“When researchers evaluated their model against natural language processing tools, such as Google’s SynaxNet (‘an open-source neural network framework’), researchers found that the software flagged African-American English as 'not English’ at a much higher frequency than standard English. In Twitter’s own language identifier, identification based on African-American language was twice as bad, despite the large presence of African-American users on the site.

'The standard tools being developed work worse on dialectical English,’ O’Connor says. 'Google’s parsers are going to do a worse job of analyzing it so it could be a case that our search systems might be worst at finding information from African-Americans. Language identification is the problem of you have a document and want language. This is a really crucial task. Your search engine only shows results written in English.’”

“Confidentially speakin’ code since I sense you peekin’” - Jay Z

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International Cartographic Association (ICA) Admits Western Cartographers Deliberately Shrunk Africa

Originally posted by sciteachers

For starters, this article despite its title provides no concrete evidence for the claim.

The real issue exposed (but not directly addressed) here is the nature of education in the world. For the most part, “learning” amounts to accepting (without questioning) and retaining information for instantaneous regurgitation (mainly for test taking purposes) upon request, rather than understanding.

Originally posted by teapotsandroses

When the most fundamental concepts of maps (or any other concept) are taught properly, it is almost impossible to miss the fact that the distances between latitudinal lines on the Mercator Projection (image of world map) aren’t represented with constancy the further you move away from the equator. Now, what is the significance of this?

What most non-cartographers (you and I) don’t know is that the length of 1 degree of latitude is a constant 111.2 km (69 miles). Therefore, the visual depiction of latitudinal lines on a map should be equivalent to the number attributed to the line. In other words, the size of the space between the 15 and 30 degree latitudes should be exactly the same as that between the 60 and 75 degree latitudes. However, as you’ll see on this Mercator Projection (map) that is not the case.

We would notice this discrepancy and understand why it exists if we’d been taught to understand what latitudes are, what they represent and how they were calculated, rather than merely ordered to know and remember a few key words of an intricate science without understanding the concepts that they represent.

Originally posted by krazikins

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“My mother gave me some seeds to plant. And I’m also giving those seeds to my children to plant. So that is ongoing, every time we transfer to our children. And that is how all the women are doing it. We don’t buy, we produce it ourselves… So that is ongoing, every time we transfer to our children. And that is how all the women are doing it. We don’t buy, we produce it ourselves.”

“Keeping seeds and sharing seeds is essential for sustainable livelihoods as well as ensuring communities have access to nutritious and culturally relevant food. But this is all under threat by a proposed bill - dubbed the ‘Monsanto Law’ - in Ghana. Its effect would be to bolster the power of multinational seed companies whilst restricting the rights of small farmers to keep and swap their seeds. This Bill will see the control of seeds being transferred away from small farmers and into the hands of large seed companies. Today just ten corporations control more than 75% of the world’s commercial seed market, although in Africa an estimated 80% of all seeds still come from farmer-managed seed systems - where farmers save, select and swap their own traditional or indigenous seed varieties. Farmer-managed seed systems help to protect bio-diversity as farmers keep a wide variety of seeds. Seeds are selected both to maintain yield but also to preserve traits which respond to different climatic conditions, have certain tastes, appearance and storability.”

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