"One thing I do have confidence in is my feeling"
A really interesting interview with André 3000 by Hanif Abdurraqib:
“The thing is, I can only give what I’m feeling. I’m interested in discovery. If there’s not any discovery, it doesn’t feel real to me. I’ve never considered myself the best producer or the best singer or the best rapper or any of those separate categories. But one thing I do have confidence in is my feeling.”
André 3000 is at peace - The Bitter Southerner
In what year was the first emoji-like character set developed? Your guess is almost certainly wrong.
Emoji History: The Missing Years - Get Info
“I hope this isn’t for weapons”: The boring, repetitive work being undertaken to train AI algorithms, which are increasingly used as tools of war, by people fleeing conflicts
A chilling essay about Fatma, a Syrian refugee working in Bulgaria’s AI data annotation industry.
Despite its crucial role in the development and maintenance of AI technologies, data work is often belittled as micro or small, involving only a few clicks, and dismissed as low-skill or blue-collar. In fact, the platform Clickworker, a prominent provider of on-demand data work, claims on its website that “the tasks are generally simple and do not require a lot of time or skill to complete.” However, this assertion is inaccurate. During my fieldwork in Bulgaria, for instance, I attempted to segment and label satellite imagery, finding it extremely challenging. The work demands precision when drawing polygons around different objects in the pictures, which is also strenuous on the eyes and hands. Moreover, it requires contextual knowledge, including an understanding of what vegetation and vehicles look like in specific regions. Following the segmentation and labeling process by Fatma and her team, a rigorous quality check is conducted by a woman in the client’s company. Fatma’s manager in Bulgaria mentioned that the quality control person was “remarkably fast with the quality check and feedback” and added, “She’s able to do this quickly because she knows the images and the ground.” While taking note of this, I wondered how well the quality controller knows the ground. Does she come from the area where these images were taken? Is she, like Fatma, a refugee? Has her displacement been leveraged as expertise?
I asked Fatma if the satellite images she was working on could be of Syria. She said she thought the architecture and vehicles looked familiar. Staring at the screen, she whispered, “I hope this isn’t for weapons.” Neither she nor I could be certain.
There are no depths the AI sector will not sink to in order to exploit the vulnerable.
“I hope this isn’t for weapons.” How Syrian data workers train AI - UntoldMag
As Australian subsidies to fossil fuel producers increase to $14.5b we have to ask, has the election of the ALP made any difference in addressing the climate crisis?
Australia's willfull ignorance about poor literacy, and finally some efforts to change it
Fantastic to see “whole language” literacy finally being dropped, 30 years after we had compelling evidence that it impairs learning and particularly harms people with specific learning disabilities.
The structured literacy system teaches sounds from the “bottom up,” as opposed to the “whole language” approach which relies on immersing children in language and counting on them to absorb it. Structured language includes phonics: the matching sounds with letters or groups of letters.
Pokémon Go Players Invent Fake Beaches on Real Maps to Catch Rare Wigletts. I’m embarrassed to understand that sentence.
Primary prevention of gendered violence isn't working - so what might?
Many important points in this post by Jess Hill and Michael Salter:
In Australia, the current primary prevention strategy on gendered violence takes a universal approach. It does not put more resources into certain groups, but rather tries to deliver prevention work across the entire population. So entrenched is this ‘universal’ approach, it has come to stand as the exclusive definition of primary prevention.
But we are now coming up against the limitations of this approach. Even if we accept the current theory of change – that improvements to community attitudes will reduce gendered violence - it is clear, from the survey data we rely on to measure attitude change, that the strategy we have pursued for the past decade is showing limited, if any, success.
Family Farms in NSW and Queensland promoted by Covid vaccine-sceptic group Parents With Questions were intended to operate outside a ‘corrupt’ food system. But not all has gone to plan - good piece by Ariel Bogle and Cameron Wilson
Nobody buys books: How celebrity books and backlist bestsellers fund the 96% of books that sell less than 1,000 copies
Some genuinely fascinating insights from Elle Griffin’s analysis of the filings in the 2022 antitrust case that blocked the merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster:
The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Britney Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies).
We might not need more blogs but we definitely don’t need more books.
No one buys books elysian.press
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The Brazilian JSOC for the environment
This is pretty wild. Brazil has created a (massively underfunded) JSOC for the environment.
In 2013, Cabral secured approval to build a unit of rangers who were committed to saving the environment, by force if necessary. The next year, he was shot in the shoulder when he and his men surprised illegal loggers in the woods; he was back at work in less than two months.
The members of the G.E.F. (the acronym stands for Specialised Inspection Group in Portuguese) are biology nerds who found themselves carrying guns—a gang of jungle Ghostbusters. They undergo intensive training, developed by a specialized police unit that fights organized crime.
Most members of his team had graduate degrees in the sciences. Renato, a muscular man of thirty-four with a shaved head, had specialized in fish ecology. During raids, he did a lot of the heavy lifting, keeping up a cheerful patter as he destroyed mine equipment; other times he fixed engines. Alexandre, forty-eight and the father of two young girls, had worked in a national park and in fisheries regulation before taking the G.E.F. training course. “I’d never imagined working with weapons,” he said, but he had shown an unexpected aptitude. He was generally a guard, calmly scrutinizing the surrounding forest with a gun at his shoulder.
The only nonscientist was Marcus—a former lawyer, forty-two, tall and rangy, with an easygoing manner. At the headquarters, in Brasília, he procured weapons and ammunition for the group; in the field, he was often a guard. Growing up in the interior province of Goiás, he aspired to be a photographer for skate magazines, until his parents persuaded him to go to law school instead. Halfway through, he attended a ceremony of the União do Vegetal, a Christian sect that incorporates ayahuasca in its sacraments. “During the opening chant, I left my body,” he recalled. “I started to see the Amazon rain forest and found myself walking through it in a uniform with a team, while Indigenous people chanted behind me. That moment filled me with joy, and there I discovered the mission of my life.”
The Brazilian Special-Forces Unit Fighting to Save the Amazon newyorker.com
Reader: www.newyorker.com
“We are leaving a trail of devastation through the earth with our daily lives and we don’t care about it yet.”
I was interested in this speech by Ilona Kickbusch on the challenge of trying to create healthier societies during the polycrisis.
One of her slides jumped out at me, contrasting Goran Dahlgren and Margaret Whitehead’s longstanding model of the determinants of health with a cyclone:
This image has been central to public health messaging since the earliest stages of my career. Seeing it spun into chaos seems like an appropriate metaphor for the challenges that my field faces.
Ilona also quoted German Economics Minister Robert Habeck, who I think has it right:
“…when we live our everyday lives, when we fill up our cars, when we slather our mince on the mince roll, we are always on the side of the good guys. Only people who have never been in a pigsty can believe that. We are leaving a trail of devastation through the earth with our daily lives and we don’t care about it yet.“
Robert Habeck, 2022
This post originally appeared on the Harris-Roxas Health blog.