This article from The Economist is worth a read to understand their position on brain research and the use of primates in studies:
And were laboratories in China and Japan to come up with treatments for neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s as a result of their studies of monkeys’ brains, it would be near impossible for Western countries to refuse to buy them to treat their citizens. Leaving others to do the dirty work of generating knowledge using means you consider to be unethical, while at the same time encouraging it by adding to demand is not taking the moral high ground. It is hypocrisy. Better for Western countries to carry out the necessary but troubling research them- selves, working to the standards they deem necessary.
I came across this interesting short video documentary on the historical developments of the typewriter for the Korean alphabet (Hangeul). The following article by Young Back Choi gives a fascinating insight in the developments of this technology and its various path dependencies. From the article:
The evolution of the Korean keyboard reveals complex processes of dealing with nested path dependencies. As technologies change, one type of path dependence may turn into another type, and then into yet another. What had been first-degree path dependence in the age of handwriting had to be reexamined with the possibility of the mechanical typewriter. Difficulties for a mechanical typewriter included the conventions of writing vertically (instead of horizontally), the mixed use of the Korean alphabet and Chinese characters (which was impossible for a mechanical typewriter), and certain design features of the Korean alphabet, FALIASITB. Had all the conventions been kept, the Korean mechanical typewriter would not have been possible and Koreans would have had to rely on handwriting for much longer—second-degree path dependence. As it was, Koreans quickly adopted the convention of writing horizontally—third-degree path dependence. The mixed use of Chinese characters was also suspended, for the purpose of typing—third-degree path dependence. But FALIASITB was kept, after vigorous debates over whether a switch should be made to OLAAH—second-degree path dependence.
Tim Hart, in an article at The Financial Times, wrote an interesting article about the use of spreadsheets in business and science. I just had to save this quote:
Or say you’re a genetics researcher typing in the name of a gene such as “Membrane Associated Ring-CH-Type Finger 1”, or March1 for short, or perhaps the Sept1 gene. You can imagine what Excel does next. It turns those gene names into dates. One study estimated that 20 per cent of all genetics papers had errors caused by Excel’s autocorrect Microsoft’s defence is simple enough: the default settings are intended to work in everyday scenarios. Which is the polite way of saying: Guys, Excel wasn’t designed for genetics researchers. It was designed for accountants (…) And yet when the genetics research community were wrestling with the autocorrecting genes issue, they resigned themselves to the hard truth that they would never wean people off Excel. Instead, the folks in charge — the Hugo Gene Nomenclature Committee — decided to change the names of the genes in question.
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:
But it’s not just uncritical journalists and fringe writers who hype technologies in order to criticize them. Academic researchers have gotten in on the game. At least since the 1990s, university researchers have done work on the social, political, and moral aspects of wave after wave of “emerging technologies” and received significant grants from public and private bodies to do so. As I’ll detail below, many (though certainly not all) of these researchers reproduced and even increased hype, the most dramatic promotional claims of future change put forward by industry executives, scientists, and engineers working on these technologies. Again, at the worst, what these researchers do is take the sensational claims of boosters and entrepreneurs, flip them, and start talking about “risks.” They become the professional concern trolls of technoculture.
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:
The blatant double standards the U.S. and Europe have endlessly tried to impose upon the world — whereby they are freely permitted to do exactly what they condemn when done by others — is not just a matter of standard lawlessness and hypocrisy. While there was extensive coverage in the Western press on the downing of Morales’ plane, there was not even a fraction of the media indignation expressed over the actions by their own governments as they are now conveying when the same is done by Belarus. In Western media discourse, only Bad Countries are capable of bad acts; the U.S. and its allies are capable, at worst, only of well-intentioned mistakes. Thus do the exact same actions by each side receive radically different narrative treatment from the Western press corps.
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.
In The Netherlands I can also see this reflected in the RIVM guidelines. Until April 2021 they stated the following concerning aerosol transmission:
Het is op dit moment niet duidelijk of de kleine druppels (aerosolen) die in de lucht blijven hangen een rol spelen bij de verspreiding van het virus. Mochten ze een rol spelen in de verspreiding, dan is dit een minder belangrijke verspreidingsroute dan van de grotere druppels. Het beeld van de verspreiding van SARS-CoV-2 is hetzelfde als dat van andere virussen die door grote druppels worden overgedragen.
While current RIVM guidelines state the following.
Onder bepaalde omstandigheden kan besmetting ook plaatsvinden via virusdeeltjes die in de kleine druppeltjes (aerosolen) een grotere afstand kunnen afleggen. Bijvoorbeeld in ruimtes waar geen of te weinig ventilatie is en/of veel mensen, vooral voor een langere tijd,- bij elkaar zijn. Overdracht van het SARS-CoV-2-virus via luchtkanalen van ventilatiesystemen is niet waargenomen.
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.
Via The Register.