Links
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Paper: You Want My Password or a Dead Patient?
First of all, great title. This paper is a work of ethnography, where the authors sat and studied how people in medical settings did their work interacting with computers, and denoted all sorts of workarounds they’d take to bypass security rules that they judge are a hindrance to their work.
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The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine
It was the mid-1980s. They were the technician teams charged with servicing the Xerox machines that suddenly were providing all of America’s offices with vast quantities of photocopies and frustration. The machines were so large, noisy, and busy that most offices kept them in a separate room.
An inquisitive anthropologist discovered that what the technicians did all day with those machines was grotesquely different from what Xerox corporation thought they did, and the divergence was hampering the company unnecessarily. The saga that followed his revelation is worth recounting in detail because of what it shows about the ingenuity of professional maintainers at work in a high-ambiguity environment, the harm caused by an institutionalized wrong theory of their work, and the invincible power of an institutionalized wrong theory to resist change.
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My kids sometimes ask me how high I can count. I’ve noticed that they stop asking this question once they reach a certain age, usually around six or seven. This is because the question does not make sense once you understand what a number is. If there’s a single highest number you can count to, you don’t really grok numbers. The difference between computers and humans doing math is a bit like the difference between the younger kids who think that “how high you can count” is a real thing and the older kids who have successfully understood how numbers work.
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Sherlock and House are to blame for the cult of Jordan Peterson and Elon Musk
Fraser was in good company in the 90s. Most big American shows, from Star Trek: The Next Generation and its two spin-offs, to Buffy the Vampire Slayer were premised on an ensemble of broadly likeable characters.
And it was watching thirty or more episodes of this nice man solving crimes, mostly by tasting stuff he finds on the ground, which made me realise: Around the turn of the millennium, something profound changed in the characters we see on TV.
And I think in many ways this explains the rise of some of the worst people in our culture today.
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Being on The Semantic Web is easy, and, frankly, well worth the bother
The Semantic Web is so widely adopted in fact that I think it’s fair to say that we’re already on Web 3.0. It’s not the future, it’s the present. I suppose that means the blockchain crowd will need to argue their case to get all that crypto stuff into the next major version. Good luck to them, really.
If Web 3.0 is already here, where is it, then? Mostly, it’s hidden in the markup.