As of last Wednesday (13/01/21) the Economy & Society Summer School (E&S) has opened for applications with a new and improved website. We have previously written about the E&S and how it impacted on the creation of the HECAT project. We are proud to say that this year the school will be run in association…
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Work Package Lead Meeting – January 12
Today we’re brushing the cobwebs off by having our monthly WP lead meeting to keep ourselves updated on what everyone in the project is up to. Our agenda is relatively simple today, mostly focusing on updating one another on where each work package is in terms of their progress in the project.
New Deliverable: An Ethical Review of Algorithms
We’re excited to announce the finalization of a significant deliverable. You can find it on our deliverables page http://hecat.eu/deliverables/ or download it through this link. The document itself is quite long and we will be writing several blog posts in the near future about it. It has three major discussion sections: A review of the…
What Does Accuracy Mean, Anyway?
Today we have a guest post by Patrick Gallagher. Patrick is a postdoctoral fellow at the Waterford Institute of Technology. Statistical profiling of the unemployed has gained traction in recent years as an efficient, cost-cutting means of categorising job seekers into two groups the frictionally unemployed and those at high risk of long-term unemployment. The…
The Experiences of Unemployment: Waiting
This will be the first in a series of short pieces on the experiences of unemployment. We have previously written about the origins of our project, which came from the Waterford Unemployment Experiences Research Collaborative (WUERC), a team of researchers based out of Waterford in Ireland who were making our tentative first steps into understanding…
Rethink, Reskill, Reboot: What’s a ‘Useless’ Degree Anyway?
For quite some time it has been axiomatic that there are certain degrees which are unlikely to help you secure a job. Career Addict furnishes us with a revealing top 10 list of ‘useless’ degrees which includes the culinary arts, the liberal arts, and communications. While the Career Addict article is not as brazenly dismissive…
Racism and Algorithms: Part 2
Previously we have written about the problematic relationship between algorithms and law enforcement, specifically what happens when algorithms are supposed to predict crime in advance of it happening (precrime). Today we will briefly mention another case of racism in algorithms by going over a recent scandal, which the social media giant Twitter has already apologised…
Our First Consortium Meeting – Profiling or Visualising?
This past Friday (September 25th) we had our first consortium meeting with all of our partners present since our project first launched in February – which feels like it was a lifetime ago now! Originally our entire consortium was to meet in person once each year, but at our launch (pictured above) we realised that…
Precrime: Racism and Algorithms
Previously we have written about how algorithms can be classist, today we will consider the curious case of Pasco, Florida to reflect on the ways in which algorithms can be racist. In 1956 US author Phillip K. Dick published a science fiction novella called The Minority Report, set in an unspecified time in the future….
ESPANet Online Seminar Details
On September 3rd espanet (the European Network for Social Policy Analysis) is hosting a series of online seminars for PhD students to network and present their research. See the details below. Combined Streams 3-4: Big data and digitalisation in social and employment services Conveners: Minna van Gerven (University of Helsinki, Finland), Janine Leschke (Copenhagen Business…