“Soon, talking to strangers will be even easier” is the title of a recent article in Wired magazine about language translation technology. Author David Pierce begins the article with a description of current technology that helps travelers navigate foreign locations. He continues with “as translation tech improves, though, the benefit will extend way beyond just helping you get around. When translation happens quickly and accurately enough to have a conversation that spans two languages and feels almost natural, we’ll be able to experience places in an entirely new way.” Maybe the technology will evolve to better enable conversation between two people speaking the same language but using different dialects. For example, I was surprised by how many times I did not quite get what a British person was saying to me during my recent vacation to London. Eventually, of course, translator microbes will solve all of our problems :).
culture
More than a dozen United States cities have pledged to pressure Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to honor net neutrality, in response to last year’s Federal Communications Commission’s decision to eliminate requirements for equal access to the Internet, so now ISPs can block content, throttle speeds to some sites or services, or give preferential treatment to others. According to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, “We’re gonna use our economic power to force the hands of these companies. We’re gonna build a movement among other cities.” It will interesting to see if this movement really takes off. Perhaps it may even lead to a resurgence of technorealism. We’ll see…
A couple of weeks ago I posted a note about an online game designed to help people detect fake news. This game is even more timely than I initially thought, as I just learned about a new research study that found that falsehoods are more popular than truths on Twitter. The study “analyzes every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter’s existence—some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years—and finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories.” Wow!
In a recent Pacific Standard article — “How to Immunize Yourself Against Fake News” — author Tom Jacobs argues, “it’s imperative that citizens become more media savvy, and learn to distinguish between authentic information and dubious material designed to sow discord.” The articles discusses www.fakenewsgame.org, a new online game that invites users to assume the role of a fake news disseminator. “This gives users insight into both the mindset of such propagandists, and the techniques they use,” Jacobs notes. A pilot study of the game played by 95 high school students in the Netherlands produced encouraging results. Hopefully other studies will provide confirmation!
The new movie Black Panther is breaking records at the box office, and generating lots of commentary online. The article that has most resonated with me is “Why ‘Black Panther’ is a Defining Moment for Black America.” Author Carvell Wallace begins with “the Grand Lake Theater — the kind of old-time movie house with cavernous ceilings and ornate crown moldings — is one place I take my kids to remind us that we belong to Oakland, Calif. Whenever there is a film or community event that has meaning for this town, the Grand Lake is where you go to see it.” My wife, mother-in-law, and I saw the movie at the Grand Lake Theater the day after it was released. The jam-packed multicultural crowd roared when the opening scene was identified as being set in Oakland, and many other scenes generated thunderous applause. I experienced the movie again the next day at a special screening for SJSU students. I’ll probably go view the movie a third time soon!
Carvell begins the analysis of the movie by contrasting it with earlier films with Black superheroes, which were either comedies or action films with the hero’s blackness being incidental.
Black Panther, by contrast, is steeped very specifically and purposefully in its blackness. “It’s the first time in a very long time that we’re seeing a film with centered black people, where we have a lot of agency,” says Jamie Broadnax, the founder of Black Girl Nerds, a pop-culture site focused on sci-fi and comic-book fandoms. These characters, she notes, “are rulers of a kingdom, inventors and creators of advanced technology. We’re not dealing with black pain, and black suffering, and black poverty” — the usual topics of acclaimed movies about the black experience.
“Black Panther is a Hollywood movie,” Carvell continues, “and Wakanda is a fictional nation. But coming when they do, from a director like Coogler, they must also function as a place for multiple generations of black Americans to store some of our most deeply held aspirations.” The movie sits squarely in the Afrofuturism artistic movement:
Afrofuturism, a decidedly black creation, is meant to go far beyond the limitations of the white imagination. It isn’t just the idea that black people will exist in the future, will use technology and science, will travel deep into space. It is the idea that we will have won the future. There exists, somewhere within us, an image in which we are whole, in which we are home. Afrofuturism is, if nothing else, an attempt to imagine what that home would be. Black Panther cannot help being part of this.
Carvell closes with “we hold one another as a family because we must be a family in order to survive. Our individual successes and failures belong, in a perfectly real sense, to all of us. That can be for good or ill. But when it is good, it is very good. It is sunlight and gold on vast African mountains, it is the shining splendor of the Wakandan warriors poised and ready to fight, it is a collective soul as timeless and indestructible as vibranium. And with this love we seek to make the future ours, by making the present ours. We seek to make a place where we belong.” Indeed!
The Pacific Standard website has published a fascinating story about using data to help migrants find work. In the article the authors of a Science magazine article are interviewed; they discuss their study of applying an artificial intelligence algorithm to analyze historical data to predict where to best settle refugees upon their arrival in a new country. The authors note,
Refugee policies, like immigration policies generally, are dominated by ideology rather than sound evidence. We haven’t seen a lot of innovations in this space. Cash assistance, language instruction, training programs: These turn out to be very expensive and difficult to scale. The nice thing is, from a policy perspective, [using artificial intelligence algorithms] doesn’t really cost you anything more. It’s just a smarter way of doing the allocation. Rather than doing it in a haphazard, quasi-random fashion, as we’re doing it right now, we might as well do it in a more data-driven way, where we send people to the places they’re more likely to succeed.
Indeed!
Amazon Books editors have chosen a list of 100 books to read in a lifetime. I’ve only read half of them. Over spring break I’ll have to lock myself in a room and catch up…
Today (January 16, 2018) is the second annual National Day of Racial Healing (NDORH). The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) asked colleges and universities across the country to engage in activities, events, and/or strategies that promote healing and foster engagement around the issues of racism, bias, inequity, and injustice in U.S. and/or global societies. The AACU&U notes, “this is an opportunity for people and organizations to come together in their common humanity and take collective action to create a more just and equitable world.” NDORH is an initiative in the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation (TRHT) effort, a national community-based process to promote transformational and sustainable change that addresses historical and contemporary effects of racism. We did not plan any NDORH activities in the College of Social Sciences this year; that will have to change next year.
The December 29, 2017 edition of the MapLab newsletter examines “some of 2017’s big narratives (for cities and the world) in maps, and some of 2017’s best maps, in stories.” The editors chose these categories: women march, gentrifiers gentrify, Russia snoopes?, missiles move, megaregions dawn, mass shootings accelerate, cities resist, opioids kill, tech’s power grows, Puerto Rico goes dark, a people wiped off the map, a red state goes blue, and two minutes of zen. Most of the categories are two-word entries, so I’ll close with this: “maps rock!”
Today I learned a new word: “youthquake.” According to the Oxford Dictionaries this is “a significant cultural, political, or social change arising from the actions or influence of young people,” and it is their world of the year. The other eight finalists for word of the year were Antifa, broflake, gorpcore, kompromat, milkshake duck, newsjacking, unicorn, and White fragility. I’ve only heard of Antifa and White fragility [and unicorn, but only as a reference to a mythical animal, not “denoting something, especially an item of food or drink, that is dyed in rainbow colours, decorated with glitter, etc.”]. I’ll need to read the dictionary more often…
More than a dozen United States cities have pledged to pressure Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to honor net neutrality, in response to last year’s Federal Communications Commission’s decision to eliminate requirements for equal access to the Internet, so now ISPs can block content, throttle speeds to some sites or services, or give preferential treatment to others. According to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, “We’re gonna use our economic power to force the hands of these companies. We’re gonna build a movement among other cities.” It will interesting to see if this movement really takes off. Perhaps it may even lead to a resurgence of technorealism. We’ll see…
A couple of weeks ago I posted a note about an online game designed to help people detect fake news. This game is even more timely than I initially thought, as I just learned about a new research study that found that falsehoods are more popular than truths on Twitter. The study “analyzes every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter’s existence—some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years—and finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories.” Wow!
In a recent Pacific Standard article — “How to Immunize Yourself Against Fake News” — author Tom Jacobs argues, “it’s imperative that citizens become more media savvy, and learn to distinguish between authentic information and dubious material designed to sow discord.” The articles discusses www.fakenewsgame.org, a new online game that invites users to assume the role of a fake news disseminator. “This gives users insight into both the mindset of such propagandists, and the techniques they use,” Jacobs notes. A pilot study of the game played by 95 high school students in the Netherlands produced encouraging results. Hopefully other studies will provide confirmation!
The new movie Black Panther is breaking records at the box office, and generating lots of commentary online. The article that has most resonated with me is “Why ‘Black Panther’ is a Defining Moment for Black America.” Author Carvell Wallace begins with “the Grand Lake Theater — the kind of old-time movie house with cavernous ceilings and ornate crown moldings — is one place I take my kids to remind us that we belong to Oakland, Calif. Whenever there is a film or community event that has meaning for this town, the Grand Lake is where you go to see it.” My wife, mother-in-law, and I saw the movie at the Grand Lake Theater the day after it was released. The jam-packed multicultural crowd roared when the opening scene was identified as being set in Oakland, and many other scenes generated thunderous applause. I experienced the movie again the next day at a special screening for SJSU students. I’ll probably go view the movie a third time soon!
Carvell begins the analysis of the movie by contrasting it with earlier films with Black superheroes, which were either comedies or action films with the hero’s blackness being incidental.
Black Panther, by contrast, is steeped very specifically and purposefully in its blackness. “It’s the first time in a very long time that we’re seeing a film with centered black people, where we have a lot of agency,” says Jamie Broadnax, the founder of Black Girl Nerds, a pop-culture site focused on sci-fi and comic-book fandoms. These characters, she notes, “are rulers of a kingdom, inventors and creators of advanced technology. We’re not dealing with black pain, and black suffering, and black poverty” — the usual topics of acclaimed movies about the black experience.
“Black Panther is a Hollywood movie,” Carvell continues, “and Wakanda is a fictional nation. But coming when they do, from a director like Coogler, they must also function as a place for multiple generations of black Americans to store some of our most deeply held aspirations.” The movie sits squarely in the Afrofuturism artistic movement:
Afrofuturism, a decidedly black creation, is meant to go far beyond the limitations of the white imagination. It isn’t just the idea that black people will exist in the future, will use technology and science, will travel deep into space. It is the idea that we will have won the future. There exists, somewhere within us, an image in which we are whole, in which we are home. Afrofuturism is, if nothing else, an attempt to imagine what that home would be. Black Panther cannot help being part of this.
Carvell closes with “we hold one another as a family because we must be a family in order to survive. Our individual successes and failures belong, in a perfectly real sense, to all of us. That can be for good or ill. But when it is good, it is very good. It is sunlight and gold on vast African mountains, it is the shining splendor of the Wakandan warriors poised and ready to fight, it is a collective soul as timeless and indestructible as vibranium. And with this love we seek to make the future ours, by making the present ours. We seek to make a place where we belong.” Indeed!
The Pacific Standard website has published a fascinating story about using data to help migrants find work. In the article the authors of a Science magazine article are interviewed; they discuss their study of applying an artificial intelligence algorithm to analyze historical data to predict where to best settle refugees upon their arrival in a new country. The authors note,
Refugee policies, like immigration policies generally, are dominated by ideology rather than sound evidence. We haven’t seen a lot of innovations in this space. Cash assistance, language instruction, training programs: These turn out to be very expensive and difficult to scale. The nice thing is, from a policy perspective, [using artificial intelligence algorithms] doesn’t really cost you anything more. It’s just a smarter way of doing the allocation. Rather than doing it in a haphazard, quasi-random fashion, as we’re doing it right now, we might as well do it in a more data-driven way, where we send people to the places they’re more likely to succeed.
Indeed!
Amazon Books editors have chosen a list of 100 books to read in a lifetime. I’ve only read half of them. Over spring break I’ll have to lock myself in a room and catch up…
Today (January 16, 2018) is the second annual National Day of Racial Healing (NDORH). The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) asked colleges and universities across the country to engage in activities, events, and/or strategies that promote healing and foster engagement around the issues of racism, bias, inequity, and injustice in U.S. and/or global societies. The AACU&U notes, “this is an opportunity for people and organizations to come together in their common humanity and take collective action to create a more just and equitable world.” NDORH is an initiative in the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation (TRHT) effort, a national community-based process to promote transformational and sustainable change that addresses historical and contemporary effects of racism. We did not plan any NDORH activities in the College of Social Sciences this year; that will have to change next year.
The December 29, 2017 edition of the MapLab newsletter examines “some of 2017’s big narratives (for cities and the world) in maps, and some of 2017’s best maps, in stories.” The editors chose these categories: women march, gentrifiers gentrify, Russia snoopes?, missiles move, megaregions dawn, mass shootings accelerate, cities resist, opioids kill, tech’s power grows, Puerto Rico goes dark, a people wiped off the map, a red state goes blue, and two minutes of zen. Most of the categories are two-word entries, so I’ll close with this: “maps rock!”
Today I learned a new word: “youthquake.” According to the Oxford Dictionaries this is “a significant cultural, political, or social change arising from the actions or influence of young people,” and it is their world of the year. The other eight finalists for word of the year were Antifa, broflake, gorpcore, kompromat, milkshake duck, newsjacking, unicorn, and White fragility. I’ve only heard of Antifa and White fragility [and unicorn, but only as a reference to a mythical animal, not “denoting something, especially an item of food or drink, that is dyed in rainbow colours, decorated with glitter, etc.”]. I’ll need to read the dictionary more often…