Sociologist documents what Gary Becker knew in 1957
12 May 2017 Leave a comment
Source: Pager, Devah. 2016. “Are Firms that Discriminate More Likely to Go Out of Business?” Sociological Science (September):849-859. PDF
AI: Still not clever enough to be allowed out on its own
09 May 2017 Leave a comment
Barely a day goes by now without a Robots Taking Jobs story. If that wasn’t bad enough, once they’ve taken all our jobs they will eventually take over the world. They might even wipe us out, though why they would bother to enslave us is beyond me.
All good clean entertainment but in most news pieces there is little or no attempt to explain terms like artificial intelligence and machine learning. As Matt Ballantine pointed out a few weeks ago, some of the robot stories are pure hype.
Imagery matters. Imagery shapes the agenda. And there’s a whole load of crap, clichéd stock imagery that time-pressed and underpaid online editors attach to their copy without really thinking.
So just what is artificial intelligence and can machines really learn?
There’s no generally agreed definition but there is a useful explanation of the various terms here, summarised below, which is a good…
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% adult low performers in literacy and/or numeracy, G7, Australia and New Zealand
05 May 2017 Leave a comment
Twenty five years on from Rushdie we are too frightened to say we are scared
04 May 2017 Leave a comment
British publishing is now such a neurotic and hypocritical business there are stories it cannot cover. Nor should it try. When journalists, writers and artists can’t be honest with their audience, when they can’t even be honest with themselves, silence is preferable to the damage their double-standards bring.
Last month our media commemorated the imminent anniversary of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie by trying and failing to report the threats to the life of Maajid Nawaz, the chief executive of Quilliam Foundation. In a vindication of Kipling’s “once you have paid him the Dane-geld/you never get rid of the Dane” fanatics are after Nawaz not because he satirised the founding myths of Islam, as Rushdie did, or projected sexist verses from the Koran on to a naked woman’s body, as Theo van Gogh and Ayaan Hirsi Ali did, but because – brace yourselves – he tweeted a picture of Jesus…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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