Tag: author_name|Andrew Tarantola
Why humans can’t use natural language processing to speak with the animals
We’ve been wondering what goes on inside the minds of animals since antiquity. Dr. Doolittle’s talent was far from novel when it was first published in 1920; Greco-Roman literature is lousy with speaking animals, writers in Zhanguo-era China routinely ascribed language to certain animal species and they’re also prevalent in…
Read More
Hitting the Books: In England’s industrial mills, even the clocks worked against you
America didn’t get around to really addressing child labor until the late ’30s when Roosevelts New Deal took hold and the Public Contracts Act raised the minimum age to 16. Before then, kids could often look forward to spending the majorities of their days doing some of the most dangerous…
Read More
Hitting the Books: The dangerous real-world consequences of our online attention economy
If reality television has taught us anything, it’s there’s not much people won’t do if offered enough money and attention. Sometimes, even just the latter. Unfortunately for the future prospects of our civilization, modern social media has focused upon those same character foibles and optimized them at a global scale,…
Read More
Hitting the Books: ‘Vision Zero’ could help reclaim roads from American car culture
Despite decades of focusing our national infrastructure on personal vehicles (often at the direct exclusion and expense of other modes of transport), modern folks gets around on far more than planes, trains and automobiles these days. With our city streets and suburban neighborhoods increasingly populated by an ever-widening variety of…
Read More