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Penn Reading Project 2019: Weapons of Math Destruction/The Year of Data

The Year of Data: Penn students spend not only their undergraduate careers but also their entire lives exposed to data in its many forms, and they need to be able to understand, use, manipulate, and draw conclusions from those data. We need to help them understand how data are created, collected, shared, accessed, visualized, monetized, leveraged, and effectively communicated. The Year of Data is an opportunity to make sure our students have the knowledge and skills they need to be successful at Penn and in life beyond. It encompasses qualitative and quantitative data, numerical data, biometric information, geospatial data, climate data, corporate profit projections, and even anecdotes, images and stories, in such areas as:

  • a field scientist taking measurements and collecting samples
  • a literature student working in text analysis
  • a historian mapping data from historical records
  • a data scientist using big data to micro-target consumers to drive sales
  • a political scientist studying how Facebook data can influence elections
  • a public policy analyst using census data to measure impact in a community
  • a philosopher examining the ethics of privacy in data analytics

Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil: We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives—where we go to school, whether we get a car loan, how much we pay for health insurance—are being made not by humans but by mathematical models. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules, and bias is eliminated.

But as Cathy O’Neil reveals in this urgent and necessary book, the opposite is true. The models being used today are opaque, unregulated and uncontestable, even when they’re wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination: For example, if students can’t get a loan because a lending model deems them too risky (by virtue of their zip code), they can then be cut off from the kind of education that could help them advance, creating a “toxic cocktail for democracy.”

Our students will be the ones not only gathering and analyzing data but also creating the algorithms that govern critical aspects of our lives. We must imbue them with an awareness of how data affect us and with a sense of responsibility to use their skills to enhance our society.

—David Fox, PRP Director

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