HON 214 Fall 2019 Schedule

Below is the schedule for HON 214 section taught by Atri. The class meets on Tuesdays in Capen 110.

Note on Reading Assignments

Unless mentioned otherwise, you should read all the articles and watch all the videos in the reading assignments.

Future Reading Assignments

All reading assignments for future lectures are tentative till the week before the lecture. You can definitely read up on the future readings but your weekly reports will have to be based on the final reading assignments.

Date	Topic	Reading Material	Notes
Aug 27	Introduction	Life without the tech giants Week 1: Amazon
Sep 3	Pervasiveness of Computing	Week 2: Facebook Week 3: Google Week 4: Microsoft Week 5: Apple Week 6: Blocking them all	For each week 2-6, the video and the text are roughly equivalent. If short on time you can pick one of the two for each week.
Sep 10	Smart Cities	Instrumental City: The View from Hudson Yards, circa 2019 Rethinking, Reimagining and Remaking Smart Cities	Guest Speaker: Mark Shepard
Sep 17	Open Data Kit	Design of a Phone-Based Clinical Decision Support System for Resource-Limited Settings Accompanying talk to the above paper	Only the paper is required for weekly report. We will watch the talk video in class.
Sep 24	Tech and Gig Economy	AB 5 AB5 gig work bill: All your questions answered Sweeping bill rewriting California employment law sent to Gov. Newsom California Is Changing The Rules For Contract Workers And The Gig Economy	Only the first three links are required for the weekly report. We will listen to half of the radio discussion from the last link in class. Also Good, Bad and Ulgy will be specifically for Tech in Gig economy.
Oct 1	"Doing good" isn't easy	Physiognomy’s New Clothes How a Feel-Good AI Story Went Wrong in Flint	Guest Speaker: Kenny Joseph
Oct 8	Precision Agriculture	Farmbeats (TEDxUoR talk) Blog post by Bill Gates ion Farmbeats
Oct 15	Online Platforms and Free Speech	The Dark Side of Techno-Utopianism Section 230 Is the Internet's First Amendment. Now Both Republicans and Democrats Want To Take It Away Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, 47 U.S.C. § 230	Guest Speaker: Jonathan Manes
Oct 22	AI and Decision Making	Machine Bias Automated Background Checks are Deciding Who's Fit For a Home
Oct 29	When you are the data	The house that spied on me The Car of the Future Will Sell Your Data
Nov 5	Technology and Government	Absher Apple and Google Criticized for Hosting Absher
Nov 12	Mental Health Impacts of Social Media on Adolescents	Is social network site usage related to depression? A meta-analysis of Facebook–depression relations	Guest Speaker: Melanie Sage Also check out piazza post on this lecture
Nov 19	Biased Data: How and Why it Matters	The Problem with "Biased Data" Survival of the Best Fit	Yes, the 2nd assignment is to play a video game
Nov 26	"I do it because its Cool!"	GPT2, Counting Consciousness and the Curious Hacker The Hacker Learns to Trust
Dec 3	What Can I Do?	Onward! Another #GoogleWalkout Goodbye A (twitter) story about Google maps