Praise also then light, and creation unfinished

An interesting article on the difficulties of de-biasing language difficulties of de-biasing language, from a machine learning viewpoint. The author notes that simple approaches can hide bias in automated systems without removing it, e.g., if an algorithm is trained on a biased dataset in which "programmer" clusters with words that are more often found on men's resumes, words that might be irrelevant to job qualification. At the same time, the effort is worth making; even if a completely unbiased algorithm isn't possible with current methods in a society with baked-in prejudices, a less-biased one will get better results if the goal is (say) to hire qualified programmers, or make loan decisions based on ability to repay, not on race or gender.

The problem we’re facing in natural language processing (as in any application of machine learning) is that fairness is aspirational and forward looking; data can only be historical, and therefore necessarily reflects the biases and prejudices of the past. Learning how to de-bias our applications is progress, but the only real solution is to become better people.

(via Richard Mateosian, on Copyediting-L.)

The Supreme Court just ruled, 7-2, that the states cannot be required to enforce federal law. The case in front of them was about sports betting. That AP story quotes Justice Alito's decision, someone from the ACLU, and someone from the Cato Institute:

“The court ruled definitively that the federal government can’t force states to enforce federal law. In the immigration context, this means it can’t require state or local officials to cooperate with federal immigration authorities,” said Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.

siderea posted about MassHealth changes a few days ago. The post title is hers, and she notes that she spent quite a bit of time trying to find out what the new rules will be, especially for mental health care. (Do read the comments here.)

(I'm linking because the Davis Square community is pretty local, and this is of interest to people outside Somerville, or who just don't read that journal.)

The city of Boston has put up a climate change website that republishes EPA and other federal government stuff that the current administration has scrubbed:

http://climatechangedata.boston.gov/

The top of the home page identifies it as a City of Boston site, and says
The City of Boston wishes to acknowledge and attribute this information to the United States Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies for the decades of work that they have done to advance the fight against climate change. While this information may not be readily available on the agency’s webpage right now, here in Boston we know climate change is real and we will continue to take action to fight it.

I haven't explored very much yet, but there's a lot there.

[cross-posted here and to the thisfinecrew community]

Someone at Weather Underground is live-blogging the current (just starting) northeast U.S. snowstorm. In the comments, among the maps and discussions of what models the National Weather Service using, user pegleg666 posted a link to a post-Sandy blog post containing the Cuban poet José Martí's description of the blizzard of 1888 and its aftermath.

An Italian team has discovered that Propionibacterium acnes, the ubiquitous human skin bacterium that causes acne, is also found within domesticated grapevines. The researchers say this is the first known inter-kingdom transfer of a bacterial symbiont, and that it likely happened during the Neolithic.

This specific variety of P. acnes is grape-adapted and an obligate endophyte: it can no longer live on human skin. It does the grapes no harm, and might be benefiting them in some way.

Though this is the first example of a human-to-plant pathogen transfer, the team thinks the same bacterium may live in other domesticated plants, and that other types of bacteria may also have transferred from humans to plants, Campisano said.

It shouldn't be necessary to state that mailing live viruses in unlabeled packages is illegal as well as unethical and stupid.

Note that these are being sent by, and to, parents who disapprove of vaccination, so we can assume their kids haven't been vaccinated against hepatitis either.

rozk has taken a break from translating Catullus, and given us "A Poem I Have Waited Thirty-One Years to Write.

It begins "She has been sick so long we forget how much/We hate her still…."

Prompted by a long, anti-Muslim and strongly pro-assimilation post by Elizabeth Moon, shweta_narayan wrote about the pressure to assimilate and how it has affected her.

This is hard stuff, but worth reading. It's not everyone's experience, but it's real, and difficult, and seldom seen by those of us who are, at least mostly, part of the dominant culture. Because one of the demands, often, is that people should pretend that assimilation was straightforward.

(I may post about what Moon said later, but Shweta's post is worth reading even if you've never heard of Elizabeth Moon.)

Apparently there has been significant turmoil at my old high school: the NY Times is reporting on the third principal to resign in five years, against a background of questions of race and/or socioeconomic discrimination.

Apparently they don't, these days, have a valedictorian. Instead, students are invited to submit speeches to be read at graduation, and the faculty pick one. This year, they picked Justin Hudson, one of the few black students, who talked about the fact that there are so few black or Hispanic students, and so few students from poor neighborhoods. Being the New York Times, they don't actually say "class," much less "institutional racism," but they do quote Hudson on the subject of discrimination in admissions:

“If you truly believe that the demographics of Hunter represent the distribution of intelligence in this city,” he said, “then you must believe that the Upper West Side, Bayside and Flushing are intrinsically more intelligent than the South Bronx, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Washington Heights. And I refuse to accept that.”

As far as I can tell, the main change in demographics from my day is that there are now about as many Asian-American as white students.

According to this story, the high school faculty were much more supportive of Hudson than the Hunter College president; stress between the college and the high school is at least a factor in the turnover in the principal's office.

[Expository lump: Hunter is a selective talented and gifted school, grades 7-12, admission only at the beginning of seventh grade. It gives its own admissions test. Many students get tutoring for the test. This surprised me. My mother says that yes, some people were doing that in my day, but she thought it wouldn't be fair to arrange that for her children. She also didn't think we needed it, which may have been maternal pride but proved correct.

Hunter is part of the City University of New York, under the auspices of Hunter College; at least in my day, it was in theory, among other things, a place for college students to get teaching practice. We were hard on student teachers, but I suspect so are most high school students.]

(I'm posting this largely for myself and for the fellow-Hunterites reading this journal who may not have seen this. My mother, a former president of the alumnae/i association*, wasn't aware of any of it until my brother sent her the link.)