In a blog post on Medium Lee Vinsek writes about journalist and academics uncritically using and reproducing the claims of technologies. He further believes that this focus distracts from more current issues with at more mundane technologies such as their maintenance and repair:
Interesting article from The Economist on debates about economic models and theories. The author notes a return to evolutionary economics compared to the neoclassical approach built around equilibrium models.
The column on language by Johnson’s at the Economist reports that Google announced that its word processor Google Docs will start to nudge users to use more inclusive language:
On May 18th the company announced that it was going further in its promotion of inclusive language. Google Docs, its popular free wordprocessing software, would soon be nudging people away from potentially sexist language, such as the generic use of “chairman”. Instead it will offer gender neutral suggestions including “chairperson”.
Glenn Greenwald rightly points out the double standard on the coverage of the forced landing by Belarus of a passenger jet flying over its airspace to arrest a leading Belarusian opposition figure:
Very interesting to see a scientific paradigm shift — as described by Kuhn — happening before our eyes concerning the role of droplets versus aerosols in the transmission of Covid-19. This opinion piece by Dr. Tufekci at The New York Times gives some more information about why these facts took so long to accept. Another article at Wired gives some more background on the old scientific theories.
Surprising conclusions from Twitter on a recent controversy about a bias of their image cropping algorithm towards white people and women.
We considered the tradeoffs between the speed and consistency of automated cropping with the potential risks we saw in this research. One of our conclusions is that not everything on Twitter is a good candidate for an algorithm, and in this case, how to crop an image is a decision best made by people.
In a press release, NVIDIA announced that is apparently starting to change their GPUs to reduce their Ethereum hash rate and hence try to prevent them from being used for crypto mining.
The following Vox video details how the invention of a “Chinatown style”, that can be found in cities around the world, can be traced back to an earthquake in San Francisco in 1906 and the subsequent re-imaging/invention of a new style and culture.
Interesting quote from an article at The Economist about the changing role of taste-makers and how art and media is produced with the rise of algorithmic systems:
The diminishing role of industry taste makers is reflected in the sort of art now being produced. To make it onto computer generated playlists, songs must avoid getting skipped, so tracks increasingly open with a catchy “prechorus”. New re leases may have up to a dozen writers making sure that every section sparkles—a “genetically modified hit”, quips Mr Mulligan, who doubts that “awkward listens” like Radiohead would do as well today. “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen, which takes more than a minute to get going, would not be released, he suspects. Songs have become shorter, since artists are paid per stream. Labels are even making sure that the titles are Alexa friendly.