How do contemporary technologies shape our understanding of ourselves? By the 1500s, automata powered by springs and gears had been devised, eventually inspiring leading thinkers such as René Descartes to assert that humans are complex machines. In the 1600s, the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes suggested that thinking arose from small mechanical motions in the brain.…
It’s January, so it must be time for the annual celebration of the value of the UK’s creative industries. The UK’s creative industries are now worth a record £84.1 billion to the UK economy, figures published today reveal. British films, music, video games, crafts and publishing are taking a lead role in driving the UK’s…
…by 1859, thanks to John Tyndall’s experiments, the world had a better understanding of how CO2 warms the earth, and how the oceans absorb it, and how the burning of fossil fuels could lead to more intense weather. Cameron Muir at Medium.
Glenn Fleishman argues that bad data leads to a basic misunderstanding about the risks to children from strangers: As with most crime and violence, children are exposed to the greatest risk either because of family members or their own choices. More here.
Is the world being taken over by bigoted algorithms? Pasquale cites a 2013 study, “Discrimination in Online Ad Delivery,” in which Harvard professor Latanya Sweeney found that black-identified names (including her own) frequently generated Google ads like “Lakisha Simmons, Arrested?” while white-identified names did not. More on Frank Pasquale’s ‘Black Box Society’ here.
At ‘Africa Is A Country’, Siddhartha Mitter discusses Max Fisher‘s article ‘A fascinating map of the world’s most and least racially tolerant countries’, derived from World Values Survey data: We are left with a shiny color-coded “fascinating map” on the Washington Post site that sends a strong message of Western, Anglo-Saxon moral superiority, assorted with…