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Bill Fulkerson

Anatomy of an AI System - 1 views

anatomyof.ai

AI amazon

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 14 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 14 Sep 18
     
    "With each interaction, Alexa is training to hear better, to interpret more precisely, to trigger actions that map to the user's commands more accurately, and to build a more complete model of their preferences, habits and desires. What is required to make this possible? Put simply: each small moment of convenience - be it answering a question, turning on a light, or playing a song - requires a vast planetary network, fueled by the extraction of non-renewable materials, labor, and data. The scale of resources required is many magnitudes greater than the energy and labor it would take a human to operate a household appliance or flick a switch. A full accounting for these costs is almost impossible, but it is increasingly important that we grasp the scale and scope if we are to understand and govern the technical infrastructures that thread through our lives. III The Salar, the world's largest flat surface, is located in southwest Bolivia at an altitude of 3,656 meters above sea level. It is a high plateau, covered by a few meters of salt crust which are exceptionally rich in lithium, containing 50% to 70% of the world's lithium reserves. 4 The Salar, alongside the neighboring Atacama regions in Chile and Argentina, are major sites for lithium extraction. This soft, silvery metal is currently used to power mobile connected devices, as a crucial material used for the production of lithium-Ion batteries. It is known as 'grey gold.' Smartphone batteries, for example, usually have less than eight grams of this material. 5 Each Tesla car needs approximately seven kilograms of lithium for its battery pack. 6 All these batteries have a limited lifespan, and once consumed they are thrown away as waste. Amazon reminds users that they cannot open up and repair their Echo, because this will void the warranty. The Amazon Echo is wall-powered, and also has a mobile battery base. This also has a limited lifespan and then must be thrown away as waste. According to the Ay
Bill Fulkerson

Psephology in Free Fall | Sam Kriss - 0 views

thebaffler.com/...psephology-free-fall-kriss

prediction

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 08 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 08 Mar 17
     
    "Our word for the science of elections is psephology. The word is quite new; it was coined in 1948 by the British historian R. B. McCallum, otherwise chiefly remembered for his aphoristic dictum for democracy-watchers: "Find immortality in the footnotes of others." One of McCallum's colleagues, David Butler, later remarked, "Actually I regret having launched the word. It implies there is some occult expertise about the subject.""
Steve Bosserman

Batteries That Make Use of Solar Power, Even in the Dark - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ar-power-even-in-the-dark.html

batteries solar power energy storage

shared by Steve Bosserman on 28 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • Amid all this disruption, Britain and other countries have created a smorgasbord of incentives to power providers to keep the lights from going off. Neil Hutchings, director of power systems and storage at Anesco, the small British company that supplied Mr. Beatty’s battery, said there were no fewer than 14 ways that it could make money. “The real secret is how to pick out the best combination,” he said. Independent journalism.More essential than ever. Subscribe to the Times While he said the batteries, which are imported from China, were improving, the real key was in the electronic controls that allowed them to react almost instantaneously to the needs of the grid.
Steve Bosserman

The economic impact of colonialism | VOX, CEPR's Policy Portal - 0 views

voxeu.org/...economic-impact-colonialism

colonization economic disparity complex systems

shared by Steve Bosserman on 02 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Colonialism did not, however, merely impact the development of those societies that did the colonising. Most obviously, it also affected the societies that were colonised. In our research (Acemoglu et al. 2001, 2002) we showed that this, again, had heterogeneous effects. This is because colonialism ended up creating very distinct sorts of societies in different places. In particular, colonialism left very different institutional legacies in different parts of the world, with profoundly divergent consequences for economic development. The reason for this is not that the various European powers transplanted different sorts of institutions – so that North America succeeded due to an inheritance of British institutions, while Latin America failed because of its Spanish institutions. In fact, the evidence suggests that the intentions and strategies of distinct colonial powers were very similar (Acemoglu and Robinson 2012). The outcomes were very different because of variation in initial conditions in the colonies.
Steve Bosserman

What does home mean if your bed is on the pavements of Paris? | Aeon Essays - 0 views

aeon.co/...d-is-on-the-pavements-of-paris

homelessness anthropology paris home

shared by Steve Bosserman on 29 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • The American anthropologist Edward Fischer, paraphrasing Aristotle, said that the good life is ‘a life worth living’, or a journey towards ‘a fulfilled life’. It has to do with happiness but is not limited to it; it’s often – perhaps counterintuitively – linked to commitment and sacrifice, to the work of becoming a particular person. The French philosopher Michel Foucault in 1982 described these practices as technologies of the self. According to Foucault, the self is ‘not given to us … we have to create ourselves as a work of art’. My informants on the streets of Paris were striving – in their own ways – towards being better selves. I came to understand the activities, processes and routines that they engaged in – begging, making a shelter, accessing temporary housing, etc – as practices of the self geared towards a better life, as practices of homemaking on the street, as practices of hope.
  • Aside from François, others I met on the streets of Paris – such as Sabal from India, and Alex from Kosovo – talked about their engagement in such practices of hope. Following them through soup kitchens, drop-in centres, government institutions and homeless shelters, I observed two main ways in which they attempted to push for a better life. Both of them were connected to the idea of home: my informants in Paris were longing to find and go back to a homeland, often one from the past, while on a daily basis they were struggling to construct a home in order to survive. That was what a better life looked like for them.
  • Home, according to the Australian social scientist Shelley Mallett, is always suspended between the ideal and the real. It relates to ‘the activity performed by, with or in person’s things and places. Home is lived in the tension between the given and the chosen, then and now.’ While Sabal’s India was part of the ideal, what Alex was dealing with was closer to the ‘real’ side of this distinction. His home-making efforts were a continuous process of daily activities.
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  • For many of the homeless people I’ve met in both London and Paris, home was connected to a place they departed from and have a desire to return to – a place that carried what the English sociologist Liz Kenyon calls a right to return and a sense of one’s origin. Sara Ahmed’s 1999 study of migrants’ writing, particularly Asian women living in Britain, supports this view of home as something in the longer-term future. The British-Australian scholar wrote that home is often a destination, somewhere to travel to: ‘the space which is most like home, which is most comfortable and familiar, is not the space of inhabitance – I am here – but the very space in which one finds the self as almost, but not quite, at home. In such a space, the subject has a destination, an itinerary, indeed a future, but in having such as destination, has not yet arrived.’ Home is, in this sense, not about the present – and surely not a place of passive suffering – but about one’s hopes, about making home an imagined place where one has not yet arrived.
  • Home is exactly such a process, involving the material and the imaginative, social connections and mundane acts. Routines, habits and rhythms – often as simple as regularly visiting certain neighbourhoods, shelters and food kitchens – are important parts of this process, and are deeply connected to a temporal as well as spatial order. This focus on order is best expressed in the classical analysis of home by the English anthropologist Mary Douglas:[Home] is always a localisable idea. Home is located in space but it is not necessarily a fixed space. It does not need bricks and mortar, it can be a wagon, a caravan, a board, or a tent. It need not be a large space, but space there must be, for home starts by bringing some space under control.
  • François, who introduced me to the labour of begging, found something close to home in his daily practices. His home was fashioned by coming face to face with the city around him. These narratives show how far removed these people are from a state of passive suffering. Yes, there were moments of idleness and, for some, long phases of pain. But most of the people I met sleeping rough – independent of age, gender, tenure on the street and level of addiction – were striving, in their way, towards a better life: first on, and hopefully off, the street.
Steve Bosserman

Germany Cracks Productivity Puzzle as Others Lag | Fast Forward | OZY - 0 views

www.ozy.com/...90249

productivity germany

shared by Steve Bosserman on 01 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • “It’s clear that Germany has very distinct differences in its business structure and cultural makeup,” says Tony Danker, CEO of Be the Business, which campaigns to spread best practice on productivity to British companies. “There is real interest in continuous improvement and building business networks and institutions that focus on this. This spirit and activity feels eminently replicable even if the institutions are not.”
  • Indeed, a key difference between the U.K. and Germany lies in the training that workers receive. Although German managers are less likely to have higher educational qualifications, they have often received vocational training that builds workplace expertise. And despite the U.K. having more tertiary-educated managers than Germany, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development data show their actual skills, in literacy and data management, are lower.
Bill Fulkerson

Is Peer Review a Good Idea? | The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science | Oxfor... - 0 views

academic.oup.com/...5526887

philosophy science peer review

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 28 May 20 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 28 May 20
     
    Prepublication peer review should be abolished. We consider the effects that such a change will have on the social structure of science, paying particular attention to the changed incentive structure and the likely effects on the behaviour of individual scientists. We evaluate these changes from the perspective of epistemic consequentialism. We find that where the effects of abolishing prepublication peer review can be evaluated with a reasonable level of confidence based on presently available evidence, they are either positive or neutral. We conclude that on present evidence abolishing peer review weakly dominates the status quo.
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