Nnedi's bookshelf: currently-reading en-US Wed, 08 May 2024 10:13:09 -0700 60 Nnedi's bookshelf: currently-reading 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Coming Home 206571264 From the nine-time women’s basketball icon and two-time Olympic gold medalist—a raw, revelatory account of her unfathomable detainment in Russia and her journey home.

On February 17, 2022, Brittney Griner arrived in Moscow ready to spend the WNBA offseason playing for the Russian women’s basketball team where she had been the centerpiece of previous championship seasons. Instead, a security checkpoint became her gateway to hell when she was arrested for mistakenly carrying under one gram of medically prescribed hash oil. Brittney’s world was violently upended in a crisis she has never spoken in detail about publicly—until now.

In Coming Home, Brittney finally shares the harrowing details of her sudden arrest days before Russia invaded Ukraine; her bewilderment and isolation while navigating a foreign legal system amid her trial and sentencing; her emotional and physical anguish as the first American woman ever to endure a Russian penal colony while the #WeAreBG movement rallied for her release; the chilling prisoner swap with Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout; and her remarkable rise from hostage to global spokesperson on behalf of America’s forgotten. In haunting and vivid detail, Brittney takes listeners inside the horrors of a geopolitical nightmare spanning ten months.

And yet Coming Home is more than Brittney’s journey from captivity to freedom. In an account as gripping as it is poignant, she shares how her deep love for Cherelle, her college sweetheart and wife of six years, anchored her during their greatest storm; how her family’s support pulled her back from the brink; and how hundreds of letters from friends and neighbors lent her resolve to keep fighting. Coming Home is both a story of survival and a testament to love—the bonds that brought Brittney home to her family, and at last, to herself.]]>
320 Brittney Griner 0593801342 Nnedi 0 currently-reading 4.36 2024 Coming Home
author: Brittney Griner
name: Nnedi
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/08
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<![CDATA[Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines]]> 136342721 Fortune) explains how we’ve arrived at an era of AI harms and oppression, and what we can do to avoid its pitfalls.

“Dr. Joy Buolamwini has been an essential figure in bringing irresponsible, profit-hungry tech giants to their knees. If you’re going to read only one book about AI, this should be it.”—Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation
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To most of us, it seems like recent developments in artificial intelligence emerged out of nowhere to pose unprecedented threats to humankind. But to Dr. Joy Buolamwini, who has been at the forefront of AI research, this moment has been a long time in the making.

After tinkering with robotics as a high school student in Memphis and then developing mobile apps in Zambia as a Fulbright fellow, Buolamwini followed her lifelong passion for computer science, engineering, and art to MIT in 2015. As a graduate student at the “Future Factory,� she did groundbreaking research that exposed widespread racial and gender bias in AI services from tech giants across the world.

Unmasking AI goes beyond the headlines about existential risks produced by Big Tech. It is the remarkable story of how Buolamwini uncovered what she calls “the coded gaze”—the evidence of encoded discrimination and exclusion in tech products—and how she galvanized the movement to prevent AI harms by founding the Algorithmic Justice League. Applying an intersectional lens to both the tech industry and the research sector, she shows how racism, sexism, colorism, and ableism can overlap and render broad swaths of humanity “excoded� and therefore vulnerable in a world rapidly adopting AI tools. Computers, she reminds us, are reflections of both the aspirations and the limitations of the people who create them.

Encouraging experts and non-experts alike to join this fight, Buolamwini writes, “The rising frontier for civil rights will require algorithmic justice. AI should be for the people and by the people, not just the privileged few.�
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336 Joy Buolamwini 0593241835 Nnedi 0 currently-reading 4.13 Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines
author: Joy Buolamwini
name: Nnedi
average rating: 4.13
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date added: 2024/04/27
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A Kind of Madness 177148883 224 Uché Okonkwo 1959030388 Nnedi 0 currently-reading 4.01 2024 A Kind of Madness
author: Uché Okonkwo
name: Nnedi
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/26
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