I’m immensely proud to write that the Zampolli Prize Awarded to Voyant Tools. The Zampolli prize is one of the most prestigious in my field. I’m proud to have been part of the team that developed and sustained Voyant. Alas, Stéfan Sinclair, its genius, is not with us to share this.
The history of ideas still struggles to remember the names of notable women philosophers. Mary Hesse is a salient example
Aeon has an important essay on Why are women philosophers often erased from collective memory? The essay argues that a number of important women philosophers have been lost (made absent) despite their importance including Mary Hesse. (You can see her Models and Analogies in Science through the Internet Archive.)
I read this after reading a chapter from Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life where Ahmed talks about citation practices and how disciplines exclude diverse work in different ways. She does a great job of confronting the various excuses people have for their bleached white citations. Poking around I find others have written on this including Victor Ray in Inside Higher Ed in an essay on The Racial Politics of Citation who references Richard Delgado’s The Imperial Scholar: Reflections on a Review of Civil Rights Literature from 1984.
What should be done about this? Obviously I’m not the best to suggest remedies, but here are some of the ideas that show up:
Catalogue of billions of phrases from 107 million papers could ease computerized searching of the literature.
From Ian I learned about a Giant, free index to world’s research papers released online. The General Index, as it is called, makes ngrams of up to 5 words available with pointers to relevant journal articles.
The massive index is available from the Internet Archive here. Here is how it is described.
Public Resource, a registered nonprofit organization based in California, has created a General Index to scientific journals. The General Index consists of a listing of n-grams, from unigrams to five-grams, extracted from 107 million journal articles.
The General Index is non-consumptive, in that the underlying articles are not released, and it is transformative in that the release consists of the extraction of facts that are derived from that underlying corpus. The General Index is available for free download with no restrictions on use. This is an initial release, and the hope is to improve the quality of text extraction, broaden the scope of the underlying corpus, provide more sophisticated metrics associated with terms, and other enhancements.
Access to the full corpus of scholarly journals is an essential facility to the practice of science in our modern world. The General Index is an invaluable utility for researchers who wish to search for articles about plants, chemicals, genes, proteins, materials, geographical locations, and other entities of interest. The General Index allows scholars and students all over the world to perform specialized and customized searches within the scope of their disciplines and research over the full corpus.
Access to knowledge is a human right and the increase and diffusion of knowledge depends on our ability to stand on the shoulders of giants. We applaud the release of the General Index and look forward to the progress of this worthy endeavor.
There must be some neat uses of this. I wonder if someone like Google might make a diachronic viewer similar to their Google Books Ngram Viewer available?
He helped make the home computer ubiquitous by introducing the fully assembled Tandy TRS-80, which was so novel at the time that it became a museum piece.
The New York Times reports that John Roach, Pioneer of the Personal Computer, Is Dead at 83. Roach was the executive who introduced the Tandy TRS-80 in the 1970s, one of the first fully assembled microcomputers. I didn’t realize how dominant the TRS-80 was in the late 1970s. At one point it held 40% of the market. We usually hear about Apple and IBM, but not about the TRS (Tandy Radio Schack).
They later released a laptop or tablet computer that I lusted after, the TRS80 Model 100. This was a keyboard and a small LCD screen and enough software to type notes or edit text. There was also a modem to send your writing somewhere. I still think this form factor makes sense. You can’t really type on an iPad (unless you get a keyboard for it) and you don’t really need lots of screen for typing notes.
From a CGSA/ACÉV Statement Against Exploitation and Oppression in Games Education and Industry a link to a video report People Make Games. The report documents emotional abuse in the education and indie game space. It deals with how leaders can create a toxic environment and how they can fail to take criticism seriously. A myth of the “auteur” in game design then protects the superstar leaders. Which is why they called the video “people make games” (not single auteurs.) Watch it.
Jeanna Matthews from Clarkson College gave a great talk at our AI4Society Ethical Data and AI Salon on “Creating Incentives for Accountability and Iterative Improvement in Automated-Decision Making Systems.” She talked about a case regarding DNA matching software for criminal cases that she was involved in where they were able to actually get the code and show that the software would, under certain circumstances, generate false positives (where people would have their DNA matched to that from a crime scene when it shouldn’t have.)
As the title of her talk suggests, she used the concrete example to make the point that we need to create incentives for companies to test and improve their AIs. In particular she suggested that:
We had an interesting conversation around the question of how one could test point 2. Can we come up with a way of testing which approach is better?
She shared a link to a collection of links to most of the relevant papers and information: Northwestern Panel, March 10 2022.
A short essay I wrote with Stéfan Sinclair on “Recapitulation, Replication, Reanalysis, Repetition, or Revivification” is now up in preprint form. The essay is part of a longer work on “Anatomy of tools: A closer look at ‘textual DH’ methodologies.” The longer work is a set of interventions looking at text tools. These came out of a ADHO SIG-DLS (Digital Literary Studies) workshop that took place in Utrecht in July 2019.
Our intervention at the workshop had the original title “Zombies as Tools: Revivification in Computer Assisted Interpretation” and concentrated on practices of exploring old tools – a sort of revivification or bringing back to life of zombie tools.
The full paper should be published soon by DHQ.
Scientific American has a whole issue on COVID that includes a collection of data visualizations, COVID’s Uneven Toll Captured in Data. The visualizations are fascinating, though some take careful reading.
Just finished playing the Universal Paperclips game which was surprisingly fun. It took me about 3.5 hours to get to sentience. The idea of the game is that you are an AI running a paperclip company and you make decisions and investments. The game was inspired by the philosopher Nick Bostrom‘s paperclip maximizer thought experiment which shows the risk that some harmless AI that controls the making of paperclips might evolve into an AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and pose a risk to us. It might even convert all the resources of the universe into paperclips. The original thought experiment is in Bostrom’s paper Ethical Issues in Advanced Artificial Intelligence to illustrate the point that “Artificial intellects need not have humanlike motives.”
Human are rarely willing slaves, but there is nothing implausible about the idea of a superintelligence having as its supergoal to serve humanity or some particular human, with no desire whatsoever to revolt or to “liberate” itself. It also seems perfectly possible to have a superintelligence whose sole goal is something completely arbitrary, such as to manufacture as many paperclips as possible, and who would resist with all its might any attempt to alter this goal. For better or worse, artificial intellects need not share our human motivational tendencies.
The game is rather addictive despite having a simple interface where all you can do is click on buttons making decisions. The decisions you get to make change over time and there are different panels that open up for exploration.
I learned about the game from an interesting blog entry by David Rosenthal on how It Isn’t About The Technology which is a response to enthusiasm about Web 3.0 and decentralized technologies (blockchain) and how they might save us, to which Rosenthal responds that it is isn’t about the technology.
One of the more interesting ideas that Rosenthal mentions is from Charles Stross’s keynote for the 34th Chaos Communications Congress to the effect that businesses are “slow AIs”. Corporations are machines that, like the paperclip maximizer, are self-optimizing and evolve until they are dangerous – something we are seeing with Google and Facebook.
