Good Evening – August 3, 2021

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Good evening! A pleasant before I get my tooth filling fixed at 8 AM tomorrow 🦷

Eh, lucky me? 😁 Bright and early going to have to skip the morning walk 🚶🏻. I did walk this morning.

Partly cloudy and 68 degrees in Delmar, NY. ☁ Calm wind. The dew point is 57 degrees. The skies will clear tomorrow around 5 pm.

A pleasant evening 🌃, sat out back for a while under the stars ✨ after my evening walk. Took a nap this evening after work as I stayed up too late last night. This afternoon went to the laundromat 👖 and got enough clothes clean through the weekend. Didn’t get groceries 🛒 but that’s fine I’ll stop at Hannaford after work as I’m going to park at the Park and Ride 🅿 and the catch the bus 🚍 from there after my dentist appointment. 🪥

Continuing to explore PANDAS 🐼 and all the amazing data processing and munging with Python, much faster and better with a few commands compared to dozens of clicks 🖱 and complicated formulas in my normal spreadsheet, LibreOffice Calc. PANDAS isn’t better than spreadsheets for everything but it is for a lot of things. The commands once you learn them are easily stacked and well documented. It’s amazing technology I should have learned about years ago. So much about PANDAS is super logical when you think about it but it’s a somewhat different philosophy to data management compared to Excel and similar spreadsheets.

Mandatory emasculation

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I would post a comment on social media about mandatory emasculation rather than mandatory vaccination for government workers but such a comment would be rather tasteless these days.

That said, mandatory emasculation for government workers probably isn’t a bad idea if not somewhat unpopular with the unions. But it would mean much more level headed, well thought out public policy and a generally fairer and better society. Less police brutality, fewer crashes of transit vehicles, less war.

She exposed how Facebook enabled global political manipulation. Now she’s telling her story. | MIT Technology Review

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She exposed how Facebook enabled global political manipulation. Now she’s telling her story. | MIT Technology Review

The world first learned of Sophie Zhang in September 2020, when BuzzFeed News obtained and published highlights from an abridged version of her nearly 8,000-word exit memo from Facebook.

Before she was fired, Zhang was officially employed as a low-level data scientist at the company. But she had become consumed by a task she deemed more important: finding and taking down fake accounts and likes that were being used to sway elections globally.

Her memo revealed that she’d identified dozens of countries, including India, Mexico, Afghanistan, and South Korea, where this type of abuse was enabling politicians to mislead the public and gain power. It also revealed how little the company had done to mitigate the problem, despite Zhang’s repeated efforts to bring it to the attention of leadership.