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:
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:
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.