Marketplace Tech

Throughout human history, the color blue has been a conundrum. Now, an Oregon State University lab is pushing color science forward. Researcher Mas Subramanian discovered YInMn blue, the first new blue pigment discovered since Thomas Jefferson was president and one of the most vivid blue colors ever created. Oregon Public Broadcasting’s Jes Burns reports.

You aren’t seeing ads from hundreds of brands on Facebook and Instagram right now because companies froze their advertising over how Facebook handles hate speech. That’s on top of a drop in advertising due to the pandemic. For online creators, the drop in advertising is even more of a push to diversify their revenue sources and support themselves without relying on sponsorship or ads. 

There are a lot of juicy targets for hackers these days, with millions of people working from home and companies working on valuable COVID-19 drugs. One of the ways companies fight attacks is to try to fix bugs in their software before they can be exploited. They do it by hiring ethical hackers. Molly Wood speaks with Jesse Kinser who works as the chief information security officer for the precision health care company LifeOmic. She also moonlights as a hacker, finding jobs using the crowdsourced hack platform Synack.

The Trump administration put a temporary freeze on new foreign workers that come here through the H-1B visa program. The administration argues that if the U.S. stops the flow of immigrants, there will be more jobs left for Americans in this recession. But researchers say the policy may backfire, because when immigrants go to a new country, they frequently bring new ideas, start companies and attract new investment money. Molly Wood speaks with Zeke Hernandez, a professor of global strategy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

It’s been proven that facial recognition software isn’t good at accurately identifying people of color. It’s also known that police departments around the country use facial recognition tools to identify suspects and make arrests. And now we know about what is possibly the first confirmed wrongful arrest made as a result of mistaken identification by software. The New York Times reported last week that Robert Williams, a Black man, was wrongfully arrested in Detroit in January. Molly Wood speaks with Joy Buolamwini, who has been researching this topic for years as a computer scientist based at the MIT Media Lab and head of the nonprofit Algorithmic Justice League. She said that, like racism, algorithmic bias is systemic.

In this country, internet access comes from companies. And in many states, those companies have lobbied for laws that prevent cities from building their own infrastructure to provide access. But some cities have. A decade ago, Chattanooga, Tennessee, laid fiber to every business and home in the city to prevent power outages and offer internet access to everyone. Molly Wood speaks with Katie Espeseth, vice president of new products at the city’s electricity and internet utility. 

All this week, we’ve been looking at internet access, cost, infrastructure, and today, competition. Actually, the almost complete lack of competition. More than 129 million people in the U.S. only have one option for broadband. Is that a government problem or a free market problem? Molly Wood speaks to Susan Crawford, a law professor at Harvard and the author of the book “Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution — and Why America Might Miss It.”

All this week, Marketplace Tech is doing a new series called “The Internet Is Everything,” where we look at access, infrastructure and cost. That question of cost comes down to competition, infrastructure and whether telecom companies have invested in bringing service to where you live. Molly Wood speaks with Mignon Clyburn, a former member of the Federal Communications Commission. She says we have to acknowledge that race and poverty play a role in where companies decide to offer access.

This fall, the FCC is planning to award up to $16 billion to increase broadband availability across the country. But the data the FCC is using to decide where broadband is most needed is wildly inaccurate, even by the agency’s own admission. Host Molly Wood speaks with Nicol Turner Lee, who researches technology access as a fellow in the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution. She said the pandemic has made the mapping problem even more obvious.

Internet access is the ultimate essential service. But, like so many things in this country, access is not equal. This week, host Molly Wood starts a new series called “The internet is everything,” starting with listeners’ personal stories.