Category: Gordon Hull
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By Gordon Hull Foucault thinks Marxism is bossy. In Society must be Defended, he lays down the gauntlet clearly enough: totalizing theories get in the way of useful things at the local level. As he notes, one should beware of: “the inhibiting effect specific to totalitarian theories, or at least – what I mean is…
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I've been commenting off and on about the vagaries of Covid data – for example, in knowing what "covid cases" refers to (and here); states' early conflation of PCR and antibody tests; the vagaries of different testing technologies, or the ways that even death certificates can mislead about mortality. This reflective piece by the co-founders…
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By Gordon Hull “Factory work exhausts the nervous system to the uttermost; at the same time, it does away with the many-sided play of the muscles, and confiscates every atom of freedom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity” (Marx, Capital I [Penguin Ed.], 548). A recent piece by Josh Dzieza in the Verge about…
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You might have heard that minorities are hesitant about getting a Covid vaccine? Well, about that. According to polling reported by Axios, the group least likely to want a vaccine is White Republicans… to the point that "White Americans are now less likely than Black and Latino Americans to say they plan to get the…
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This time Margaret Mitchell, one of the other authors on the fabulous "Stochastic Parrots" paper (that's my post on it. The paper is here) on natural language processing. This was obviously coming, since they'd suspended her email account weeks ago. In case you haven't read the paper (and you really should!), it's worth mentioning that…
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By Gordon Hull Not long ago, Google summarily dumped Timnit Gebru, one of its lead AI researchers and one of the few Black women working in AI. Her coauthor Emily Bender has now posted the paper (to be presented this spring) that apparently caused all the trouble. It should be required reading for anybody who…
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By Gordon Hull As of this writing, approximately 421,000 people in the United States have officially died of Covid-19. We also know that this number is fewer than the number that have actually died of Covid for a variety of reasons. For example, early in the pandemic, there was nowhere near enough testing, and so…
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Now up on SSRN. This paper uses Foucault's works on disciplinary power to develop a typology for understanding different models of Internet governance. Here is the abstract: Following Foucault’s remarks on the importance of architecture to disciplinary power, this paper offers a typology of power relations expressed in different models of Internet governance. Infrastructure governance…
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Knee pain is common and debilitating, and it’s often caused by osteoarthritis in the knee. Treatment options range from analgesics (including opioids) to knee-replacement surgery. If you go to the doctor with arthritic knee pain, you can get an x-ray which can then be interpreted using standard rubrics like the Kellgren–Lawrence Grade (KLG) to quantify…
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By Gordon Hull I’ve written about the importance of Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) before (see also here). Briefly, BIPA is the most important and powerful of the (relatively few) state laws designed to protect biometric privacy. The statute establishes a notice-and-consent regime (sigh. better than nothing, though N&C doesn’t work well, and is…
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