Month: January 2013

Tom Vanderbilt highlights an ethical problem for search engines:

A few years ago, Google faced controversy when it was revealed a search for the word “Jew” returned several anti-Semitic websites. Through brute algorithmic logic, it made sense: the sort of people who use the word “Jew” tend to have those sorts of proclivities. Now a search for that word leads in short order to an explanatory page from Google (which states, in part: “Someone searching for information on Jewish people would be more likely to enter terms like ‘Judaism’, ‘Jewish people’ or ‘Jews’ than the single word ‘Jew’. In fact, prior to this incident, the word ‘Jew’ only appeared about once in every ten million search queries”). While [Amit Singhal, a senior vice president at Google] says that “time and again we decided that Google shouldn’t intervene in the [search] process,” it is constantly shaping the world — for example, it recently struck the peer-sharing site The Pirate Bay from autocomplete — and the fact that “Holocaust denial” yields very different results than “Holocaust lie” is as much a social as a search issue.

Tom Vanderbilt highlights an ethical problem for search engines:

A few years ago, Google faced controversy when it was revealed a search for the word "Jew" returned several anti-Semitic websites. Through brute algorithmic logic, it made sense: the sort of people who use the word "Jew" tend to have those sorts of proclivities. Now a search for that word leads in short order to an explanatory page from Google (which states, in part: "Someone searching for information on Jewish people would be more likely to enter terms like 'Judaism', 'Jewish people' or 'Jews' than the single word 'Jew'. In fact, prior to this incident, the word 'Jew' only appeared about once in every ten million search queries"). While [Amit Singhal, a senior vice president at Google] says that "time and again we decided that Google shouldn't intervene in the [search] process," it is constantly shaping the world — for example, it recently struck the peer-sharing site The Pirate Bay from autocomplete — and the fact that "Holocaust denial" yields very different results than "Holocaust lie" is as much a social as a search issue.

James Wolcott connected himself to an array of self-tracking gear, including one that coaches you through the stress of modern life:

Along with my digital wristbands, I am packing an emWave2 pocket-size Personal Stress Reliever, which, through an earlobe attachment or thumb sensor, measures heart-rate variability (H.R.V.) and doubles as a biofeedback meditation assistant. By breathing in unison with a climbing and descending column of illuminated beads and thinking happy thoughts of ballerinas, I seek to raise my coherence level from red (low) to blue (medium) to green (high), achieving a steady-state flow of relaxed awareness that will undulate through the day, until somebody annoying calls. It’s like a mood ring for the heart. I practice with the emWave2 five minutes at a stretch, because any longer than that and its beeps begin to bug me and drop me into the red zone, which defeats the purpose.

Alyssa recently hailed the innovative aspects of Netflix's new season of Arrested Development. Jean Christian tempers this praise:

[T]he innovations Arrested Development (2013) will bring to television narrative and distribution have existed in smaller, less-obvious and lower-budget forms online for over a decade.

As I explored in a recent article in the Journal of Communication Inquiry, the web series market has existed for nearly twenty years, and in that time has routinely upended our expectations of what television is and can be. Arrested Development is building on years of work from scores of producers of independent television — television produced not just by independent production companies (mostly), but also television produced independent of the industry’s conventions. Web series are a vital and largely unexplored part of the Golden Age of Television, which critics have largely located on basic and premium cable.

Llewellyn Hinkes-Jones is sickened by private prisons:

Prison labor has long been banned in various states from competing on the free market since it violates numerous labor laws and essentially amounts to a slave workforce who can be paid subminimum wages and have little recourse against harsh working conditions. The for-profit prison industry is determined to change that.

This profiteering might be defended as part and parcel of running an efficient penitentiary, but it’s hard not to view it as a vicious cycle of exploitation; prisoners are used as cheap labor, sometimes against their will, obstructed from leaving in due time, and given worse treatment all to help fund a lobby that seeks to trap ever more into their galley. When the venture is not profitable enough, the inventory can be auctioned off to the lowest bidder like chattel, creating a kind of de facto system of legitimized slavery.

Amtrak is switching to faster 4G networks. Rebecca Greenfield isn't optimistic that it will do much good, noting that "the best commuters can hope for is very fast internet…very occasionally":

Currently, Amtrak gets its onboard Wi-Fi from Verizon and AT&T cell towers, which don't happen to sit along the train routes. Cellphone companies, of course, want to cater to dense areas of people — also known as their regular customers — and the way signals work, the further away the cell tower, the worse the reception. Although Amtrak will upgrade to faster, better cellphone technologies, changing to 4G doesn't make those cell towers get any closer to the tracks.

Erik Vance ponders the musical taste of Kevin, his $10 canary:

Every morning I sit down to work, turn on either a Cyndi Lauper, Jack Johnson, or Pavarotti Pandora station, and start typing. And Kevin sings along –  adding staccato trilling during the long notes, warbling burbles during the wordy bits, and finishing in unison with the song. He doesn’t actually get the tune, but I could swear he is harmonizing. And then there’s his tastes. At first, eager to greet the morning he’ll sing to anything. But by late morning, he’s choosier. Madonna, Bon Jovi, the Eagles? He can’t get enough. John Mayer, Tracy Chapman, or anyone playing an acoustic guitar and he silently waits for the next song. Turns out, he’s a big fan of opera, classic rock, and some country. He hates most new age, acoustic, and alternative rock.

The cockatiel above is more of a dub-step fan.

Freddie revives a perennial grammar debate:

We have this problem in English: we're lacking a particular pronoun, the third person gender-neutral singular. The conventional way around this is to use their: "every student picked up their paper." But this usage drives prescriptivist grammarians crazy, as "every" is singular, which we can tell from how "student" inflects as singular. (It's "every student," after all, not "every students.") The typical advice is to instead us "his or her" in place of their. That's a technically satisfying answer, but as anyone who actually uses English knows, it's imperfect: it sounds clunky, likely due to its phonological distance from the other possessive pronouns like I, me, she, he, you– each of which has only one syllable. That's not an irrelevant concern. Phonological symmetry is actually an important consideration when it comes to certain categories of words.

Alyssa is pleasantly surprised by FX's roster of shows:

“Sons” is as much a show about what it means to be a downwardly mobile white man as it is a show about bikes. “The League” describes what it means to view your wife not just as a helpmeet but one of the guys (she’s in the fantasy league, too). And “Louie” is about how to be not just a good single father, but a single father to daughters. As a network, FX is the televisual equivalent of publications like the Good Men Project—a self-proclaimed effort to foster “a national discussion centered around modern manhood”—but with a healthy dose of bad and struggling men in the mix.