5IT, 11/25
"Having been enslaved for 250 years, black people were not left to their own devices. They were terrorized. In the Deep South, a second slavery ruled. In the North, legislatures, mayors, civic associations, banks, and citizens all colluded to pin black people into ghettos, where they were overcrowded, overcharged, and undereducated. Businesses discriminated against them, awarding them the worst jobs and the worst wages. Police brutalized them in the streets. And the notion that black lives, black bodies, and black wealth were rightful targets remained deeply rooted in the broader society. Now we have half-stepped away from our long centuries of despoilment, promising, 'Never again.' But still we are haunted. It is as though we have run up a credit-card bill and, having pledged to charge no more, remain befuddled that the balance does not disappear. The effects of that balance, interest accruing daily, are all around us."
2. Virtual reality will not be used just for entertainment, but this still feels a little funny.
"In Fidelity’s prototype virtual environment—which it says is the first financial services app written for Oculus—stocks are represented as office towers and lumped together in sector 'neighborhoods.' The buildings’ footprints are shaped by trading volume and their rooftops are red or green depending on changes in price."
"'Philosophers… have been figuring out the right ways [for men] to kill each other for thousands of years, codifying that for the last several hundred years and actually having international agreements on what is the right way… for us to slaughter each other in the battlefield,' he said. Now they want robots to conform to those standards as well, he added. The hope among roboticists in this field is that the technology — being less prone to human, emotional error — will one day eliminate some of the unnecessary casualties in warfare, he said."
4. Making media is part of making a movement.
"'I felt there was something missing in terms of the way social-movement scholars understood the role of media, and media-making, in social-movement processes,' Costanza-Chock says. 'The actual media-making process itself is very much part of forming social-movement identity.' To be clear, Costanza-Chock does not downplay some of the changes brought about by online communications and communities; rather, in his view, he is placing those changes in a broader perspective. 'I will say that I think the Internet has made the diffusion of social-movement tactics more rapid, so people are now able to more quickly see experiments other movements came up with,' he adds."
"Between 2007 and 2009, linguistic researchers from the Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the Institute of Legal Medicine in Munich in Germany convinced 162 men and women to get drunk. Some, only a little drunk. But others, the sort of drunk that causes you to slur your speech, or decide it's the right time to play "Wonderwall" to party guests on your guitar—or, worse, get behind the wheel of your car when you really, really, shouldn't. The researchers had each person sit in the passenger seat of a (stationary) car, and recorded their drunken attempts at speech... The point of all this was to build something that no one else had built before on such a large scale: the first publicly-available audio library of drunk (and sober) speech, the Alcohol Language Corpus."
Today's 1957 American English Language Tip
convenance, convenience. For mariage de convenance (a 'suitable' marriage; one arranged for reasons of position or money), & the convenances (conventional propriety; the conventionalities), see FRENCH WORDS & MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE.
The Credits: 1. theatlantic.com 2. technologyreview.com 3. nationaldefensemagazine.org 4. mit.edu 5. fastcompany.com
The Balance Does Not Disappear