Assorted links about science and tech

Some of these links are from last year, but they’re still interesting. Accompanied, as usual, by random comics illustrations.

In one of those “identical resumes/different gender” experiments, women were hired for STEM faculty positions twice as often as men of equal ability. As noted at the link this is not a real world experiment — nobody involved was real or actually hired — and even a slight superiority on the male side made it a slam dunk (despite shrieks online that it’s about women being picked over more qualified men).

“When AI gets attention for recovering lost works of art, it makes the technology sound a lot less scary than when it garners headlines for creating deep fakes that falsify politicians’ speech or for using facial recognition for authoritarian surveillance.” — from an article arguing that AIs researching art history are mostly just PR for the technology.

The kunga of Mesopotamia is the oldest human-created hybrid we know of, a mix of Syrian wild ass and donkey.

How game-theory AI is transforming high-stakes poker.

It’s been said that while fully automated cars are 90 percent of the way to perfection, the last 10 percent is nightmarishly hard. Case in point.

If you’re unvaccinated and catch Covid, CDC guidelines say you’re a priority for life-saving treatment ahead of other pulmonary issues.

Aww, gee, it seems right-wingers on right-wing social media are having trouble attracting followers.

What effect will massive mergers in the gaming industry have on the market?

The female “pudenda” derives from a Latin word for “shame.” Medicine is going to retire the word.

There are also a boatload of female body parts named for men.

If the Earn It Act imposes legal liability on hosting companies for posts harming children, will it also kill encryption?

There are only a few hundred Stradivarious violins. A digital project hopes to preserve their sound before time takes its toll.

“Throughout the pandemic, each time a public safety measure arrives on the scene, some experts fret that the masses will simply use the newfound sense of security as license to behave recklessly, canceling out or even reversing any benefits of the safety measure.” — On the dubious arguments that reducing danger makes the risk greater.

#SFWApro. Covers by Murphy Anderson, Gil Kane, Carmine Infantino, Mort Meskin and Jack Binder

Leave a comment

Filed under Miscellanea

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.