FIFOG – Festival International du Film Oriental de Genève, 21-29 avril 2018

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The 2018 edition of FIFOG starts tomorrow!

“The 13th International Oriental Film Festival of Geneva will take place from the 21st to the 29th of April 2018 in Geneva, Lausanne and neighbouring areas of France. Over a hundred quality films, spanning all genres, whose aesthetics match the difficult conditions of their genesis, will be screened, accompanied by discussions with either authors or specialists.

The aim of this 2018 edition is to highlight and inspire hope. We want to celebrate the visions of women, amplify the voices of the youth, and explore the complexities of oriental societies. On this occasion, we take the opportunity to showcase the creativity of women, as they give expression to the hope of people who will not be silent in their struggle for a better life.”

Check out the full programme and enjoy!

Book of the Week: “Weapons of math destruction: how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy”

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A former Wall Street quantitative analyst sounds an alarm on the mathematical models that pervade modern life and threaten to rip apart our social fabric.

“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: if a poor student can’t get a loan because a lending model deems him too risky (by virtue of his zip code), he’s then cut off from the kind of education that could pull him out of poverty, and a vicious spiral ensues. Models are propping up the lucky and punishing the downtrodden, creating a “toxic cocktail for democracy.” Welcome to the dark side of Big Data.”

Publisher: London: Penguin Books, 2017
Call Number: 384 HEIA 120998