On this episode, TJ discusses how online retailers track your shopping and purchase behavior in order to recommend other products and increase our AOV. Are you concerned about online tracking and retailer recommendations? Do you find these recommendations useful? Let us know. 

We're taking a little break for the summer, but we'll be back in the fall with season 2 with more great episodes. In the mean time, check us out on all the socials. 

On this episode TJ and I discuss facial recognition, but not the Big Brother kind. In a world where we all constantly upload images of our faces to the social media platforms, it's not so much Big Brother that is to blame, but Little Brother. What happens when you commit sedition and your selfies litter the web? Spoiler alert, nothing good.

The firing of Timnit Gebru caused a stir at Google and the tech community at large. How do we create ethical artificial intelligence? How do we make sure that the products we build reflect and serve the entirety of humankind and not just a select group of well connected, well-off white people? That's a difficult issue to solve, but we do know is how you don't do that, by firing one of the few people of color working in AI ethics. Happy Black History Month, ya'll.

On this episode we discuss spam, no not the canned meat-like product, but the scourge of your email inbox. Spam, though not as top of mind as it once was, is still a significant problem. According to Campaign Monitor, nearly 60 billion junk or spam emails will be sent each day in the next 4 years.  For some context, there are only 7.8 billion people in the world. That works out to nearly 8 spam emails for every person on the planet per day for four straight years. That's massive. For email providers, AI plays a major role in curtailing the spam messages we all receive. As it turns out, AI can actually be our friend. Who knew?

On this episode, TJ and I take a deep dive into the Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma. The documentary outlines the impact social media networks like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have had on our everyday lives. And yes, there are algorithms involved. We talk about both the film as a piece or art and the questions it raises. 

Police around the country in departments large and small have been using algorithms to, in their words, identify crime hot spots and more efficiently and effectively allocate scarce resources and manpower. But is it working? Critics say these systems merely perpetuate racial bias and over policing of minority neighborhoods. On this episode, we discuss these issues.

College rankings have incredible influence over the colleges and universities that students and their families choose to attend. But should it? On this episode, we examine the U.S. News and World Reports college rankings.