Law enforcement, marketers, hospitals and other bodies apply artificial intelligence (AI) to decide on matters such as who is profiled as a criminal, who is likely to buy what product at what price, who gets medical treatment and who gets hired.
Reads
Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
Read through part of chapter 4 and the section on Method of Loci on/around 8/7/20.
Some pretty big new features added. First, in Authl:
Private post — please log in to read
It pains me to read this. I’m sorry you’ve had to deal with all this… I can’t imagine having to live it.
(I’m also sort of curious about webmentions to protected posts, but I’m reasonably sure they should work, right?!)
Airlines are fine-tuning their cleaning procedures — where they clean, how frequently and with which tools. This is what the new processes look like.
A new feature that will allow automatic updating of plugins and themes will be available in WordPress version 5.5, which is scheduled to be released on August 11, 2020. In this core release of the world’s most popular content management system, site owners will have the option to turn auto-updates on for individual plugins and ...Read More
This should be an interesting update because of this. I’m probably going to generally ignore the functionality since I prefer closer control over my site and spend so much time in it on a daily basis.
An alarming photo of a hallway crowded by mostly maskless students in a Georgia high school raises issues with reopening schools all around the country.
This depresses me to read. It’s even worse when I think that this high school is just 36 miles South of the high school I attended. The local schools’ and government’s lack of care for the students under their supervision is appalling. It’s even worse when I think of the people who were sent home or punished for what I would consider minor dress code “violations” when I attended and yet now they’re saying they can’t manage to make mask wearing mandatory.
A strange sea monster appears on the lake ...a fortune is unearthed from an old cannon ...a valuable dinosaur egg is stolen. Watch out as the Mad Scientists turn Mammoth Falls upside down!
20% done
Read two chapters: The Strange Sea Monster of Strawberry Lake and The Unidentified Flying Man of Mammoth Falls
Cory Doctorow (well.com)Metadata is "data about data" -- information like keywords, page-length, title, word-count, abstract, location, SKU, ISBN, and so on. Explicit, human-generated metadata has enjoyed recent trendiness, especially in the world of XML. A typical scenario goes like this: a number of suppliers get together and agree on a metadata standard -- a Document Type Definition or scheme -- for a given subject area, say washing machines. They agree to a common vocabulary for describing washing machines: size, capacity, energy consumption, water consumption, price. They create machine-readable databases of their inventory, which are available in whole or part to search agents and other databases, so that a consumer can enter the parameters of the washing machine he's seeking and query multiple sites simultaneously for an exhaustive list of the available washing machines that meet his criteria.
Doctorow apparently drew out the roadmap for Twitter, democracy, and the future of society in 2001.
If everyone would subscribe to such a system and create good metadata for the purposes of describing their goods, services and information, it would be a trivial matter to search the Internet for highly qualified, context-sensitive results: a fan could find all the downloadable music in a given genre, a manufacturer could efficiently discover suppliers, travelers could easily choose a hotel room for an upcoming trip.
A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia. It’s also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities. ❧
Apparently this also now applies to politics and democracy too.
Annotated on August 06, 2020 at 09:12AM
When poisoning the well confers benefits to the poisoners, the meta-waters get awfully toxic in short order. ❧
If we look at Twitter as a worldwide annotation tool which is generating metadata on a much tinier subset of primary documents (some of which are not truthful themselves), this seems to bear out in that setting as well.
ref: Kalir & Garcia in Annotation
Annotated on August 06, 2020 at 09:17AM
Schemas aren’t neutral ❧
This section highlights why relying on algorithmic feeds in social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter can be toxic. Your feed is full of what they think you’ll like and click on instead of giving you the choice.
Annotated on August 06, 2020 at 09:23AM
It’s wishful thinking to believe that a group of people competing to advance their agendas will be universally pleased with any hierarchy of knowledge. The best that we can hope for is a detente in which everyone is equally miserable. ❧
The fate of true democracies.
Annotated on August 06, 2020 at 09:33AM
Miguel Lezama (The WordPress.com Blog)P2 powers internal collaboration at WordPress.com — and now it’s free for everyone. As more collaboration is happening remotely and online — work yes, but increasingly also school and persona…
It looks like Automattic is dusting off their old p2 / o2 theme projects for a new remote working platform? Here’s hoping that they consider Webmention support for true distributed cross-site @mentions.
My sense is that RSS is having a mini resurgence. People are getting wary of the social media platforms and their rapacious appetite for data. We’re getting fatigued from notifications; our inboxes are overflowing. And people are saying that maybe, just maybe, RSS can help. So I’m seeing RSS being discussed more in 2020 than I have done for years. There are signs of life in the ecosystem.
Matt has got a good overview and some useful ideas and I like the direction he’s moving. There has been more work on not only RSS but other feeds and specs like Microsub in the past few years. The IndieWeb has moved the needle a bit on this topic as well as related work on things like OPML. Even then, we still have a way to go on making the UI as easy as social media sites do.
Ben Werdmüller (Ben Werdmüller)Here's a lesson I learned a long time ago, the hard way. In a startup, everyone has to bring something important to the table that meaningfully pushes the organization forward. The people who want to tell everyone else what to do, or who are there because having a startup is cool, are dead weight. T...
I see this far too often as well…
Tatoeba is a free collaborative online database of example sentences geared towards foreign language learners. Its name comes from the Japanese term "tatoeba" (例えば), meaning "for example". Unlike other online dictionaries, which focus on words, Tatoeba focuses on translation of complete sentences. In addition, the structure of the database and interface emphasize one-to-many relationships. Not only can a sentence have multiple translations within a single language, but its translations into all languages are readily visible, as are indirect translations that involve a chain of stepwise links from one language to another.
English: from a Middle English personal name, Ailric, Alrich, Aldrich, etc. (Many different forms are recorded.) It represents the coalescence of at least two Old English personal names, Ælfric ‘elf ruler’ and Æ{dh}elric ‘noble ruler’.
Source: Dictionary of American Family Names ©2013, Oxford University Press
settlement, village, dwelling
wick, bay