Chaos3612 - Chaotic Dynamics

The deadly truth about a world built for men – from stab vests to car crashes (Caroline Criado-Perez, The Guardian, Feb 23 2019)

“The formula to determine standard office temperature was developed in the 1960s around the metabolic resting rate of the average man.

But a recent Dutch study found that the metabolic rate of young adult females performing light office work is significantly lower than the standard values for men doing the same activity.

In fact, the formula may overestimate female metabolic rate by as much as 35%, meaning that current offices are on average five degrees too cold for women. (…)

Over the past 50 years, breast cancer rates in the industrialised world have risen significantly – but a failure to research female bodies, occupations and environments means that the data for exactly what is behind this rise is lacking.

“We know everything about dust disease in miners,” Rory O’Neill, professor of occupational and environmental policy research at the University of Stirling, tells me.

“You can’t say the same for exposures, physical or chemical, in ‘women’s work’.” (…)

All Tufekci’s photos from the event were unusable, she wrote, and “for one simple reason: good smartphones are designed for male hands”.

Voice recognition could be one solution to a smartphone that doesn’t fit your hands, but voice-recognition software is often hopelessly male-biased. (…)

When Apple launched its health-monitoring system with much fanfare in 2014, it boasted a “comprehensive” health tracker.

It could track blood pressure; steps taken; blood alcohol level; even molybdenum and copper intake.

But as many women pointed out at the time, they forgot one crucial detail: a period tracker. (…)

When Apple launched their AI, Siri, users in the US found that she (ironically) could find prostitutes and Viagra suppliers, but not abortion providers.

Siri could help you if you’d had a heart attack, but if you told her you’d been raped, she replied “I don’t know what you mean by ‘I was raped.’”

From smartwatches that are too big for women’s wrists, to map apps that fail to account for women who may want to know the “safest” in addition to “fastest” routes; 

to “measure how good you are at sex” apps called “iThrust” and “iBang” the tech industry is rife with other examples.

While there are an increasing number of female-led tech firms that do cater to women’s needs, they are seen as a “niche” concern and often struggle to get funding. (…)

Women tend to sit further forward when driving. This is because we are on average shorter. 

Our legs need to be closer to reach the pedals, and we need to sit more upright to see clearly over the dashboard.

This is not, however, the “standard seating position”, researchers have noted. Women are “out of position” drivers.

And our wilful deviation from the norm means that we are at greater risk of internal injury on frontal collisions. (…)

Designers may believe they are making products for everyone, but in reality they are mainly making them for men. It’s time to start designing women in.”

Joi Ito:

“What I realized was that a lot of the engineers who work in AI felt that you could reduce the whole world to a function.

That life, human life, was just optimizing. And that the world could be simulated in a computer.

This is almost religious because I think that there are people who have the kind of thinking where they look at their life as a game.

Where they say: “Okay. I’m optimizing for money, and how many minutes do I have to do this.”

I tweeted out the other day: “Those people who think that we live in a computer simulation are the kinds of people who are most likely to be simulations.”

A lot of people approach life like an engineering problem. For them, I could imagine that they could see their whole life being in a computer.

But if you go into the humanities or the East Coast, there are a lot of people who don’t think like a computer.

They live life through experience and only things that happen actually matter. (…)

A lot of the papers that you see by the engineers say: “We’ll just define fairness as accuracy,” or something like that.

And this is what I call reductionist, because fairness is really complex, and it’s always contextual.

My concern is the stuff that we have, which is efficiency, productivity — that’s the stuff that makes us obese, creates climate change, income inequality.

The problems that we have today are caused by the tools that we created.

But I think there’s a lot of people who believe that more efficiency and productivity will fix everything.

I think right now there’s a lot of power in the hands of the reductionists.

And I would put economists and neoclassic economics in this, which is just reducing everything to just measuring GDP. (…)

If you go to places like MIT, the engineers have all the power, all the money, and everything looks like an engineering problem. 

And we’ve made liberal arts sort of this sideshow. 

I think that we need the historians, social scientists, anthropologists, qualitative people involved in asking the questions: why are we here, what are we doing?”

Source: Recode Decode — MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito on the problem with tech people who want to solve problems

“I don’t know anything with certainty, but seeing the stars makes me dream.” ― Vincent Van Gogh

friday the 24th of may 2019

hi! i have a week of break now yay and i’ll be less active here sorry

but here’s a pic that i took a month ago when i was studying for chemistry while we were in usa for a road trip!!

I really love my family, but it was supposed to be a quiet weekend and now it’s not and I am stressing out.

The thing is, my family organized a very small lunch tomorrow with my grandmothers but now everyone is showing up and tomorrow I have an eight-hour long lunch with fourteen people. So I’ve spend all morning shopping and now I got a bunch of work that I need to finish plus I have to bake two cakes and pack as I am spending all next week on a conference. Ok, there are all good things, I know. But I don’t know how to chill out, so now I’m an anxiety ball and my headaches are acting out again. Fun life!

What’s Your favorite space object?

Circling the Sun (larger)

Very messily getting a Tempest essay together