Jacob Ward discusses how the US government is contracting Palantir in order to process information on residents and compares it to Estonia’s digital identification. A key difference is that Estonia is focused on keeping the data siloed while here a goal seems to be removing barriers to data access.
An All-American Surveillance System Is Coming (The Rip Current)
Time for another song that I like. This one is Unique by Lenka.
Lenka – Unique (Official Video) (lenkatv – YouTube)
One of the central arguments made by opponents of public education is that North Carolina taxpayers spend too much on their children and schools. Even as the state continues to rank near-bottom in the nation for school spending, some on the political right charge that the number is still too high. Specifically, opponents blame “administrative bloat” in North Carolina’s public school system for soaking up resources that should go to classrooms instead.
In but one example, failed Republican candidate Michelle Morrow claimed that there had been a 265% increase in funding for “administrative and bureaucratic stuff” (what time frame she was referring to was left unclear). Failed Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson repeatedly decried a “bloated bureaucracy” in the school system, which he said needed to “cut the fat.”
But like much of what Robinson and Morrow had to say, these claims do not survive the first contact with evidence.
Miles Kirkpatrick
The Myth of Bloated School Administration (Carolina Forward)
Adam Conover, whose videos I generally like, made an embarrassing mistake and accepted an offer to make a video about Sam Altman’s cryptocurrency company, World, and its Orb biometric scanning device. After folks complained and pointed out how working with World went against his values, he turned down the money and made this video about the situation and the event.
Why I Became a Crypto Shill (Adam Conover – YouTube)
We set speed limits, we put them on signs, and we expect people to follow them. But in reality, it plays out a little differently. People don’t really drive based on what a sign tells them. So if signs don’t work, what does?
Justine Underhill
Why speed limits don’t matter (Justine Underhill – YouTube)
A new song from Kate Nash that I think is worth a listen.
Girl listen up,
You’re not radical
Exclusionary, regressive, misogynist
Germ! Germ
Nah you’re not rad at all
Kate Nash
The music video is age-restricted due to nudity, so I can’t embed it here. You can watch on YouTube: Kate Nash – GERM (Official Lyric Video) (Kate Nash – YouTube)
In the Who Cares Era, the most radical thing you can do is care.
Dan Sinker
The Who Cares Era (Dan Sinker /blog)
A whole lot of people – including computer scientists who should know better and academics who are usually thoughtful – are caught up in fanciful, magical beliefs about chatbots. Any sufficiently advanced technology and all that. But why chatbots specifically?
Jeffrey Lockhart
it’s the interface (scatterplot)
This article from University of Michigan’s LSA Magazine was an interesting read.
Brown finds that when we look closely at the historic foodways that brought us popular dishes, we are “forced to consider that cuisines and cultures can’t be reduced to a single ethnic group.” Dumplings, for example, can be mapped all over the world, and she believes the first dumplings were likely made in Central Asia, or somewhere along the Silk Road, and not in the Chinese heartland.
Gina Balibrera
What Can the Dumpling Tell Us About the History of the World? (LSA Magazine)
Scott Boehmer 