The World Without
Spinning Globe
The latest on Human Ingenuity.
Scans of Students’ Homes During Tests Are Deemed Unconstitutional
Digitization has seen an uptick due to the COVID-19 era, with the workforce and students alike being forced to adapt to remote conditions of completing their work or school obligations. With this increase in prevalence for digital communication, however, both students and workers have sometimes been forced to adhere to sometimes machiavellian control methods: bosses and institutions have sought to maintain an equivalent level of control in the digital space as they had grown accustomed to enjoy in the so-called “meatspace” (like everything, balance is sometimes elusive). Some of these methods are relatively innocuous, such as clock-in and clock-out programs; others, such as Cleveland State’s practice of scanning student’s homes during tests, go too far.
It’s somewhat understandable that schools would ask that students turn their cameras on during tests or classes; but the need to control cheating, in this case, does generate a violation of privacy. Not all students (not even all student’s parents) would want their home to be seen through a camera - by anyone. Especially not when the camera is sending a feed towards an entire class of students: with children (and adults…) being what they sometimes are, differences in their perceived environments could lead to bullying or otherwise discriminating practices. People are also exposing details of their private lives - such as what books they read, what valuables are in sight, among other elements.
There’s no need to mention Big Brother’s TV-installed cameras in George Orwell’s 1984, is there?
Cleveland State defended its room scanning practice by saying that it “had become common during the pandemic and, therefore, more acceptable to society.”
Something being acceptable to society doesn’t mean it’s rightly accepted, desirable, or that someone might not have the right to disagree. This sounds a bit like the argument “we’ve been doing it without any issue, so we should continue to do it.”
I’d also mention that as control mechanisms are deployed (such as CCTV), each passing day of their implementation leads citizens to understand them as normal — as their reality. At one point, children that were born and nurtured in controlling environments tend to accept them as standard (just like children bone in the computer age already show much more competence at interacting with technology and the digital space than their forebears).
It’s easy to understand how this can mean a slippery slope for increasingly invasive control methods - whose perception just doesn’t register as control in the first place.
Just wait until these questions are posed at a time when students already have their own Neuralinks or other such devices — devices that may stretch the fabric of humanity beyond what it currently is. Just wait until similar or more invasive control methods are attempted. That will be “fun”.
New Method of Measuring Economic Inequality Could Improve Policy Outcomes
This just in: it’s better to look at specifics rather than compressing complex issues into a “one-size-fits-all” box. While this may sound obvious, especially when it comes to measuring economic inequality with its myriad variables, it’s a fact that things aren’t always looked into as deeply as one would think they are. Case in point: researchers have proposed an alternative to the classical “Gini coefficient” - a simple way of describing how income is distributed amongst a certain population, and how unequal that distribution is. The study has been published in Nature.
Note that even in its definition, the Gini coefficient clearly leaves trillions of dollars of wealth on the table. Income isn’t quite the same as net worth: while the first relates to money entering a person’s sphere, the second also considers that person’s general ownership - including property and stocks.
There’s a reason the top 1% don’t usually get the income taxes one would expect (I don’t want to name them, but there are few billionaires, aren’t there?) The reason is they use their net worth (such as the value of the stocks they hold) as leverage to borrow money fron the banking system. Because borrowed money must be paid back, it isn’t classified as income - and thus it isn’t taxed. Yet at the same time, because the tendency for stock value is to go up, billionaires needn’t even pay back their dues, if they don’t want to - interest on their debt usually pales in comparison to the increasing valuation of their stocks. Read this article to understand more on this system.
The above operates within the confines of the law in some countries. Its occurrence, alongside the inequality analysis provided by the Gini coefficienct itself, are the origin of the old adage that “99% of wealth is held by 1% of the population.”
According to the researchers, using an equation known as “Ortega parameters” adds depth to income inequality analysis, allowing us to extract more conclusions than the Gini coefficient does. As an example, the researchers reached the conclusion that higher income inequality relates to disproportionally high obesity in the lowest-earners (the high-earners show a negative correlation with obesity).
This is relatively easy to understand: as income lowers, the ability to allocate money to one’s diet tends towards achieving the necessary quantity to sustain life instead of quality (with all the present and future costs that brings in general health and life expectancy).
"Our approach and findings suggest that moving beyond the overall concentration of inequality as reflected in the Gini coefficient may be fruitful in both pinpointing how different kinds of inequality affect outcomes and how to make meaningful change to redress inequality."
Well, yes. I’d say it’s important to understand what are the consequences and manifestations of inequality so we can better fight it.
Interacting Brains Sync Without Physical Presence
A new study has found that the brainwaves of humans playing cooperative videogames sync - even when people are physically apart. Two gamers were tasked with driving the same car (one tasked with acceleration and braking, the other with steering) while in separate, soundproof rooms. The study found that their alpha and gamma frequencies tended to synch - to overlap. They also found that the more overlap between both subject’s brainwaves, the better their in-game performance became. Interestingly, their brainwave synchronization tended to fall as the experiment went on.
“We were able to show that inter-brain phase synchronization can occur without the presence of the other person. This opens up a possibility to investigate the role of this social brain mechanism in online interaction.
This study shows that inter-brain synchronization happens also during cooperative online gaming, and that it can be reliably measured. Developing aspects in games that lead to increased synchronization and empathy can have a positive impact even outside of gaming.”
Valtteri Wikström, Doctoral Researcher
I find this inference interesting, and I’m unsure it can be accurately justified through the data itself.
For one, I’d ask: why did the synchronization occur? Was it because people’s “social brain mechanism” synchronized one with the other, or did the brains sync because they were tasked with solving the same problem?
If the players were playing the same game - and even controlling the same car, in the same track - it follows that in order to achieve success, they were required to produce similar fine-motor movements, as well as accurately attempt to predict and correct for the player’s handling style (or even capacity) to control the car itself. Both people have the same variables at play: the same objective (get the car to the finish line in the least time possible); the same task requirements, such as hand-vision coordination (reacting to what’s on screen with fine motor inputs), joystick sensitivity…
Further, the participants were selected for proximate IQs, meaning that their spatial competences were similar. The researchers even selected friends or romantic partners (who rated their closeness at an average of 4.52 out of 5. These are people who already share at least a measure of personality/general intelligence/worldview synchronicity, otherwise they likely wouldn’t be so close to one another.
Are we observing brainwaves becoming synched through the “brain social mechanism”, or as a mere result from processing the same sensorial inputs? If two different brains process the same information - and because there isn’t much variability in brain architecture between humans - it follows that the brain would respond in a similar manner by itself, without the aid of an actual social synchronization (that in this case, would be occurring without any feedback between subjects aside from the perception and accounting for handling style).
I understand that the phenomenon of brain social synchronization has been demonstrated, but this usually happens because people’s interactions work towards a balance - if I’m showing signs of distress or anger, you tend to reflect those back at me. Empathy is a powerful human motivator, and it happens - you guessed it - in the brain.
Anyway, I just thought this was interesting. Did you?
Passive Quality
Content for nurture, not mindless consumption.
Watch: Arrival (2016)
Despite knowing the journey... and where it leads... I embrace it... and I welcome every moment of it.
Louise Banks in Arrival
Arrival, based on the short “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, is a sci-fi tale that deals mostly with language and human nature. It’s been carved by Denis Villeneuve, the director behind Dune and Bladerunner 2049. You can thus count on sprawling vistas, human tales, and a movie that feels grander than its budget would suggest.
Good sci-fi doesn’t deal in laser sabers, starships, and galactic explosions (especially the kind that has no basis in physics). Good sci-fi tells the human stories surrounding technology.
In great sci-fi, technology isn’t the answer: it’s the question.
Arrival’s alien (heptapod) language is a beautiful aspect that was painstakingly created; there can be much meaning behind coffee-like blotches (logograms) like the one in the poster above. Its creation included consulting linguists, and brought aboard comments from none other than the creator or the Mathematica programming language Stephen Wolfram - a genius of modern times.
The idea was to create a language that surpassed the ideas usually transmitted through the written medium; and in becoming a work of art, the aliens’ language not only unlocks layers of meaning; it also unlocks the circularity of time.
“Language is the foundation of civilization. It is the glue that holds a people together. It is the first weapon drawn in a conflict."
in Arrival
What the movies does a great job of doing is approaching an alien contact that’s not focused on combat or a show of strength; instead, the movie takes more of a philosophical take on the meaning of time, and the choices human beings could make when confronted with the ability to see how their decisions play out.
Would we change our decisions is we could see into their outcomes?
The aliens are also a mechanism to showcase what could be one of the reasons we’d fail on any sort of external contact: distrust bent on nationalistic principles.
Humanity should supersede internal concepts of in-groups and out-groups, but if there’s one thing history has shown time and again is that it’s much easier to carry and believe in the “Us vs Them” mentality rather than the opposite. In the case of Arrival, humanity falls to infighting even when there’s a third party over which our attention would be preferably splayed over.
This is the second time a piece of work by Ted Chiang appears in this newsletter; there Are more authors out there.
Maybe next time.
Read: Politics and the English Language, by George Orwell
(…) an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely.
George Orwell, Politics and the English Language
This is a short one: it comes in at around 22 pages, and is freely available online. I deeply respect Orwell’s thoughts - and how can one not after seeing the concepts he gave us when he wrote 1984?
It seems that the topic of language is strong in this Software Update. And there’s good reason for it: language is the cornerstone of human civilization. It’s the enabler of empathy and knowledge. Using words according to their conventional meaning is paramount for understanding; and good communication is indispensable for human cooperation.
This is part of the reason I love reading and writing poetry. As I see it, poetry is like cleaning a kitchen knife: the art of doing away with everything that doesn’t belong, leaving the metal’s sheen as clear as possible. Poetry is the vehicle of precision: good poetry has no added fat. It’s short, it’s clear, uses precise wording and needs but a single strong metaphor to convey a whole idea, concept, or feeling.
Clear, approachable, concise language does seem to have become a rare breed these days. In Politics and the English Language, George Orwell takes his metaphorical knife to unclear, non-committal language; the wording that’s mired in so much unneeded elements so as to conceal its true purpose. Yes, it’s about the English Language; but this can be easily adapted to whatever your first language is. And politics… Well, politics unfortunately exists wherever man exists (but not on every domain of humanity, as some would have you believe).
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.
Orwell’s concern lies not with purity of language, but clarity of thought and intention. And it’s as actual a concern as it always has been; perhaps even more so. After all, just this year we’ve seen a war being waged under the pretence of a “special military operation”, and a totalitarian country with a puppet democracy claiming its actions are intended to “wipe a nation clean of Nazi sympathizers”.
Clear writing means clear thinking.
Clear writing leaves poor thoughts nowhere to hide.
The World Within
Tech Writing
Lightmatter Aims to Bridge Chiplets With Photonics
As chiplets are increasingly seen as the future of computation, Lightmatter aims to reduce power consumption and latency by interconnecting chips through light rather than wires. As there’s no medium faster than light, this seems like a valid point towards building the chips that power the supercomputers of the future.
NFT Craze Hits the Brakes as OpenSea Records 99% Volume Decline in 90 days
The NFT craze seems to be subsiding - at least judging from the 99% volume decline in NFT trading on OpenSea. Blockchain is an incredible, humanity-changing technology, and personally, I don’t believe in the value of the PFP (Profile Picture) craze - I’d prefer to mint my own instead of acquiring something that seems to only be used for Crypto Flex. There’s so much that can be done with the tech - it seems a waste that so many people are programming automagically-creating drops of 10,000 images with a certain number of variables. But the market decides, and my opinion is but my own.
FBI Warns of Increased Cybercriminal Activity Surrounding Crypto
Where there’s money, there’s people who want to take that money at minimum cost. Where there’s opportunity, likely there will be a criminal. I think this article is a great way for users to understand exactly what’s at stake in the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) underworld. The FBI’s PSA is a valid one, and in the article I expound on the systems and methods through which criminals interact with this financial system.
TL;DR version: DYOR (Do Your Own Research) on where your money is going to. Not all hands (not all DEXes [Decentralized Exchanges]) are the same.
Fiction Writing
This is one of those weeks: a week where I couldn’t work on my creative writing.
Even so, that doesn’t mean this section needs to lay barren. I’ve chosen to share one of my favorite modern writers in this issue of Software Update.
His name is AO-OA, and as far as I know, he’s gone.
I found his writing back in the days of Tumblr (a Tumblr which is, as far as I can tell, inactive.)
I’m unsure if he’d be ok with me sharing his writing here. But everything I’d seen of him is gone. The only way I can interact with his writing - appreciate his writing - is through what posts of his I saved.
I’d say he has been a strong influence in me.
I hope he forgives me. But his writing deserves to be seen:
Isn’t it glorious?
This is it, folks: the end of the line for this Software Update V.3.
Thank you for taking the time to read. Feel free to comment, to consider, to share.
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That’s all for this week, folks. Take care.
Don’t forget: keep being curious, keep thinking - but most of all, keep being human.
Best,
Francisco