Abstract:

Ahmet T. Kuru will talk about his new book  Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Comparison (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Why do Muslim-majority countries have high levels of authoritarianism and low levels of socio-economic development in comparison to world averages? Kuru elaborates an argument about the ulema-state alliance as the cause of these problems in the Muslim world from the eleventh century to the present. Criticizing essentialist, post-colonialist, and new institutionalist alternative explanations, Kuru focuses on the relations between intellectual, economic, religious, and political classes in his own explanation.

Speaker Bio:

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Abstract:

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Monica Prasad's areas of interest are political sociology, economic sociology, and comparative historical sociology. Her new book Starving the Beast asks why Republican politicians have focused so relentlessly on cutting taxes over the last several decades--whether the economy is booming or in recession, whether the federal budget is in surplus or deficit, and even though total taxes in the U.S. are already lower than in other developed countries. Drawing on archival documents that have never before been seen, Prasad traces the history of the famous 1981 "supply side" tax cut which became the cornerstore for the next several decades of Republican domestic economic policy. She argues that the main forces behind tax cuts are not business group pressure, racial animus, or a belief that tax cuts will pay for themselves. Rather, the tax cut movement arose because in America--unlike in the rest of the advanced industrial world--progressive policies are not embedded within a larger political economy that is favorable to business, a situation whose origins she explored in a prior book

Abstract: The enormous financial success of online advertising platforms is in large part due to the advanced targeting features they offer. WiSE Gabilan Assistant Professor of Computer Science at USC, Aleksandra Korolova will discuss recent findings showing how implementations of targeted advertising create new societal concerns related to privacy, manipulation of the vulnerable, and discrimination. Furthermore, Korolova will demonstrate that the ad delivery optimization algorithms run by the platforms can lead to skew in delivery along gender and racial lines, even when such skew was not intended by the advertiser. Korolova will conclude by introducing a new fairness notion, preference-informed fairness, that could serve as a novel step towards formally studying fairness in scenarios such as targeted advertising, where individuals have complex and diverse preferences over possible outcomes.

Based on joint work with I. Faizullabhoy (ConPro 2018), M. Ali, P. Sapiezynski, M. Bogen, A. Mislove, A. Rieke (CSCW 2019), and M. P. Kim, G. Rothblum, G. Yona (ITCS 2020, FAT* 2020).  

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Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/Se8UcB6HFNo

About this Event: Based on his recent experience in Kyiv, Ambassador Taylor will evaluate current US policy toward Ukraine and make recommendations for future initiatives.  He will argue that now is the time to re-engage with Ukraine to strengthen US-Ukrainian relations and boost US security.  He will address the two main threats to the Zelenskyy administration — the Kremlin and corrupt oligarchs.

About the Speaker:

Ambassador William B. Taylor served as the Chargé d'Affaires at the US embassy in Kyiv from June 2019 to January 2020. Previously, he served as the executive vice president at the U.S. Institute of Peace and the special coordinator for Middle East Transitions in the U.S. State Department during the Arab Spring.  He served as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 2006 to 2009.

He also served as the U.S. government’s representative to the Mideast Quartet, which facilitated the Israeli disengagement from Gaza and parts of the West Bank, led by Special Envoy James Wolfensohn in Jerusalem. Prior to this assignment, he served in Baghdad as Director, Iraq Reconstruction Management Office (2004-2005), in Kabul as coordinator of USG and international assistance to Afghanistan (2002-2003) and in Washington with the rank of ambassador as coordinator of USG assistance to the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (1992-2002).

Ambassador Taylor spent five years in Brussels as the Special Deputy Defense Advisor to the U.S. Ambassador to NATO, William Taft and earlier directed an in-house Defense Department think tank at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C.  He served for five years on the staff of Senator Bill Bradley and earlier directed the Department of Energy’s Office of Emergency Preparedness.

In the Army, he fought in Vietnam as a rifle platoon leader and combat company commander in the 101st Airborne Division and flew reconnaissance missions along the West German border with Czechoslovakia in the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment.

The Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center cordially invites its faculty, scholars, staff, affiliates, and their families to join APARC's first International Potluck Day! Join us to celebrate the diversity of APARC through a multicultural smorgasbord of food. Bring a dish from your home country or family heritage to share with the APARC community as we take the time to mix, mingle, and celebrate the diversity that makes APARC special.

Due to current circumstances, we will be postponing this event until further notice. Thank you for your understanding.

The research on misinformation generally and fake news specifically is vast, as is coverage in media outlets. Two questions run throughout both the academic and public discourse: what explains the spread of fake news online, and what can be done about it? While there is substantial literature on who is likely to be exposed to and share fake news, these behaviors might not signal belief or effect. Conversely, there is far less work on who is able to differentiate between true and false stories and, as a result, who is most likely to believe fake news (or, conversely, not believe true news), a question that speaks directly to Facebook’s recent “community review” approach to combating the spread of fake news on its platform.

In his talk, Professor Tucker will report on initial findings from a new collaborative project between NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics and Stanford’s Program on Democracy and the Internet designed to fill these gaps in the scholarly literature and inform the types of policy decisions being made by Facebook. The project has enlisted both professional fact checkers and random “crowds” of close to 100 people to fact check five “fresh” articles (that have appeared in the past 24 hours) per day, four days a week, for eights week using an innovative transparent and replicable algorithm for selecting the articles for fact checking. He will report on initial observations regarding (a) individual determinants of fact checking proficiency; (b) the viability using the “wisdom of the crowds” for fact checking, including examining the tradeoffs between crafting a more accurate crowd vs. a more representative crowd and (c) results from experiments designed to assess potential policy interventions to improve crowdsourcing accuracy.

About the Speaker:

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