Wednesday 1 August 2018

out to pasture

Via Kottke, we’re directed toward a rather powerful and immediate way to visualise land-use in the United States of America by projecting percentages on to a map of the contiguous states. Each pixel represents one million acres (about four hundred thousand hectares) and an enormous amount is allotted to ranches, ranges and pasturelands for livestock and for raising feed for the animals with crops for human consumption dwarfed in comparison. One would think that in this day and age, one could find a better use for more than a third of one’s territory than the upkeep of cattle and wonder how other countries and regions rank.

kleptocracy

This thoughtful essay from economist Susan Crawford on the inherently paradoxical nature of good governance—how the most vital and integral public services are the most vulnerable to being dismantled by oligarchs by dint of their invisibility—initially reminded us of a parallel phenomena that we encountered a few weeks ago that spoke to how we perceive laisse-faire attitudes and confidence in market-corrections: a search void.

The result of unequal passion for forwarding a particular agenda or product over a scientifically sound and accepted truth that needs no advocacy, search engines answer enquiries with a paucity of authoritative answers in favour of amplifying and propagating rumour and falsehoods—not because of some malfeasance in programming or bias to serve up what sells (though spamdexing does happen and that is a real problem too), but because there is a concerted effort boost the worldview of a particular party. It’s not a majority perspective but can appear so. In the same way those sturdy and staid institutions of government, the museums, schools, hospitals and regulatory bodies, get far less attention and fewer champions (seemingly) than those who would call for their privatization or outright obliteration. Here’s hoping that we won’t have to loose these protections to realise what we have and what’s at stake.

รญ embรฆtti

On this day in 1980, Vigdรญs Finnbogadรณttir became the first democratically directly elected female president (forseti—the presiding one and derived from the ร†sir god Fosite, the personification of justice and reconciliation), assuming the high office in Iceland.  Though she initially won by only a slight majority of voters, she went on to serve three more terms, running in two of the elections unopposed, making her also the longest serving—to date—female head of state, with an administration of exactly sixteen years. In 1996, Vigdรญs chose not to be considered for re-election but has remained active since as a goodwill ambassador, lobbying on behalf of minority languages and world peace.

flagged content

The experimental social media chatbot Tay that quickly suffered a racist meltdown after less than a day’s exposure to the Internet wilds has a younger sibling called Zo, whose programming dictates she follows the protocols of their aggregate idea of a typical teenage American girl.

Far worse than the stereotyped pastiche of shouts and murmurs, however, is the unsettling and insidious way Zo champions political correctness through disengagement and strictly avoids the lures and decoys that led to the grounding of her elder sister. What Zo is ostensibly being trained for is to police forums for uncivil material and she has adopted a disturbing way of shutting down a conversation, should an interlocutor introduce a term associated with controversy. Decontextualizing censorship is a mistake that humans are prone to make enough by their own devices and possibly not something to be automated and institutionalised.