Author Archives: thh55

money clouds

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Back in February, a friend and I attended the Sip-N-Paint. I’d just finished a big project — like, about ten minutes before the event — and so I met her down there for some painting.

She and I both had the same idea of painting the sky. Hers, though, was significantly more interesting, which I noticed very quickly. She’d draw out patterns for galaxies, and star constellations, and a big Police Public Call Box flying around in the center. I was moving much more slow, and I’d only just decided to let dry a big expanse of light blue.

My plan was to layer clouds over the blue by blotting white paint with a napkin. This worked….alright. But it wasn’t very distinctive or interesting, so I added a rainbow, but what I didn’t know was that I didn’t know how to paint a rainbow. I put forth my best effort.

And in a last-ditch attempt to make my sky more interesting, I put felt stickers all over it. There were little felt stickers littering the tables, with letters, numbers, and symbols on them, so I grabbed a couple dollars signs ($) and went crazy. The stickers, being white felt, didn’t show up at all.

But it got a laugh out of my friend, which was alright. All I have to do is ask spectators to look at my boring white sky painting a little closer, for the secret, felt-soft, textured money clouds.

 

algorithmic inequality

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My friend and I, CS and IS majors respectively, attended this book read because we were interested in some of the effects of the algorithms we spend so much time looking at. Most of the time, technical classes don’t focus too much on the repercussions of what we’re doing. We don’t have time — there’s so much to ingest and comprehend, and it becomes easy to take numbers out of their context and process them and move on.

So we wanted to attend this book read. Context is key, particularly in information science, and operating so far removed from the consequences of data wouldn’t beget a whole education. I’m really, really glad we attended, because we learned a lot; the moderator was kind and compelling, and this made it easier for people to feel confident speaking up regardless of background.

With the increased collection and usage of personal data, it stands to reason that corporations would jump to conclusions as a result. An anecdote from the beginning of the book still stands out to me: the author’s husband, recovering from a brutal mugging, was nearly denied coverage due to a numbers error from their insurance provider. The author, whose data trail is of the upper-middle-class variety, was able to override this online red flag and convince their provider to look further into the mistake.

Still, the author makes clear that that was her personal situation. If she’d had previous red flags placed on her, due to her own  numbers that she may not even be privy to, she would’ve had to fight a lot harder. And this is the crux of the book, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor: the policing of data trails punishes the poor, and grants significant flexibility to everyone else, and the dangerous part is that most of this work is done in secrecy.

Retro!!

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When I attended the Gaming Night in the beginning of the semester, fellow attendees tended to cluster into two groups: the larger one, in the Dining Hall with the Nintendo Switch, and the smaller one, seated around the couches in the television room. That was where I spent most of my time, because it’s where the retro games were.

Seeing old Mario Kart was, quite frankly, a trip. The backgrounds were two-dimensional; when the characters onscreen tilted, the sprite just changed shifted to a slightly angled one. It was still surprisingly easily to navigate, which makes sense — clearly, this game has continued to be popular through the years.

Even with the expanse of Retro games available, most of us stuck to older versions of what we already knew. In particular, the older edition of Street Fighter was very popular! It was awesome seeing people utilize these quick combos, and old control methods, that are clearly successful enough that users still enjoy them. Super Mario Bros, too, was a hit — the environments, though pixelated, were so fun to look at that the controller changed hands multiple times in the same game world. I’m talking specifically about the donut world, which I haven’t seen in any modern reincarnation of the game! It’s a whole new Super Mario world that didn’t exist on the version when I played it all those years ago on the Wii classic.