This post is about and inspired by two books about what is happening in the age of the machine and big data, when algorithms wield control. One is ‘Weapons of math destruction’ by Cathy O’Neil, and the other one is ‘Hello world. How to be human in the Age of the Machine’ by Hannah Fry.… Read More How to be human in the age of the machine

Also, stolz ist man ja nicht auf dieses erst fünzigjährige Jubiläum. Gar nicht. Syrien, die Philippinen, Moldau, Burundi, Senegal, Venezuela, Spanien, Eritrea, China, Togo, und ganz viele andere Länder haben das Frauenstimmrecht vor der Schweiz eingeführt. Vielleicht müsste man die kleinere Zahl nennen – wieviele Länder das erst nach der Schweiz eingeführt haben. Und überall… Read More Lesestoff zum Jubiläum des Frauenstimmrechts

Kurz gesagt – in a nutshell is an animation studio/design agency with an amazing YouTube channel, explaining the world in chunk-size bites at a time, wonderfully illustrated, of course. The one video I’d really like you to see is the one on vaccines: But maybe you also want to learn about the deep sea, strange… Read More Kurz gesagt: vaccinations

Over the last couple of months, I managed to read some non-fiction, this time somewhat further removed from the usual popular (natural) science books but totally worth the time, sometimes eye-opening. I’ll start with a quick description of Cordelia Fine’s ‘Delusions of Gender’. I am re-reading it, and am quite surprised I didn’t blog about… Read More Recent reads on gender, feminism and racism

I’ve written before about Hans Rosling and his amazing talks about global development. Today I stumbled about another excellent youtube video that takes a more critical stance. Why don’t you look for yourself: There are some valid points – first and foremost that averages can be misleading. To illustrate, a hypothetical example: if, from four… Read More Going beyond averages

Thanks to a friend I recently stumbled across this article by Melanie Mitchell in the New York Times on machine learning and its limitations. It highlights that despite the huge advances especially in deep learning, machines are still pretty far from ‘understanding’ things the way we do. They make mistakes we never would, are susceptible… Read More Getting at meaning is hard

‘Factfulness: The stress-reducing habit of only carrying opinions for which you have strong supporting facts.’ (gapminder.org/factfulness-book/) If you read one non-fiction book this year, make it ‘Factfulness: Ten reasons we’re wrong about the world – and why things are better than you think’ by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund. If the name of… Read More Factfulness

While travelling, we spent lots of time on the road. And in some countries, traffic seemed pretty chaotic. To check whether this perception was correct, we checked rates of road deaths. These seem to be usually reported as a number per 100’000 inhabitants per year. And indeed, some roads travelled are more dangerous than others:… Read More Road deaths, or: what do people die of?

More on books! One book,  ‚Lean in‘ by Sheryl Sandberg, has long been on my list, but But I’ve also been skeptical. Sandberg encourages women to ‘lean in’ fully, not holding anything back because of societal and/or internalised barriers and norms. While I still think this is not the major problem underlying the whole gender… Read More Travel reads: gender

Unrestrained by thoughts about work, deadlines, and the chores of everyday life, and stimulated by all the new things I see every day, my mind has been able to wander and wonder much more freely during our travels. There’s so much freedom in simply having the curiosity and energy to ask very simple questions, inspired… Read More Travel: a time to wonder