Category Archives: Did you Know?

Did you Know?

79 Theses on Technology

So here is a selection of the 79 theses on Technology

o    Everything begins with attention.

o    It is vital to ask, “What must I pay attention to?”

o    It is vital to ask, “What may I pay attention to?”

o    It is vital to ask, “What must I refuse attention to?”

o    To “pay” attention is not a metaphor: Attending to something is an economic exercise, an exchange with uncertain returns.

[…]

o    Useful strategies of resistance require knowledge of technology’s origin stories.

[…]

o    Blessed are they who strive to practice commentary as a legitimate, serious genre of responsiveness to others’ thoughts.

[…]

o    Our current electronic technologies make competent servants, annoyingly capricious masters, and tragically incompetent gods.

[…]

o    This epidemic of forgetting where algorithms come from is the newest version of “I for one welcome our new insect overlords.”

[…]

o    Jaron Lanier: “The Turing test cuts both ways. You can’t tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you’ve just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart.”

[…]

o    Everyone should sometimes write by hand, to recall what it’s like to have second thoughts before the first ones are completely recorded.

[…]

o    On the internet nothing disappears; on the internet anything can disappear.

 79 Theses on Technology. For Disputation. | The Infernal Machine.

Did you Know?

2014 VIDA Count is now available

The 2014 VIDA Count has been revealed.

Vida represents Women in Literary Arts and undertakes an annual survey to profile the gender (and now race) of contributors writing for leading literary publications.

The results of last year’s VIDA Count from 2013 caused something of a furore, so poor was the representation of women in a number of prominent journals, most notably the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books. The reactions from these publications also made headlines. This year, the organisation did three counts: the 2014 VIDA Count, the second annual Larger Literary Landscape VIDA Count (looking at smaller publications from across America) and the first annual 2014 Women of Colour VIDA Count. 

So what about the past year, have things improved? Is there anything to hope for?

Well, sort of.

Few surprises from the 2014 VIDA Count » MobyLives.

Did you Know?

Inside The Most Amazing Map Library That You’ve Never Heard Of

Within the campus of University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is a geographer’s treasure trove: over a million artifacts from the American Geographical Society, one of the most incredible collections of maps, atlases and globes to be found in America.

But, ironically, the library is practically unexplored territory. When I asked for directions on campus many students themselves didn’t know it was there.

Inside The Most Amazing Map Library That You’ve Never Heard Of | Atlas Obscura.

Did you Know?

Fake peer review

… [The research articles] are so obviously fake that nobody who has any business being within 10 feet of a computer science journal would fail to spot them with even the most careless examination. A technological solution is completely unnecessary. The answer to that question exposes the dirty secret of modern scientific publishing.

It is that secret, not the occasional publication of fake papers, that the scientific publishing world should be mortified about, for it is damaging the underpinnings of the whole scientific endeavor.

Fake peer review: Scientific journals publish fraudulent, plagiarized, or nonsense papers..