Wolfram Mathematica

4:18 AM

@ChrisK Yeah there are XML (and maybe JSON) dumps of the entire network

Wolfram Blog: 3 Free Wolfram U Webinars Showcasing Innovative Data Science Applications

10:35 AM

@b3m2a1 @ChrisK @halirutan This is an interesting take on what is happening: meta.stackexchange.com/a/335374

Carl Lange

Heh, Mathematica counts my <1000 person rural home town as a city... I wonder what their data source is.

@b3m2a1 Future version. It looked pretty complete in the livestreams, so hopefully 12.1

Re the SE drama: I am also a bit worried that they will close down or deprecate some network sites. It seems like they never really successfully scaled management of the network sites and I wonder if they make any money off them at all.

I worry on a larger scale that what SE is doing is well-intentioned but that their approach has already shown to be a failure, that they will lean into it and implode, and that the headlines will read "SE failed because of forced inclusivity". SE might then be (or is already) held up as a bastion against acknowleging diversity. Companies might say "We must ignore preferred pronouns because of what happened to SE", and the situation will be worse for those who already have a difficult time.

Feeds

3:06 PM

posted on January 16, 2020 by Jamie Peterson

Looking to fulfill your New Year’s resolution of learning new data science skills? Join Wolfram U for Wolfram Technology in Action: Data Science, a three-part web series demonstrating a range of data science applications in the Wolfram Language. These 90-minute sessions feature recorded talks from the 2019 Wolfram Technology Conference, along with live presentations by [...]

4:31 PM

@CarlLange For whatever it’s worth I still can’t understand what the real issues are in the “forced inclusivity” as you put it. On one side is insistence on inclusivity and on the other it seems mainly a complaint about the process rather than about the behavior. In general folks don’t like change or like acknowledging that common behaviors might be offensive or even oppressive to others.

On this site and on a smaller scale is the issue of continuing to use the “Lena” picture to showcase image functions. That issue still seems to raise the blood pressure of some very good contributors.

The thing with Lena is that the whole reasoning about this topic is wrong. Their argument is that using Lena might be offensive to women and might prevent them from studying STEM courses.

I'm working in this field for a very long time. The issue I have with their whole course of argumentation is that Image Processing is taught in a very late stage of the CS degree because you first need to learn math, data-structures, complexity, logic, and whatnot. Even then, you don't come in contact with scientific publications. The first time I saw Lena was well after I got my university degree and was…

I didn't even know that it was a Playboy image for several years. That is how completely innocent this image is. Additionally, the standard test images also contain a male photographer which is very often used besides the mandrill, the jelly-beans, and others.

So while young people, "in general", don't even know that there is a test image called Lena, it should be the reason they don't consider STEM courses after school? This is ridiculous. On the other hand, we have probably thousands of algorithms that were tested against these standard images to create comparable results.

4:51 PM

@halirutan I wouldn't say that the fear is that "young people won't go into STEM". I'd say that it's more that there are a bajillion other images that could be used as a standard with very little effort to transition over, so why bother continuing to use Lena?

Like it's so easy not to

So why continue to use it if a broad subset of people find its provenance to be offensive?

@b3m2a1 Because if you have a paper and they used Lena, you can't compare your results unless you also use Lena.

@halirutan Yeah but that's just inertia. By making a (very mild) conscious effort to look places other than Lena, the entire community will use Lena less.

And will find themselves no worse for wear

@b3m2a1 Then why don't we just say so? But to argue that more women will go into STEM with this step is just crazy.

And btw, what about male models? Are they dropped as well?

I'm not sure I've ever heard that argument. Mostly I just hear people saying "why are we still using this image in the modern era...?"

@b3m2a1 Yep, I just gave you the reason. Not because she is a woman or it's from Playboy. Because you don't just drop decades of research results.

4:57 PM

@halirutan I mean, stuff from the male equivalent of Playboy? Sure, why not? Random other images of men, those aren't apt to offend.

@halirutan Which, again, the articles I read usually just attribute to inertia

I've also never heard of the argument about Lena and STEM. (And if someone posed that argument, I would agree that it holds no water.) In the US we have statues of confederate generals who supported slavery. Many of those are now being taken down. It's not too late for change. (But there certainly is a lot of inertia to keep those statues in public places.)

@b3m2a1 We could just use one of the zillion insta-models (both male and female). I'm sure they would give and arm and a leg for such exposure.

@halirutan Or literally any very inane photo of a person with reasonable color contrast / whatever other features make for a good benchmark image

The banal is good, in this context.

Carl Lange

@JimB To be clear, I'm definitely not calling this "forced inclusivity", I'm concerned that others will see it that way. I personally am completely for the changes SE would like to make, but it seems that their approach was poorly thought-out.

> It makes clear that the use of her image is emblematic of the sector’s often unwelcoming culture for women, entrenching female under-representation.

pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/…

> Retiring Lena as an image used in coding goes beyond copyright, consent or ethics. It is a required step to help women feel more welcome in tech

This is the official petition:

losinglena.com

5:02 PM

I'd say there's a difference between more welcoming as meaning "more young people will immediately join up" and more welcoming as saying "people shouldn't have to realize that the community they're entering after studying for ~2 decades is still using a 1970s image from Playboy"

'@CarlLange. Sorry if I implied that. I did get from your original message as to what you meant. I agree that there will be a lot of resistance and unfortunately many steps backwards by some companies and individuals.

> removing Lena from our visual vocabulary and training sets is one small step in the direction of making it clear that we won’t accept the unintended biases of the past

2

^that seems more pertinent

The debate seems to be about being cognizant of the messages one's community is sending

Chris K

@b3m2a1 hope that backup includes my precious reputation points 🤣

@ChrisK I think there's a user segment in it

It's been a year and some months since I last tried to parse through it, but I think it was there...

Here's a Wolfram person using it: blog.wolfram.com/2019/02/01/the-data-science-of-mathoverflow

(well that was MathOverflow but the entire network gets a dump)

Here's the dump itself: archive.org/details/stackexchange

@b3m2a1 Is there anything that some people don't find offensive? /s

Much of it is taught offence, which IMO causes more harm than good. Like this one: theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/31/…

Teaching a 7-year old that she should be severely offended by a word that is not meant to be offensive and not used with offensive intent. At the same time, reinterpreting the word, creating a bad word of something that wasn't, and denying its history (i.e. men = people)

So what did we really gain? One more offensive word in the dictionary. That is not a gain.

5:20 PM

^TBH in my eyes that seems more like a normal 7 year old who sees this word for the first time and feels excluded by the fact that it appears to just reference men

Which, for historical reasons, it does

And I guess NZ decided it was a small enough change that why not?

@b3m2a1 Because we have bigger problems? Why not listen to other girls that have to say something about the climate?

@halirutan I don't think it's an either/or issue

Would she really feel excluded unless it was specifically explained to her that the word is excluding her?

I might have a different perspective due to speaking other languages than English, some entirely devoid of gender, and some making it impossible to even refer to a profession without specifying the gender.

@Szabolcs If memory/past interactions with elementary school kids serves, those ages are a peak for questions like "why are they called firemen? Why not firewomen too?"

But as you note, that might just be an English thing

Where we decided to stick "man"/"men" at the end of many of our occupational nouns, but ended up with neuter endings for many others

So the disconnect is apparent

@b3m2a1 I always saw -man / -men as a genderless ending, but then I'm not a native speaker.

There are still genderless uses of "man", like the oft quoted "all men are equal"

It was genderless at one time in history. I don't know how long ago.

5:27 PM

I think one gets used to it seeming genderless over time, but when running into these words for the first time the gender is apparent.

In Hungarian, we have a generic term for person, then separate terms for men/women

The generic term has drifted toward implying men only (not women) in some uses and some areas. Then it drifted back to person. Younger speakers from the capital won't know this. Those who are familiar with the language of villages will agree though.

In English we went the "let's make all the words" approach and so everything is a mishmash and hence the decision to use "man/men" as the ending of a noun is a true decision rather than something built into the language

I'm currently using a female mouse, a neutral keyboard, a male screen, a male browser, but a female IDE. This is how diverse my language is :)

^ I'm constantly mis-gendering my nouns when I speak German

This is one reason why I do not believe in the need to forcibly change language (replace words) for justice reasons. It's not the word that makes the difference. It's the intention of the people who use it.

5:30 PM

It is something my memory doesn't retain

This can also be observed by some words for "gypsy" which is now being forcibly replaced by alternatives like "roma", but that's just not having the indented effect. It's the attitude towards those people that matters, not what they are called.

@Szabolcs This is true, but there are also many instances where language has been long used to denigrate or delegitimize people and for many of those people language choices do have an impact

Of course, there are words which have one purpose: to offend. Their only meaning is negative. That's a different thing.

@b3m2a1 Yes, that definitely happens, I could give many examples from my own language too. Some of those words have been innocent in the past, say, 150 years ago, but they no longer are, and they can't be reverted to a non-derogatory meaning anymore. Others have only ever had derogatory meanings.

Still, many words that we're asked not to use are not like that.

Declaring them to be that just creates another bad word and brings more hatred into this world

Carl Lange

@JimB No no, not at all, don't worry about it :)

5:49 PM

tl;dr There are stupid reasons to get offended. The fact that some people find something offensive is just not a good reason not to use/do/say that thing anymore.

What's important is to try to assume good faith (instead of immediately getting upset) and also to try to be a decent person. It makes a difference if I say something on my blog, then a stranger sees it and gets offended, or if I say something specifically to an audience who I know finds that thing offensive.

The internet does not make things easy. There are people with so many backgrounds, and whatever we write here on SE can be read by anyone.

kirma

6:42 PM

@CarlLange Finnish lacks gendered pronouns entirely. One might think that this is a good situation, but no; there are progressives who actually want to bring these magical preferred pronouns into the language in order to feel... eh, equal. Like, everybody else has the normal, nongendered pronoun, but you just have to know that some more equal individuals have to be referred using special ones (which you almost certainly can't know in advance).

Thankfully popular traction is missing, but unfortunately activist groups trying to make the world a better place seem to be completely incapable of self-criticising such demands.

It is concerning that these things are becoming such a prominent part of the political debate because our world has much more pressing, much more serious issues ...

A future in which everyone has enough to eat, a room to live in, the chance to stay healthy ... the basics ...

C. E.

8:56 PM

@Szabolcs there are some that would say the same about many areas of physics...

C. E.

9:10 PM

What is politics anyway? It’s an attempt by politicians to create the world that they want to live in. I have confidence in their ability to debate things high and low and to prioritize what they want to spend their political capital on. In fact, there was an African leader here in Sweden recently who got questions about the situation of homosexuals in his country. He stated plainly that whereas this may be very important to Swedes, this was a non-issue for his people,

which has other, more pressing concerns.

C. E.

9:39 PM

(And I also think that it is right that countries like Sweden try to make them prioritize this issue more, even though their current leader may not think the issue is important.)