop here and stepping away. You can find me over at Bluesky ( https://t.co/x6ZjpEQTpx) and Mastodon ( https://t.co/agPKpWAuEC) where I'll be posting more regularly.
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As a digital culture researcher, I think there's something to say about the influx of tradwife/homesteaders in creator economies, and how they've irrevocably changed the way young white women are imagining their roles in political participation.
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ty sandy! 🙏 as a new prof at penn state, i'm trying to build something different: a lab that does research and builds tools *with* communities, rather than studying them from afar (1/?)
📶signal boost: Dr. Dana Calacci (@dcalacci - recent grad from MIT Connection Science) has an opening for Ph.D. students to join her in building their lab at Penn State IST. Learn more on her site:
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Very happy to announce that @A__W______O and @mozilla have launched our report on researcher access to closed foundation models, written by @mathver and I!✍️ Check out the blog and full research here: https://t.co/mNinHFVRRB
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Our methodology is inspired by Aaron and @dmehro’s Jalopnik piece on Uber and a Lyft fares and @dcalacci’s Shipt calculator SMS bot that offers pay transparency to Target gig workers. https://t.co/IGWnQCnIuO
https://t.co/so66LwnHQi
jalopnik.com
In July, an Uber driver we’ll call Dave—his name has been changed here to protect his identity—picked up a fare in a trendy neighborhood of a major U.S. metropolitan area. It was rush hour and surge...
Really proud to work with @LeonYin, @natlungfy and @DeniseDSLu on this one. Imagine having to constantly tap a button in an app all day to find out if you're allowed to work. That's what Uber/Lyft drivers in NYC had to do all summer (and Lyft still does).
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Incredible data journalism. This Article shows exactly what "algorithmic wage theft" looks like. We need more than the minimum wage & data transparency: we need new laws of work to prevent algorithmic wage discrimination. https://t.co/vrB2cdFSOl
bloomberg.com
Uber and Lyft locked drivers out of their apps to game a NYC wage law, denying drivers millions in pay
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DATA VAMPIRES is a four-part series exploring the costs of hyperscale data centers and why tech billionaires are desperate to build more. In Part 1, we examine where “the cloud” came from and how it expands Amazon, Microsoft, and Google’s power. Full ep: https://t.co/em6cWLTqGG
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Loved this reflection from @biancawylie on the use of AI to summarize meetings. She says that the "inefficiency" of transcribing & synthesizing notes forces us to sit with what requires our attention.
biancawylie.medium.com
A Case Where the D of the DDD Work Needs More Attention
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Great news! Bellingcat just launched the new Online Investigations Toolkit. In the toolkit you can discover tools for everything from satellite imagery analysis, to social media scraping, transportation tracking or archiving research material.
bellingcat.com
Our Online Investigations Toolkit comes with detailed descriptions maintained by a team of volunteers and an AI-powered assistant.
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NEW PAPER! 1. Small AI models often perform better than big in context. 2. Obsession w bigness has bad consequences, from climate, to power concentration, to surveillance, to research capture. This & what to do c/o @GaelVaroquaux, @SashaMTL and me ♥️👇 https://t.co/dCOcOwVqd2
arxiv.org
With the growing attention and investment in recent AI approaches such as large language models, the narrative that the larger the AI system the more valuable, powerful and interesting it is is...
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was wating to have everything in order to make proper annoucmenet but alas, i need help so here we are. got some grant & should be starting a research lab soon focused on AI accountbility & I'm looking for someone who could help design logo & artwork for the website. hit me up
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NEW: Armed with a fanny pack full of radios, WIRED investigated reports of a secretive surveillance technology being deployed at the DNC. Here’s the story about what we found: https://t.co/qXvWDHyX6p
wired.com
Using special software, WIRED investigated police surveillance at the DNC. We collected signals from nearly 300,000 devices, revealing vulnerabilities for both law enforcement and everyday citizens...
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🎉 New Grant Opportunity for #MozillaAlumni!📢 Today we open applications for our Alumni Connections Grants; a program built to support Mozilla Fellows and Awardees as they continue their critical work on issues that directly affect the future of #AI and the health of our
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If you haven't yet read Ted Chiang's essay on generative AI and art, get on it. For my money, it's one of the best things written on AI, period—it gets to the heart of what's so dismaying about AI in a single haunting sentence: "It reduces the amount of intention in the world."
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Meta is shutting down CrowdTangle, a tool popular among researchers to investigate disinformation on Facebook and Instagram. @mozilla says over 50,000 people have signed letters and petitions asking Meta to stop or pause its plans - via @darakerr @NPR
https://t.co/xgyZdeUVqF
npr.org
The social media company discontinues its CrowdTangle tool, which researchers have used to track misinformation. Amid fears of election interference, lawmakers have urged Meta to keep it running.
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We, along with @AINowInstitute and @logic_magazine, are proud to support Surveillance Watch: an interactive map revealing the intricate connections between surveillance companies, their funding sources and affiliations. https://t.co/RzvlMp5WSz
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New from 404 Media: we got a massive leak from inside Nvidia (emails, Slack chats, documents) which show how it created a yet-to-be-released AI model. The leak shows that Nvidia scraped YouTube en masse, had clearance from highest levels of the company
404media.co
Internal emails, Slack conversations and documents obtained by 404 Media show how Nvidia created a yet-to-be-released video foundational model.
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📣 Introducing the eight initiatives now supported by the Data Empowerment Fund. It's a great group, empowering people with data to tackle the climate crisis, advocate for fair work, govern artificial intelligence and address other critical challenges:
dataempowerment.fund
The purpose of the Data Empowerment Fund is to support a diverse set of initiatives that enable greater individual agency or community control over data.
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colleague @AlexandraBerke is doing some really interesting stuff with this data now that it's published! happy to be part of this project and make data like this more available to researchers
Media Lab researchers @RobertMahari and @AlexandraBerke, with alum @dcalacci, discuss their recent paper; it presents a crowdsourced dataset of Amazon purchase histories from American consumers, published with the participants' informed consent. https://t.co/u0HB7ysPWj
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Happy to tell the story of how workers helped drive an audit of Shipt’s algorithmic pay system in @IEEESpectrum ! some discussion on hacker news that I want to highlight (🧵):
When their pay suddenly dropped, delivery drivers audited their employer, @Shipt . A textbot created by the workers, @dcalacci, and @teamcoworker collected data and revealed that 40% of workers had received an unannounced pay cut. #gigworkers
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