5 Intriguing Things
1. USA Today is kicking off serious coverage of the racial pay gap in the tech industry.
"In the same high-skilled positions such as computer programmers and software developers, Asians make $8,146 less than whites and blacks $3,656 less than whites, according to the report from the American Institute for Economic Research. 'What this tells us is that race and ethnicity matter, and they matter a lot,' said Nicole Kreisberg, the senior research analyst who conducted the research. 'Simply increasing diversity is not enough. We also have to talk about money.' The study takes into account education, occupation, age, geography, gender, citizenship status, marital status and children in the home." (usatoday.com)
2. To be sure, there are a lot of people worried we'll overregulate drones.
"To be sure, large-scale deployment of increasingly low-visibility drone technologies will bump up against cultural and even legal restrictions on the collection and distribution of information. At the same time, at least in the United States, some of those concerns will be offset by strong First Amendment protections for journalists and others. It may be that existing privacy protections and 'Peeping Tom' laws are already sufficient to bar the most offensive uses of drones. For law enforcement applications, likewise, the Fourth Amendment has been interpreted by courts to adapt to new technologies that challenge personal privacy, and may curb police practices that most Americans would find unreasonable." (washingtonpost.com)
3. This article is especially popular in Colorado and Washington.
"Why haven't we met any visitors from another time? It sounds like a silly question, but it's one that many scientists actually take very seriously. Meeting someone from the future would, of course, serve as definitive proof that we can indeed travel through time, and that would be a quite a simple way to solve a huge scientific riddle. So it's no surprise that a handful of enthusiasts and experts have staged experiments in order to attract the time travelers that could be hiding among us." (gizmodo.com)
4. The Venn diagram intersection of cognitive science and museum curation.
"If you care about authenticity, this research is pretty troubling. Sure, it shows that people value the original artist's hand in his/her work. But more than that, it shows that value is positively correlated with a perception of human touch. That perception can be faked--to both positive and negative ends. Artists embue anonymous objects with fictional narratives to increase their value. Companies buy up long-lived brands to add a human story to their wares. Spiritualists contact the dead. " (museumtwo.blogspot.com)
5. What happened when crack privacy reporter Kashmir Hill asked for her dossier from Zynga.
"At the end of the policy, it said that any player who wanted to see what Zynga knew about them could request their file by emailing zynga@privacy.com. Companies inEurope are required by law to do this; it’s how Austrian law student Max Schrems got Facebook to send him the 880-page dossier the company had on him. But it’s a special treat for Americans. I wondered what would be in our Zynga dossiers, so my mom and I both requested our files. There was at least one big kink along the way: the first file Zynga sent to my mom was the email inbox of a Zynga contractor." (forbes.com)
Today's 1957 American English Language Tip
compendious means containing the substance in a concise form; comprehensive though brief (esp. of lit. works): A compendious analysis of the chapters.
Correlated with a Perception of Human Touch