dexa_scantron

dexa_scantron , 3 months ago to The Right Can't Meme in This isn't even being taught in schools

Another example: all sound recording and amplification technology was developed to make white men sound good. So all audio equipment makes masculine voices sound better than feminine ones.

dexa_scantron , 3 months ago to The Right Can't Meme in This isn't even being taught in schools

Living with privilege is a lot more comfortable if you pretend you don't have it. There's an ancient Greek virtue, Aidos, which is the knowledge when you're richer than the people around you that you don't really deserve it, and the shame and humility that result from that knowledge. None of those feelings are pleasant; easier to pretend that the world is fair and you earned everything you have.

dexa_scantron , 3 months ago to Solarpunk in The Cory Doctorow Humble Bundle

I bought this and am reading The Lost Cause now, and it's really good! An actually hopeful near future that deals with climate collapse with open eyes.

dexa_scantron , 3 months ago to Science Fiction in Humble Book Bundle: The Cory Doctorow Novel Collection by Tor Books

Thanks for posting this! I didn't know about it and was just about to buy The Lost Cause.

dexa_scantron , 3 months ago to 196 in Standing rule only

I switched to standing-only at work about 10 years ago and it's been great, except for a 2-year stretch where the cleaners in the building I worked in would somehow find a free desk chair and push it under my desk every. single. night. So every morning when I got to work there'd be an office chair sitting on my standing mat and I'd have to find somewhere to put it. I tried moving it far away, finding a chairless desk on the other side of the building, but somehow they kept finding me a chair I didn't want and rolling it onto my mat. Eventually I got a little guest stool and would pull that over onto my mat when I left, and that worked as a decoy chair and kept them from adding a chair. Maybe this comic was about them.

dexa_scantron , 5 months ago to Technology in DPD has disabled part of its online support chatbot after it swore at a customer

Because some scammer told them they could fire people if they did.

dexa_scantron , 5 months ago to News in Kids of color get worse health care across the board in the U.S., research finds

Let's say it's normal to keep someone on pain meds for 4 to 8 days after surgery. Each day, you assess the patient and check a number of factors to determine when to stop pain meds, like: how much pain do they say they're in? How much do they wince when they walk? How comfortable do they seem? Do they seem distracted when talking to you? Etc. Each of those assessments is subjective, and therefore can be influenced by biases you don't even realize you have. Over a year, maybe that means you stop pain meds on the 5th day, on average, for Black patients, and on the 6th day for white patients. You're not really withholding pain meds from any one patient. Each patient probably doesn't really notice the difference. But over time, that slight difference compounds and adds up to poorer quality of care for one group.

This is why it's so important to measure things like this subjectively, and look for and fix the reasons they're happening. It's very hard, probably impossible, to fix these issues by just assuming that well-meaning people will be able to be completely unaffected by bias. And sometimes people overcorrect: managers in tech are less likely to give Black employees critical feedback, for example, because they don't want to be racist, and that behavior harms Black employees by not giving them opportunities to correct behavior that's holding them back from advancement. Again, tiny behaviors that compound at scale.

dexa_scantron , 5 months ago to News in Kids of color get worse health care across the board in the U.S., research finds

It's also implicit bias, though. Health care providers have to make assessments of their patients constantly: does this person need more pain meds? Can we discharge them? Do they need surgery or just physical therapy? And implicit bias (for example the very well-known bias that Black women can 'handle' more physical pain than white women because they're 'tougher') will be one factor in these thousands of constant little decisions. If you looked at any one decision you probably couldn't find fault with it, but they add up over time and if you look at the data you'll find statistical trends. Black women are more commonly recommended to have C-sections than white women, all other factors being equal. That's not because individual doctors hate Black women, but it's because unconscious biases affect their decision making, and because race is considered as a risk factor for certain treatment decisions.

dexa_scantron , 5 months ago to Antique Memes Roadshow in Stretching the definition of an antique "meme", but here's an image from 2016 about a message board gag in 2006.

I was working in my college's computer lab in '97/'98 and this was old then. The freshmen kept falling for it every year!