Greetings. Let's begin with a summary of how language used in research can choose either to valorize or pathologize the same traits. The kind of language pointed out in the commentary suggests that the people who were writing the report already had their conclusion in mind and then decided to bend the language to ensure that what would otherwise be seen as good things end up being bad things.
A seven minute video about ways that people with ADHD brains can find ways of motivating themselves to do things, and how others can also motivate people with ADHD brains to do things, by essentially figuring out ways to make things urgent, novel, or personally interesting to the person with the ADHD brain.
A pair of things, related to each other: How to ask a good question and How to answer questions well. Both of these are learned skills that do better with practice, and I've been trained on how to do both of them, because my profession is one of those places that's often doing translation work between two different things. Often between humans and machines. So we have to ask good questions to get people to tell us what they're looking for, and then to be able to answer questions well so that the people who are asking us questions or trying to use our services and technologies are can do what they want to do.
Scratch the surface of things that seem new and unprecedented and you will often find that we have been there, done that before, especially on the existence of trans people and on how to properly treat them. International Business Machines made good on a 1960s firing of Lynn Conway with a public apology and award, recognizing her as a visionary of computer science and acknowledging the many contributions she made to both the company and computer science in general. Unfortunately, there's also still the need for remembering all the violence done and lives lost through transmisic violence.
When speaking of freedom, there are those for whom it means the ability to do whatever they want for themselves and those for whom it means the ability to do what they want with others, and it is this second form, the freedom of slaveholders and anti-government extremists and those proclaiming that there's no reason to put any caps or bounds on capitalism and the accumulation of wealth because that would restrict freedoms, that is the root cause of many of the ills and poisons of our modern times. And yet, that call is very attractive to people who have been historically privileged and see their freedom (to own, to exploit, to destroy) as more important than other people's freedom (to live, to thrive, to be supported) and assume that freedom given to others will result in the exercise of that freedom over them, instead.
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gaudior wrestles with the paradox of tolerance, and possible methods by which someone has to be able to respect a person's basic humanity while stridently opposing the evil works they are doing. In the comments, there's a quotation attributed to the Prophet that commands a Muslim to help their brother, regardless of whether they oppress or are oppressed, which produces some confusion about how one goes about helping an oppressor. The Prophet's response is fairly direct: you help the oppressor by stopping him. As we have seen quite a bit in far and recent history, when evil things are done, the consequences of that evil eventually returns to the evildoer. (That "eventually" is usually the problem, as much of the short-term profit thinking that has long-term disasters tends to be thought of as "not my problem" rather than "perhaps we shouldn't.")
So, yes, it's going to hurt terribly for the oppressors when systems of oppression are finally dismantled, and during the dismantling, as all of the consequences of that stored and active evil are released upon the people who benefited from it and perpetuated it. But the end result is going to be better for them as well as for the people they oppressed, so it's helping to end those systems.(And then, because necessary, see above about the differing definitions about freedoms and the fears that come from the possibility that someone else might use their freedoms to curtail yours.)
Once out of office, there are several civil and potentially criminal charges that may be waiting for the person Joe Biden will be replacing in 2021, and many of those things do not have any way that they can be pardoned.
Also, unlike a significant amount of the fantasy world going on in the post-election franchise, those things will have actual lawyers and evidence to present and argue. If there's anything good out of this show that's being put on for us, it's that someone is showing us where holes, cracks, and other weaknesses are in the process and methods. And we're learning a lot more about how the actual election process works after the voting is done, as well.
So, when there's an exhibit that proclaims various towns in Minnestora have different vote tallies that what's been reported out of Michigan, have a laugh at the incompetence and then think about how something like that could be weaponized in the hands of someone who actually knows what they're doing. Think about how a sitting senator attempted to get a secretary of state to commit election fraud in a state with a tight lead and how he will probably neither be forced to resign nor be charged with a crime for this. Or watch in horror as an incompetent attempts to allege nationwide fraud in a case that has basically zip to do with it and think about what someone with a shred of ability to actually practice the law and find the right targets might do. As you consider that, though, remember not to allow the conspiracists to distance themselves from those they supported when it turns out those supporters were going to lose. And examine their conspiracies to identify where the seeds of the next one, the one that sounds plausible, might come from.
Or think about how those who do not go along with the fantasy are being removed from their political appointments and wonder how many agencies and spaces have not already anticipated their own ousters and put a plan in place to insulate themselves from being replaced by sycophants. (Because the civil servants did their jobs in combating rumors, even the ones promoted by politicians, and say this election was the most secure one, so there's no reason to believe anyone's conspiracy theories about widespread voting fraud.
Or consider how for a short time, canvassers charged with certifying the election refused to accept legitimate results, showing naked partisanship and racism in their willingness to accept everything except where all the Black people were, for which they were rightly excoriated by someone who has been in their position before and performed their duty with integrity. (And, possibly, file a lawsuit trying to stop the disenfranchisement of Black voters by those canvassers, because that seems like the sort of thing that should clearly not be permissible, and especially not on such ideological grounds.) So there's a lot of places where we expect people to act with integrity and to do what's best that could end up being failure points. Or other places where someone decides to call the police and issue trespass orders against people who are assisting others in voting.
Of course, sometimes you just want to let someone indulge in their conspiracy if it results in a better result for your political side.
The truth is, though, that we're more worried that the damage has already been done with all the norms and laws broken, and that the next government won't be able to restore things well enough for the next authoritarian to not be appealing.
The writer of one of the first abolitionist works written by a Black man and published in the UK is being honored with a Heritage plaque, as the organization tries to increase its nonwhite representation.
ProPublica made a decision in stories about disabilities to change the language they used and make it less full of long sentences and jargon. It's called "plain language" in the article, which makes me think that it's being used as a technical term of some sort, like "Simple English" is used on Wikipedia for similar target levels of complexity. I look slightly askance at this targeted decision as "plain language," because I'm a bit concerned about the implication that non-targeted language is not plain or inherently deceptive, but I might be reading too much into that. Regardless of my concerns about the choice of descriptor, the decision to write articles with a specific ceiling of complexity in mind is a good one (and produces things like Thing Explainer in addition to ProPublica articles).
Captain Awkward has links about the holidays and how to plan and experience them in this unique year. Along with some reassurance that holidays can still be holidays, even if they are not the traditional way that someone has done them in the past.
( On The Virus )
In technology, significant amounts of personal information was exposed when a vendor with access they may or may not actually need stored files in an unsecured external service, which tripped immediate investigations and distancing from the government agencies that the data was being collected from for that vendor's use. Because driver license records are hot commodities for companies to use.
Additionally, several other misconfigured cloud storage buckets have exposed financial and personal data all across the world, with the one in the article on a cloud service that many hotel and travel booking websites use that was storing data unencrypted and unsecured in an Amazon S3 bucket. Security is hard and people should be paid to do it properly. Even if that takes time and money to do and never seems to have any bottom-line benefit. (Because it won't, but it will stop other very significant losses from data breaches.)
New observations of stars in the Milky Way suggest that this galaxy had a collision with another galaxy, called Heracles, early on in its life. The universe is weirder than we ever give it credit for.
After several smaller structural failures and the investigation turning up subsequent damage, the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico is being decommissioned and dismantled. The investigations found that there was a high risk of another failure causing uncontrolled destruction, and it appears the risk is too great to continue using the telescope (and, presumably, the cost too high to try and repair it to a structurally sound state).
The history of designing and eventually getting approval and funding for an enclosed sewer system for the city of London, and of the person who was eventually able to make it a reality after Parliament was forced to confront the consequences (and odors) of their decisions.
In a bid to stop illegal trawling, a fisherman got marble blocks donated and raised sufficient funds to get sculptors to carve them into art before putting them in the Mediterranean, so they have both form and function to be seen as well as to stop the destructive fishing practice.
Certain genes are being renamed because common spreadsheet software mistakes them for dates, and it's easier to rename the genes than get Microsoft to change their defaults. Except I suspect that there are way more examples of how the software is being hlepful than just this one.
In the increasing necessity of representing the world as it actually is, rather than as some fantasy land, the new Miles Morales video game includes a deaf character, and Miles, it turns out, knows enough ASL to communicate, even if he's not fluent or confident in it.
Last for tonight, I'm sure the person in this story could be charged with misuse of a magical item, but that would mean someone would have to be there and avoid becoming part of the misuse. A short and funny story about what happens when you give magical items to people with panic responses and lateral thinking skills.
And English words that can mean their opposites, as the more modern form of two older words collide or as one word takes on a second meaning that eventually evolves into a contrary one.
A seven minute video about ways that people with ADHD brains can find ways of motivating themselves to do things, and how others can also motivate people with ADHD brains to do things, by essentially figuring out ways to make things urgent, novel, or personally interesting to the person with the ADHD brain.
A pair of things, related to each other: How to ask a good question and How to answer questions well. Both of these are learned skills that do better with practice, and I've been trained on how to do both of them, because my profession is one of those places that's often doing translation work between two different things. Often between humans and machines. So we have to ask good questions to get people to tell us what they're looking for, and then to be able to answer questions well so that the people who are asking us questions or trying to use our services and technologies are can do what they want to do.
Scratch the surface of things that seem new and unprecedented and you will often find that we have been there, done that before, especially on the existence of trans people and on how to properly treat them. International Business Machines made good on a 1960s firing of Lynn Conway with a public apology and award, recognizing her as a visionary of computer science and acknowledging the many contributions she made to both the company and computer science in general. Unfortunately, there's also still the need for remembering all the violence done and lives lost through transmisic violence.
When speaking of freedom, there are those for whom it means the ability to do whatever they want for themselves and those for whom it means the ability to do what they want with others, and it is this second form, the freedom of slaveholders and anti-government extremists and those proclaiming that there's no reason to put any caps or bounds on capitalism and the accumulation of wealth because that would restrict freedoms, that is the root cause of many of the ills and poisons of our modern times. And yet, that call is very attractive to people who have been historically privileged and see their freedom (to own, to exploit, to destroy) as more important than other people's freedom (to live, to thrive, to be supported) and assume that freedom given to others will result in the exercise of that freedom over them, instead.
gaudior wrestles with the paradox of tolerance, and possible methods by which someone has to be able to respect a person's basic humanity while stridently opposing the evil works they are doing. In the comments, there's a quotation attributed to the Prophet that commands a Muslim to help their brother, regardless of whether they oppress or are oppressed, which produces some confusion about how one goes about helping an oppressor. The Prophet's response is fairly direct: you help the oppressor by stopping him. As we have seen quite a bit in far and recent history, when evil things are done, the consequences of that evil eventually returns to the evildoer. (That "eventually" is usually the problem, as much of the short-term profit thinking that has long-term disasters tends to be thought of as "not my problem" rather than "perhaps we shouldn't.")So, yes, it's going to hurt terribly for the oppressors when systems of oppression are finally dismantled, and during the dismantling, as all of the consequences of that stored and active evil are released upon the people who benefited from it and perpetuated it. But the end result is going to be better for them as well as for the people they oppressed, so it's helping to end those systems.(And then, because necessary, see above about the differing definitions about freedoms and the fears that come from the possibility that someone else might use their freedoms to curtail yours.)
Once out of office, there are several civil and potentially criminal charges that may be waiting for the person Joe Biden will be replacing in 2021, and many of those things do not have any way that they can be pardoned.
Also, unlike a significant amount of the fantasy world going on in the post-election franchise, those things will have actual lawyers and evidence to present and argue. If there's anything good out of this show that's being put on for us, it's that someone is showing us where holes, cracks, and other weaknesses are in the process and methods. And we're learning a lot more about how the actual election process works after the voting is done, as well.
So, when there's an exhibit that proclaims various towns in Minnestora have different vote tallies that what's been reported out of Michigan, have a laugh at the incompetence and then think about how something like that could be weaponized in the hands of someone who actually knows what they're doing. Think about how a sitting senator attempted to get a secretary of state to commit election fraud in a state with a tight lead and how he will probably neither be forced to resign nor be charged with a crime for this. Or watch in horror as an incompetent attempts to allege nationwide fraud in a case that has basically zip to do with it and think about what someone with a shred of ability to actually practice the law and find the right targets might do. As you consider that, though, remember not to allow the conspiracists to distance themselves from those they supported when it turns out those supporters were going to lose. And examine their conspiracies to identify where the seeds of the next one, the one that sounds plausible, might come from.
Or think about how those who do not go along with the fantasy are being removed from their political appointments and wonder how many agencies and spaces have not already anticipated their own ousters and put a plan in place to insulate themselves from being replaced by sycophants. (Because the civil servants did their jobs in combating rumors, even the ones promoted by politicians, and say this election was the most secure one, so there's no reason to believe anyone's conspiracy theories about widespread voting fraud.
Or consider how for a short time, canvassers charged with certifying the election refused to accept legitimate results, showing naked partisanship and racism in their willingness to accept everything except where all the Black people were, for which they were rightly excoriated by someone who has been in their position before and performed their duty with integrity. (And, possibly, file a lawsuit trying to stop the disenfranchisement of Black voters by those canvassers, because that seems like the sort of thing that should clearly not be permissible, and especially not on such ideological grounds.) So there's a lot of places where we expect people to act with integrity and to do what's best that could end up being failure points. Or other places where someone decides to call the police and issue trespass orders against people who are assisting others in voting.
Of course, sometimes you just want to let someone indulge in their conspiracy if it results in a better result for your political side.
The truth is, though, that we're more worried that the damage has already been done with all the norms and laws broken, and that the next government won't be able to restore things well enough for the next authoritarian to not be appealing.
The writer of one of the first abolitionist works written by a Black man and published in the UK is being honored with a Heritage plaque, as the organization tries to increase its nonwhite representation.
ProPublica made a decision in stories about disabilities to change the language they used and make it less full of long sentences and jargon. It's called "plain language" in the article, which makes me think that it's being used as a technical term of some sort, like "Simple English" is used on Wikipedia for similar target levels of complexity. I look slightly askance at this targeted decision as "plain language," because I'm a bit concerned about the implication that non-targeted language is not plain or inherently deceptive, but I might be reading too much into that. Regardless of my concerns about the choice of descriptor, the decision to write articles with a specific ceiling of complexity in mind is a good one (and produces things like Thing Explainer in addition to ProPublica articles).
Captain Awkward has links about the holidays and how to plan and experience them in this unique year. Along with some reassurance that holidays can still be holidays, even if they are not the traditional way that someone has done them in the past.
( On The Virus )
In technology, significant amounts of personal information was exposed when a vendor with access they may or may not actually need stored files in an unsecured external service, which tripped immediate investigations and distancing from the government agencies that the data was being collected from for that vendor's use. Because driver license records are hot commodities for companies to use.
Additionally, several other misconfigured cloud storage buckets have exposed financial and personal data all across the world, with the one in the article on a cloud service that many hotel and travel booking websites use that was storing data unencrypted and unsecured in an Amazon S3 bucket. Security is hard and people should be paid to do it properly. Even if that takes time and money to do and never seems to have any bottom-line benefit. (Because it won't, but it will stop other very significant losses from data breaches.)
New observations of stars in the Milky Way suggest that this galaxy had a collision with another galaxy, called Heracles, early on in its life. The universe is weirder than we ever give it credit for.
After several smaller structural failures and the investigation turning up subsequent damage, the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico is being decommissioned and dismantled. The investigations found that there was a high risk of another failure causing uncontrolled destruction, and it appears the risk is too great to continue using the telescope (and, presumably, the cost too high to try and repair it to a structurally sound state).
The history of designing and eventually getting approval and funding for an enclosed sewer system for the city of London, and of the person who was eventually able to make it a reality after Parliament was forced to confront the consequences (and odors) of their decisions.
In a bid to stop illegal trawling, a fisherman got marble blocks donated and raised sufficient funds to get sculptors to carve them into art before putting them in the Mediterranean, so they have both form and function to be seen as well as to stop the destructive fishing practice.
Certain genes are being renamed because common spreadsheet software mistakes them for dates, and it's easier to rename the genes than get Microsoft to change their defaults. Except I suspect that there are way more examples of how the software is being hlepful than just this one.
In the increasing necessity of representing the world as it actually is, rather than as some fantasy land, the new Miles Morales video game includes a deaf character, and Miles, it turns out, knows enough ASL to communicate, even if he's not fluent or confident in it.
Last for tonight, I'm sure the person in this story could be charged with misuse of a magical item, but that would mean someone would have to be there and avoid becoming part of the misuse. A short and funny story about what happens when you give magical items to people with panic responses and lateral thinking skills.
And English words that can mean their opposites, as the more modern form of two older words collide or as one word takes on a second meaning that eventually evolves into a contrary one.
