Spatial Apartheid Mapping by DAIR
To help researchers understand the current impact of spatial apartheid, we developed a dataset consisting of satellite imagery covering South Africa, accompanied by polygons labeled according to four classes of neighborhoods: wealthy areas, non wealthy areas, non residential neighborhoods and vacant land.
DAIR is active on the Fediverse, notably through their own Mastodon instance.
Spatial Apartheid Mapping dair-institute.org
Reader: www.dair-institute.org
Secretive firm behind voice no campaign billed taxpayers almost $135,000 via Coalition MPs, documents show via @RHW@mastodon.au
The secretive firm behind the no campaign in the voice referendum has claimed almost $135,000 in taxpayer funding, including almost $70,000 from the Coalition senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, as part of its work to help conservative politicians sharpen their messaging to voters.
The computer guys have arrived to tell historical linguists how to study language
In the manner of mathematicians and physicists telling other academic fields how they’re doing it wrong, the computer guys have arrived to tell historical linguists how to study language.
Mainstream historical linguists remain skeptical, however — of computational phylogenetics in general and the new result in particular. The main criticism is that the approach relies mostly on vocabulary and ignores word sounds and structures, such as the stems, prefixes and suffixes that make up a word. And the critics say that word meanings by themselves don’t give enough information to draw firm conclusions, no matter how sophisticated the computation.
A very interesting long piece, well worth your time.
A new look at our linguistic roots knowablemagazine.org
Reader: knowablemagazine.org
Discord, the internet's sewer, continues to be dangerous to you even if you're not on it
Discord continues to be every troll’s favourite platform:
Over the weekend, hackers targeted federated social networks like Mastodon to carry out ongoing spam attacks that were organized on Discord, and conducted using Discord applications.
Importantly these coordinated attacks seem to be targeting smaller fediverse instances according to Eugen Rochko, which may have less active moderation processes in place. These claims may be self-serving on Rochko’s part though, some of the best-run instances I know are smaller ones and mastodon.social is often a bin fire.
Discord took no action against server that coordinated costly Mastodon spam attacks | TechCrunch techcrunch.com
Reader: techcrunch.com
Eugen Rochko (@Gargron@mastodon.social) mastodon.social
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Mary Reynolds: from gardening to acts of restorative kindness
It used to be an acre of gorse, bramble, hawthorn, blackthorn, but someone got planning and had cleaned out the whole field to replace it with a garden. I stood there in horror – and I realized that I’d done this myself so many times in my career. They had nowhere else to go. We’re taking away their habitats, the agricultural land is poisoned, old growth forest decimated, and now the only hope they have is abandoned land or gardens. It just reminded me of Noah’s Arc, all those animals going onto the boat, but in reverse. So I decided to give up my job. I have to dedicate myself to righting the wrong I’ve done.
Interview with Mary Reynolds | Acts of Restorative Kindness (ARK) - ARC2020 via Metafilter
I watched American Fiction last night. I haven’t enjoyed a film that much in a long time. Jeffrey Wright and Cord Jefferson, so good. 4½ stars
Forest and Factory: The Science and the Fiction of Communism
The bleak reality is that none of us have ever seen even the dimmest glimmer of a communist world—at most we have witnessed a few of those weightless moments when many people realize at once that our world can, in fact, be broken. Ultimately, these are nothing but glowing images best seen from a distance. Reach out to touch them and there is no depth. Just work, survival, desperation. Just the drywall, off-white.
There’s a phenomenal amount to ponder in this 20,000 word essay, I feel I can’t really do it justice. Just read it you muppets.
Forest and Factory: The Science and the Fiction of Communism - Endnotes
"It seems fantastic that scholars in Torino in 1840 discussed computers, punch cards, programs, data, and memory storage. But the archives prove that they did."
These cards may be the oldest existent computer program in the world. They were brought to Torino as a part of some lucid, compelling explanation, but now, they are more obscure than the Egyptian hieroglyphs in the museum next door. There is something terrible about them.
Babbage described the idea of software to the Turinese in September 1840. The Turinese understood his idea and sympathized. They honored Babbage for his efforts. Those are facts.
The largest mystery, is the presence of the secret police.
Using AI to read the Herculaneum papyrus scrolls, carbonised when Venusius erupted 2,000 years ago
A great story about uncovering the words locked inside carbonised Roman scrolls. We should be using machine learning for more things like this, and using it to impersonate humans less.
In the modern era, the great pioneer of the scrolls is Brent Seales, a computer science professor at the University of Kentucky. For the past 20 years he’s used advanced medical imaging technology designed for CT scans and ultrasounds to analyze unreadable old texts. For most of that time he’s made the Herculaneum papyri his primary quest. “I had to,” he says. “No one else was working on it, and no one really thought it was even possible.”
Progress was slow. Seales built software that could theoretically take the scans of a coiled scroll and unroll it virtually, but it wasn’t prepared to handle a real Herculaneum scroll when he put it to the test in 2009. “The complexity of what we saw broke all of my software,” he says. “The layers inside the scroll were not uniform. They were all tangled and mashed together, and my software could not follow them reliably.”…
Unlike today’s large-language AI models, which gobble up data, Farritor’s model was able to get by with crumbs. For each 64-pixel-by-64-pixel square of the image, it was merely asking, is there ink here or not? And it helped that the output was known: Greek letters, squared along the right angles of the cross-hatched papyrus fibers.
Can AI Unlock the Secrets of the Ancient World? - Businessweek
The limitations of universal basic income – and why guaranteed employment and public services may offer a way forward
Some good points in this article by Jason Hickel:
But UBI fails to transform anything about the underlying system of production. It accepts the existing system on its own terms: it does nothing to change who controls production, what kinds of goods and services are produced, under what conditions, and for whose benefit. This is one of the reasons that plenty of neoliberal capitalists, including Milton Friedman, have been perfectly comfortable with the idea. But ignoring the system of production is a problem, because the system we presently have—capitalism—is profoundly destructive and cannot address the multiple crises we face.
Land grabs, tax breaks and environmental damage: Musk's Texas takeover
“The beach has always been a special privilege to us. It has enriched our quality of life despite the low pay that is available to us,” Serrano said. “Traditionally, people have called it the Poor People’s Beach.” Now, the tourists who visit the shore (when it isn’t closed to beachgoers) to gawk at the SpaceX rockets in the distance have a different name for it, Serrano said: Elon’s Beach.
Elon Musk’s Texas Takeover - Mother Jones
The use of AI tools in hiring processes is a black box but it's already widespread. Hiring is the single most important thing you do for an organisation – abrogating that responsibility to an A.I. is grossly irresponsible.
Many of the tools are essentially black boxes, says Schellmann. AI let loose on training data looks for patterns, which it then uses to make its predictions. But it isn’t necessarily clear what those patterns are and they can inadvertently bake in discrimination. Even the vendors may not know precisely how their tools are working, let alone the companies that are buying them or the candidates or employees who are subjected to them.
Schellmann tells of a black female software developer and military veteran who applied for 146 jobs in the tech industry before success. The developer doesn’t know why she had such a problem but she undertook one-way interviews and played AI video games, and she’s sure was subject to CV screening. She wonders if the technology took exception to her because she wasn’t a typical applicant. The job she eventually did find was by reaching out to a human recruiter.
[The AI tools that might stop you getting hired - The Guardian](www.theguardian.com/technolog…
"There's quite a movement among Māori all around the country. They've been gathering in their thousands and will come to Waitangi in huge numbers to confront the prime minister and the government."
“…discussion around the treaty is now the dominant political issue in New Zealand and when organiser Rueben Taipari put out the call for the hikoi to Waitangi to be in honour of upholding it, hundreds of people responded.
“How dare they think that they can erase Māori from Te Tiriti o Waitangi (the Treaty of Waitangi),” he said.”
We need to fight this constant dehumanisation "I thought I'd get the job. Then I found out my interviewer was an AI chatbot"
Logging onto an app and using a personalised link, I was told the interview would be limited to just five questions - which I didn’t really feel captured the scope of the job - and then we began.
I was shown a question on a screen for 60 seconds before having to answer verbally within the minute. Then, if I didn’t opt to give myself an additional 30 seconds, we’d move on.
I thought I’d get the job. Then I found out my interviewer was an AI chatbot - Metro UK via Black Aziz Ansari