Four short links: 24 May 2016
Solar Weather, Machine Bias, Hyper-Reality, and Healthy Forgetting
- The Carrington Event — In June 2013, a joint venture from researchers at Lloyd’s of London and Atmospheric and Environmental Research (AER) in the United States used data from the Carrington Event to estimate the current cost of a similar event to the U.S. alone at $0.6–2.6 trillion.
- Machine Bias (ProPublica) — a lot of proprietary (closed-source) algorithms that are black boxes, producing reports on risk of reoffending and rehabilitation needs that are far from a slam-dunk in accuracy (when independent inspections of accuracy are even made), and potentially picking up on the hidden race variable.
- Hyper-Reality (YouTube) — imagining a demented augmented reality that’s all too plausible with current tech business trends. (via BoingBoing)
- Does Forgetting The Past Really Condemn Us To Repeat It? (Slate) — no. I see literally no basis for that. I think this is an exercise in mass wishful thinking. […] What is really going on is: how does the society want to think about its own past? And when you put it in those terms rather than in this sacralized language of memory, then, it seems to me, you have every right to say, well, perhaps societies should emphasize the present and not the past. And for that, a certain amount of forgetting can be a very good thing.
