Good Code - Jake Goldenfein on Google Scholar

Jake Goldenfein on Google Scholar

02/11/20 • 27 min

From Gmail and Google Documents to Google’s Cloud, our reliance on Google services has extended to more and more realms of our lives. And academia is not immune from this growing dependency. Our guest this week is Jake Goldenfein, a Postdoctoral fellow at the Digital Life Initiative. His most recent piece of research looks at Google Scholar, a free web search engine that indexes scholarly work. And it asks: should we feel that comfortable using yet another Google service as if it was a disinterested actor?

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Lisa Lewin on Making Boards of Directors Care

What can board of directors of big tech companies do to push for more ethical practices in the field? Lisa Lewin is the managing partner at Ethical Ventures, a management consulting firm. Because the problem of ethics in tech is so monumental, she thinks we need to include all stakeholders in finding a solution. From tech workers and consumers to boards of directors. Why them? Because they get a unique access to these companies' CEOs. Mandatory face-to-face time that can make a real difference.

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Yaël Eisenstat on Facebook and Political Ads

Last October, Facebook announced that it would not fact-check political ads. And that decision angered a lot of people: outside, but also inside the company. To talk about Facebook's policy, and the potential risks of such a decision ahead of the 2020 presidential election, we sit down with Yaël Eisenstat. She's a former CIA officer and national security advisor to Vice-President Joe Biden. And in 2018, she served as Facebook's Head of Global Elections Integrity Operations for six months.