Bloody Mexica
We may never fully fathom other cultures, so claims this Nautilus essay. To bolster its case it presents Friar Sahagun’s ethnography of the Mexica civilization. It’s gruesome and bloody, with lurid tales of a mountain of human sacrifice. But it’s also part of a strange culture with a hierarchy of nobility that the article equates to upper crust England.
Ethics Education in Data Science
Revisiting a forgotten (or ignored) topic in IT education. Very relevant in light of the recent Facebook and Cambridge Analytica fiasco.
The environmental cost of Bitcoin
The chilling future of standardized testing
What education will look like pretty soon. And to think the article was written three years ago!
The Bitcoin disaster
Bitcoin would be a calamity, not an economy. Fiat currency provides some forms of control, wherras Bitcoin does not.
An economy in which Bitcoin was the dominant currency would be a more volatile and harsher economy, in which the government would have limited tools to fight recessions and where financial panics, once started, would be hard to stop.
Forming identity in an online hate group
These findings indicate that processes of group identification and adaption take place in online forums in a similar way as in real life settings. The decrease in use of ‘I’ and increase in use of ‘we’ signals a collective identity formation within the forum. The increased use of ‘they’ signals increased distancing to one or more outgroups. The linguistic adaption is also a signal of normal group processes, showing that individuals in online forums want to be part of the group and hence adapts to the norms of the group.
— Read on From I to We: Group Formation and Linguistic Adaption in an Online Xenophobic Forum
State-sponsored fake news protects corrupt elite
Armies of ‘opinion shapers’” are now used on social media by the governments of 30 countries to support their agendas and attack detractors, according to a report by the nonprofit Freedom House.
What’s the proper response to this?
Life in the clouds of Venus
Microbial life, maybe. Still, it’s an intriguing prospect. But would we know it if we saw it?
Wrestling as 19th century drama
It’s a tale as old as time. Updated for the 21st century with power couple John Cena and Nikki Bella. Still with a dash of Jane Austen.