Arthur Besse
cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions
- 38 Posts
- 41 Comments
21·22 days agoDid you miss that OP mentioned they’re blind?
Here is that image you posted, but with manually-written alt text added.
(I don’t usually do this when adding alt tags but in this case I also added the same text as a title/tooltip to make it also easy to read for users without a screen reader. Apologies to screen reader users that this probably causes you to hear the description twice.)
514·23 days agosee also: Conscription of people with disabilities. It’s ongoing in present-day Ukraine.
261·23 days agoPhew! I am extremely relieved to find out those videos are fake.
It’s pretty fucked up of TikTok to have tricked us like that, but I’m sure under Larry Ellison’s new leadership they’ll sort things out.
1·1 month agoI haven’t heard of academics and/or media from China advocating for applications of phrenology/physiognomy or other related racist pseudosciences. Have you?
Plastic surgery would become more popular.
One of the paper’s authors had the same thought:
“Suppose this type of technology gets used in labor market screening, or maybe dating markets,” Shue muses. “Going forward, you could imagine a reaction in which people then start modifying their pictures to look a certain way. Or they could modify their actual faces through cosmetic procedures.”
She also bizarrely says that:
“we are very much not advocating that this technology be used by firms as part of their hiring process.”
and yet, for some reason:
The next step for Shue and her colleagues is to explore whether certain personality types are drawn to specific industries or whether those personality types are more likely to succeed within given industries.
Or, you know, just block domains that use Microsoft email
I’m guessing you probably don’t realize how many organizations host their email with Microsoft.
i agree reactions can be useful, but adding them to email the way Microsoft has is obnoxious for recipients using any client other than theirs. and, i think this is probably their intention: receiving an email reaction in a client that doesn’t render it as a reaction feels wrong and MS probably hopes this will encourage some people to switch to using Outlook.
the right way to add reactions to email would be to make it opt-in (and also not a vendor-specific header but instead something which aims to become a standard): clients should only allow reactions to messages which contain a header signaling that the sender supports receiving them.
I have in fact read Nineteen Eighty-Four; as an aside, I highly recommend reading Isaac Asimov’s review of it as well as some other things you might be surprised to learn about the author.
Anyway, FYI:
Obesity and hunger often go hand in hand
What Is the Hunger-Obesity Paradox?
etc etc 🙄
tell me you didn’t click either link without telling me you didn’t click either link 🤷
Malnutrition perhaps, but nobody in the world’s richest, fattest country - where the fattest people are the poorest ones - is dealing with “hunger”. I wish we could just abstain from manipulative Orwellian language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_insecurity_and_hunger_in_the_United_States
some corrections
it was one tour with blackwater, after four tours with the military, and i don’t think there were sexual assault allegations against him (were there? he did post reddit comments blaming women in the military for their assaults…).
Reddit somehow released his username and tied it to him?
CNN didn't say where they got his username, but he acknowledged the posts were his
From the article that reported the posts:
Most of the posts were made five years ago under Platner’s then-Reddit handle P-Hustle.
In an interview with CNN on Tuesday, Platner disavowed his posts, saying they came from a time when he felt disillusioned and angry and expressed those emotions online. He said his criticisms of rural White Americans and the police, and his political comments, do not reflect who he is and what he stands for today.
Now he has a nazi tattoo that he didn’t know was a nazi tattoo. That may be true?
It is mildly plausible that he could have gotten the tattoo without realizing what it was. It is highly implausible that (as he claimed on a podcast yesterday) nobody ever told him what it was during any of the many times he says he’s had his shirt off over the last 18 years.
He’s going up against Susan Collins.
Not yet he isn’t. The primary isn’t until next June.
8·3 months agoHere is the paper: Dutch courage? Effects of acute alcohol consumption on self-ratings and observer ratings of foreign language skills (sci-hub pdf link).
It was published in 2017 but only won the Ig Nobel prize this year.
Abstract
Aims: A popular belief is that alcohol improves the ability to speak in a foreign language. The effect of acute alcohol consumption on perceived foreign language performance and actual foreign language performance in foreign language learners has not been investigated. The aim of the current study was to test the effects of acute alcohol consumption on self-rated and observer-rated verbal foreign language performance in participants who have recently learned this language.
Methods: Fifty native German speakers who had recently learned Dutch were randomized to receive either a low dose of alcohol or a control beverage that contained no alcohol. Following the experimental manipulation, participants took part in a standardized discussion in Dutch with a blinded experimenter. The discussion was audio-recorded and foreign language skills were subsequently rated by two native Dutch speakers who were blind to the experimental condition (observer-rating). Participants also rated their own individual Dutch language skills during the discussion (self-rating).
Results: Participants who consumed alcohol had significantly better observer-ratings for their Dutch language, specifically better pronunciation, compared with those who did not consume alcohol. However, alcohol had no effect on self-ratings of Dutch language skills.
Conclusions: Acute alcohol consumption may have beneficial effects on the pronunciation of a foreign language in people who have recently learned that language.
Thanks for pointing this out. Looking closer I see that that “journal” was definitely not something I want to be sending traffic to, for a whole bunch of reasons - besides anti-vax they’re also anti-trans, and they’re gold bugs… and they’re asking tough questions like “do viruses exist” 🤡
I edited the post to link to MIT instead, and added a note in the post body explaining why.
to the many people reporting this post