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On September 19, PIT Director and PIT@UMass co-founder Dr. Francine Berman will speak at a meeting hosted by the Institute of Diversity Sciences (IDS) Learning Research Group on activities taking place within the PIT@UMass Initiative.  This IDS meeting will be focused on the theme of disparity, diversity, and equity in learning, and Dr. Berman will provide insight to other departments on how the PIT initiative is making progress in those areas and offer opportunities for collaboration.  For more information on UMass@PIT and how you can become involved, contact pit@umass.edu.  

The presence of new digital technologies is expanding in professional planning practice and in everyday urban life. Rather than examine the technical capabilities or institutional structures of such tools, this talk draws attention to the personal and collective desires that animate them, in particular the desires for certainty and solvability. Examples from recent research on New Mobility—a suite of smartphone apps, data infrastructures, and novel transportation services—suggest that when digital technologies promises an idealized escape from the challenges of politics and infrastructure, they risk leaving us unprepared to live well with the inevitable messiness of urban life.Speaker: Peter Dunn | Lecturer, Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional PlanningDate: Thursday, September 15, 2022Location: Design Building Rm. 170Time: 4:00 - 5:00 pm ESTPeter Dunn is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning at the University of…

A number of high-profile whistleblowers in the technology industry have stepped into the spotlight in the past few years. For the most part, they have been revealing corporate practices that thwart the public interest: Frances Haugen exposed personal data exploitation at Meta, Timnit Gebru and Rebecca Rivers challenged Google on ethics and AI issues, and Janneke Parrish raised concerns about a discriminatory work culture at Apple, among others. Many of these whistleblowers are women – far more, it appears, than the proportion of women working in the tech industry. This raises the question of whether women are more likely to be whistleblowers in the tech field. The short answer is: “It’s complicated.” For many, whistleblowing is a last resort to get society to address problems that can’t be resolved within an organization, or at least by the whistleblower. It speaks to…

We all have preferences when choosing who to date, but when do they cross the line into sexual racism? Daily Show correspondent Ronny Chieng, UMass Amherst College of Social & Behavioral Sciences Professor and Senior Associate Dean, Jennifer Lundquist, and “Dates & Mates” podcast host, Damona Hoffman join Roy Wood Jr. to discuss how dating apps amplify users’ racial biases and how this impacts those looking for love online. https://youtu.be/oYLHxhKIMSg Source: The Global Herald