#famous publishers in india

[fingerprintpublishing]

Hindi Books Publisher: FingerPrint Publishing

FingerPrint Publishing is a renowned Hindi books publisher in India. With a wide range of publications, Our aim to bring quality literature to readers across the nation. We dedication to promoting Hindi literature and culture is evident in our carefully curated collection of books. From fiction and non-fiction to poetry and historical texts, FingerPrint Publishing covers a diverse range of genres. We believe in nurturing emerging authors and providing them with a platform to showcase our talent. With our emphasis on quality content and visually appealing design, FingerPrint Publishing has become a trusted name in the Indian publishing industry.

[colleendoran]

I can't believe I'm actually having to argue with people about this, but yes, the Official and Ineffable adaptation of the GOOD OMENS novel into a graphic novel is actually OFFICIAL, like as in very official and real, and I am not some ne'er do well absconding with rights I don't have rights to.

I am working as the hire of the Terry Pratchett estate and Neil Gaiman. I didn't grab the book and run away with it, and make comic book pictures unbidden.

The Kickstarter launches today. The Terry Pratchett Estate is self publishing it through their company Dunmanifestin.

All of this is very easy to research on the internet. Because there are lots and lots of articles about it.

Like these.

https://www.thebookseller.com/news/pratchetts-and-gaimans-good-omens-to-be-adapted-into-a-graphic-novel?fbclid=IwAR385gG5SyD-IjBTLFkGzMRQEE2EEwvFBKgHCZU1aX6QgXfz-iMELxj589o

I've adapted a number of works by Neil Gaiman and have won some nice awards doing that, which is also easy to research.

The Kickstarter launches today at 12 EST.

I really appreciate that people are passionate about this, but I am also passionate about it and am very happy to be working on it.

It is not an adaptation of the show. It is an adaptation of the novel.

Thank you.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Being a “centrist” sounds eminently reasonable, doesn’t it? A centrist is a moderate, right? Someone who is rational and practical and takes the middle ground. Someone who isn’t extreme like those crazy ideologues on the far right or far left. A centrist, logic dictates, is really what everyone should strive to be. But stop for a moment and ask yourself how you would define a centrist in more specific terms. When you start spelling out what the word really means, it becomes clear that it obfuscates more than it illuminates. The word does not describe a set of ideas so much as it reinforces a system of power. This, of course, is a feature not a bug of political language. As George Orwell wrote in his famous essay Politics and the English Language: “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.” Orwell wrote that essay in 1946. Today, 78 years later, it feels just as relevant. Look, for example, at the carnage in Gaza and the West Bank. Look at the statements from Israeli leaders that clearly suggest genocidal intent. Look at the tragedies that barely make a dent in the public consciousness any more. Last week, for example, an Israeli airstrike killed four-day-old twins, along with their mother and grandmother, when their father went to collect birth certificates in central Gaza. Look at the levels of brutality that barely seem to register any more: there is video evidence of the sexual abuse of Palestinians at a notorious Israeli military prison (though the more accurate term is “torture camp”) and, even with that evidence, we know there will be no real accountability. Look at the dead. Nearly 40,000 people in Gaza are now dead, including nearly 15,000 children. When you look at the scale of devastation, it seems likely that those figures are an underestimate. Further, counting the dead is excruciatingly difficult: kids are being blown into fragments so small that their surviving relatives have to collect pieces of them in plastic bags. Then there are the tens and thousands more who are now dying from starvation, or facing a looming polio epidemic. Look at the West Bank, meanwhile, where Israel has published plans for new settlements, which violate international law. Since 7 October, the Israeli army and settlers have displaced 1,285 Palestinians and destroyed 641 structures in the West Bank, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Ethnic cleansing is taking place before our eyes. Now look at how all of this is being justified. This war isn’t just being waged with bombs, it’s being waged with “euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness”. When you lay out what is happening in clear language, it is indefensible. So political language dresses all those dead and starving children up in euphemism. It obscures ethnic cleansing with vagaries. Don’t believe your eyes, political writing says. What you are seeing is far more complex than your eyes can possibly comprehend.

[...]

In order to defend the indefensible, politicians and political writers move away from concreteness, from clear language, and hide behind the respectableness of terms like “centrism”. Pro-Palestinian protesters are labelled the far-left or extremists. Continuing to unconditionally send arms to Israel and shield the country’s far-right government from accountability, however, is considered a centrist – and therefore reasonable – position.

[...]

As Orwell wrote, atrocities can be defended, “but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties”. If the Democratic party were to be honest about why it is doing very little to stop the carnage in Gaza and the settlements in the West Bank, the bluntest argument would be along the lines of: “Israel is an important tool in maintaining US imperialism and western interests. The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is expedient to those interests. Human rights law doesn’t apply to atrocities enabled by the west.” Of course, being pro-ethnic cleansing doesn’t quite square with the do-gooding branding of the Democratic party. Instead, we are bombarded with the idea that massacring children is somehow a centrist and moderate position.

22 August 2024

[whencyclopedia]

The Conquest of New Spain

The Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Díaz del Castillo (1492 to c. 1580) is an account written in 1568 of the early Spanish colonization of Mesoamerica, specifically the conquest of the Aztec civilization in Mexico from 1519 to 1521 when Díaz was a member of the conquistador expedition led by Hernán Cortés (1485-1547).

Bernal Díaz

Díaz was born in 1492 in Medina del Campo, Valladolid, in Spain. Like many young men of his generation, he sought his fortune in military escapades in the New World. Díaz was in Nombre de Dios in Panama in 1514 where he served Pedro Arias de Avila (aka Pedrarias Dávila, b. 1442). In 1517, Díaz moved on to Cuba where he served under another infamous colonial governor, Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar (1465-1524). Velázquez was keen to find out more about the Yucatán Peninsula – then considered just another Caribbean island. Cuéllar sent two expeditions of exploration to Mexico: one in 1517 led by Francisco Hernández de Córdoba (1474-1517) and another in 1518 led by Juan de Grijalva (1489-1527). Díaz was on both expeditions as an ensign, and they have a chapter each devoted to them in Díaz's chronicle, but it is inconsistencies in the geography of these expeditions which have led some to doubt Díaz's participation.

Velázquez was so intrigued by the reports of the first two expeditions concerning a large civilization to the west that he determined to send out a third reconnaissance mission, this time to be led by Hernán Cortés. Díaz went on this expedition in 1519, but Cortés was ambitious for much more than information and was intent on conquest and riches.

After the campaign against the Aztecs, Díaz had an official position in Guatemala which included an encomienda license to extract labour from the indigenous community. Díaz visited Spain again but ultimately returned to Guatemala to write his famous work in the last years of his eventful life. The original title in Spanish is Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España ("The True History of the Conquest of New Spain"). New Spain was the name given to the viceroyalty that the Spanish established in 1535, of which Mexico was a part.

The work was first published in 1568, almost 50 years after the events the book describes. Díaz was 76 at the time, and this may explain some of the inconsistencies that have preoccupied modern historians. The doubts are a little ironic since one of the primary motivations for Díaz to take up his pen was to set the record straight. Díaz did not agree with a recent publication by Francisco López de Gómara (1511 to c. 1566), Herńan Cortés' private chaplain and final confessor. He felt that López's General History of the Indies (Historia General de las Indias), written in collaboration with Gonzalo de Illescas, had not got all the details of the Aztec conquest right and that Cortés had not been represented accurately. Díaz claimed that López had never even been to the Americas while he had been an eyewitness at every major battle. Díaz frequently criticises and corrects these chroniclers in his own work, and he is keen to show that the conquest was a team effort of conquistadors and not just Cortés, who Díaz felt had gained too much credit at the cost of his colleagues. A further motivation for Díaz was that his account, in which he is keen to show his role in the conquest, in some sense justified his encomienda, which at that point risked being abolished by a new set of laws.

Díaz died around 1580, having outlived all his old conquistador companions, but at least, in the words of the English translator J. M. Cohen, having recorded his version of events for posterity by displaying "a graphic memory and a great sense of the dramatic" (7).

Continue reading...

[ducktoonsfanart]

Donald Duck as Napoleon Bonaparte, Scrooge McDuck as Gaius Julius Caesar and Louie Duck (Quack Pack) as Alexander the Great - Conquerors - Real Ducks in History - History in Duckverse

I've always wanted to do a special project called Duckverse in History and my plan is to draw my favorite characters as redraws from famous works of art as well as famous historical figures. And since history is my favorite science, and my favorite field, I definitely wanted to do something related to it and related to one of my favorite historical characters. Since I don't want to complicate the situation, I will gradually publish a drawing related to that historical figure from time to time. I started this last year for Duckvember only to finish at the end of last month.

The first drawing is a redraw from Jacques Louis David's famous early 19th century artwork depicting Napoleon Bonaparte crossing the Alps in 1800 before the Battle of Marengo. Napoleon Bonaparte was the most famous French military leader, general, consul and emperor who waged war with all of Europe at the time and managed to subjugate it in its entirety except for the Ottoman Empire, Russia and Great Britain. He is from Corsica, but he left a lot for France and proved that France is not worth messing with easily. He also gave many reforms and his Civil Code which spread throughout Europe and brought order in France after the French Revolution. Napoleon's nature is very similar to Donald Duck and I drew Donald as Napoleon since he was created for that role and I drew him riding his horse Marengo in my own style, but in a realistic way and that Donald has five fingers.

The second drawing is a redraw of a statue made by Nicolas Coustou at the end of the 17th century for the decoration of Versailles, which depicts the greatest Roman, Gaius Julius Caesar. Although he was not an emperor, certainly many presented him, but he was a dictator, consul, general, writer, historian, engineer, constructor, and a great military leader who changed the Roman Republic into an almost Roman Empire. His fights against the Gauls, as well as the conflict with Pompey and his love with Cleopatra, are known, but he also changed a lot in Rome and was extremely rich. And he lived during the first century BC. That's why I drew Scrooge McDuck as Gaius Julius Caesar since Scrooge is a great leader and he also strived for fame and fortune and to be remembered in the future and he plays the role of the best Roman. Behind it are the Colosseum (built a century after him), the aqueduct (then irrigation) and the Pantheon (built two centuries after him), as well as a Roman temple that symbolizes Rome at that time, as well as the roads themselves. In addition, Topolino (Italian comics) are showed Scrooge as Caesar two or three times so that's where my inspiration came from.

The third drawing shows Louie Duck (the Quack Pack version, not the Ducktales reboot) shows Alexander the Great, another brilliant conqueror from the fourth century BC and I drew it as a redraw from the mosaic of Alexander the Great from the battle of Issus in which he confronts the Persian king Darius III from Pompeii, probably from the first century BC. Alexander the Great was the son of Philip II and the king of Macedonia who united Greece and fought against Persia and managed to conquer an entire empire in his twenties. He traveled through the Persian Empire and reached India and wanted to continue, but his soldiers did not want to continue, so he returned to Babylon, his new capital. He certainly changed the world at that time and introduced a new culture, called Hellenism, as a combination of ancient Greek culture and the culture of the Ancient East and ancient India. I drew Louie as Alexander because as a young man he is a great adventurer and rides his black horse Bucephalus and is eager for extremes, yet unlike Alexander, Louie shows a bit of his shyness, but is still brave enough to take on new challenges. I also added a helmet as worn by Alexander III in his time. Behind Louie are the pyramids from Egypt, the Ishtar Gate from Babylon and the imperial palace from Persepolis where the Persian rulers lived and it actually shows the lands that Alexander the Great conquered.

I certainly hope you like these drawings and these ideas and that these characters have such historical roles. Of course, Duckverse in history I combine mostly everything related to Duckverse (Donald Duck comics, OG Ducktales, Three Caballeros, Darkwing Duck and Quack Pack) and it's mostly my version and my idea. By all means if you like this and support these ideas, feel free to like and reblog this, but please don't use these same ideas without mentioning me and without my permission. Thank you!

[fatehbaz]

Christmas pudding [...] [is] a boiled mass of suet - a raw, hard animal fat [...] often replaced with a vegetarian alternative - as well as flour and dried fruits that is often soaked in alcohol and set alight. [...] [I]t is a legacy of the British Empire with ingredients from around the globe it once dominated [...].

Christmas pudding is a relatively recent concoction of two older, at least medieval, dishes. [...] “Figgy pudding,” immortalized in the “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” carol, appeared in the written record by the 14th century. [...] During the 18th century, the two ["plum pottage" and "figgy pudding"] crossed to become the more familiar plum pudding – a steamed pudding packed with the ingredients of the rapidly growing British Empire of rule and trade. The key was less a new form of cookery than the availability of once-luxury ingredients, including French brandy, raisins from the Mediterranean, and citrus from the Caribbean.

Few things had become more affordable than cane sugar which, owing to the labors of millions of enslaved Africans, could be found in the poorest and remotest of British households by mid-century. Cheap sugar, combined with wider availability of other sweet ingredients like citrus and dried fruits, made plum pudding an iconically British celebratory treat, albeit not yet exclusively associated with Christmas.

Such was its popularity that English satirist James Gillray made it the centerpiece of one of his famous cartoons, depicting Napoleon Bonaparte and the British prime minister carving the world in pudding form.

In line with other modern Christmas celebrations, the Victorians took the plum pudding and redefined it [...], making it the “Christmas pudding.” In his 1843 internationally celebrated “A Christmas Carol,” Charles Dickens venerated the dish as the idealized center of any family’s Christmas feast [...].

Three years later, Queen Victoria’s chef published her favored recipe, making Christmas pudding, like the Christmas tree, the aspiration of families across Britain.

Christmas pudding owed much of its lasting appeal to its socioeconomic accessibility. Victoria’s recipe, which became a classic, included candied citrus peel, nutmeg, cinnamon, lemons, cloves, brandy and a small mountain of raisins and currants – all affordable treats for the middle class. Those with less means could either opt for lesser amounts or substitutions [...]. Eliza Acton, a leading cookbook author of the day who helped to rebrand plum pudding as Christmas pudding, offered a particularly frugal recipe that relied on potatoes and carrots. [...] The high alcohol content gave the puddings a shelf life of a year or more, allowing them to be sent even to the empire’s frontiers during Victoria’s reign [...].

---

In the 1920s, the British Women’s Patriotic League heavily promoted it – calling it “Empire Pudding” in a global marketing campaign. They praised it as emblem of the empire that should be made from the ingredients of Britain’s colonies and possessions: dried fruits from Australia and South Africa, cinnamon from Ceylon, spices from India and Jamaican rum in place of French brandy.

Press coverage of London’s 1926 Empire Day celebrations featured the empire’s representatives pouring the ingredients into a ceremonial mixing bowl and collectively stirring it.

The following year, the Empire Marketing Board received King George V’s permission to promote the royal recipe, which had all the appropriate empire-sourced ingredients. Such promotional recipes and the mass production of puddings from iconic grocery stores like [Sains-bury's] in the 1920s combined to place Christmas puddings on the tables [...].

---

All text above by: Troy Bickham. "How the Christmas pudding, with ingredients taken from the colonies, became an iconic British food." The Conversation. 8 December 2023. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Image and caption shown unaltered as they appear published by Bickham along with the article's text.]

[goetiae]

Leeches were largely popular in the medical field during the Victorian era both in Europe (primarily England and France) and America. The 19th century saw progression of the academic study of leeches as used in medicine that was conducted prior and laid basis for the modern application of anticoagulant in medical practice.

At the time, many famous Englishmen found leeches fascinating: zoologist Arthur Everett Shipley, for instance, wrote papers marveling at the beauty and functionality of a leech. This fascination often grew personal. Lord Thomas Erskine, a lawyer, underwent a successful bloodletting, afterwards taking with him two leeches; later naming them Home and Clina. According to the memoirs of Sir Sam Romilly, Erskine's friend, he took great care of making sure the leeches "knew him".

In France, the obsession with leeches took drastic turns as well. François-Joseph-Victor Broussais, a notable surgeon of Napoleon's army, was known to possess a certain infatuation with leeches.

Leeches were in growingly high demand in the 19th century Europe. France imported leeches in terrific quantities equating up to dozens of millions a year.

Overall, bloodletting for medicinal purposes is not strictly unique to the 19th century Europe. Like many other medical methods, it has its roots in Ancient Egypt and Greece where bloodletting via cutting veins was often practiced by the followers of the method described in the Hippocratic collection of the 5th century BC. The medicinal use of leeches dates back to 1500 BC and is not a recent invention. However, it is only in 1884 that Haycraft learned why leeches are so efficient in bloodletting: their saliva contains an anticoagulant hirudin (hence hirudotherapy). These observations are listed in Haycraft's work, On the Action of a Secretion Obtained from the Medicinal Leech on the Coagulation of the Blood. For this property, leeches are still in high medicinal demand.

During the Victorian era, leeches were used for all kinds of medical treatment: from headaches to hemorrhoids, from fatigue to nymphomania. Sir William Henry, for example, writes that bloodletting is far beyond any other medical treatment in helping many diseases.

Albeit, the effectiveness of such treatment is a matter of much questioning as often leeching only weakened the fragile state of those being treated. Some patients were, unsurprisingly, allergic to the treatment and either suffered reactions to leeches, larger loss of blood than intended, or even died during treatment.

Leeches and bloodletting were studied with much attention: physicians wrote books on the physiology and medical benefits of leech usage, and a very detailed description of leeches was added in the 1880 edition of Johnson's Universal Cyclopaedia.

The curiosity for leeches found its way into much earlier publications as well. For example, J. R. Johnson released multiple medical studies on leeches in the very beginning of the 19th century. His A Treatise on the Medicinal Leech (1816) and Further Observations in the Medicinal Leech (1825) dwelled on the precise details of leech usage and preservation.

From Johnson's studies mentioned above, we learn that he worked with cocoons of different sizes which he received from other leech enthusiasts. He recorded that leeches are to be kept in an enclosure with a stream of fresh water coming in and turf placed conveniently so that the leeches could "retire in a shady spot". He also studied leeches' detailed anatomical structure.

Such academic interest centered around leeches in England roots within earlier academic research done by the scientists of the 18th century - for example, an apothecary by the name George Horn who published his An Entirely New Treatise on Leeches: Wherein the Nature, Properties and Use in 1798. Interestingly, even this early into the studying of leeches, he mentions the dangers of infections if leeches were to be attracted by walking bare-legged into a river (as was done in India, according to him). Instead, he promotes the English method of agitating the leech-infested waters until the animals come up to the surface to then be caught by the nets. Overall, prior to Horn's manual not many spoke in favor of leeching: William Buchan in his study from 1769 speaks on leeches as unreliable and inefficient as it's unclear how much blood is taken per use.

Horn describes four species of leech (two of which are found in England) and dwells on their peculiar anatomy:

no eyes but a teeth-filled mouth

lips to catch blood from escaping

lack of a proper stomach

presence of the so-called "bags" across their body that "get saturated when leeches receive nourishment"

Based on the gathered information, one can claim leeches were awakening more and more scientific curiosity among the English apothecaries and physicians even at the end of the 18th century.

The medical treatment of patients with the use of leeches is described by Horn as well, though he tends to recommend additional treatment - usually mixtures of milk and syrup with herbs - to be given to the patient alongside bloodletting. This as well as other studies of the late 18th century certainly became the basis of medicinal usage of leeches in the upcoming 19th century and far into the 1910s.

It is impossible to speak of leech therapy of the early 19th century in England and beyond without mentioning the influence of François-Joseph-Victor Broussais, a surgeon of immense medical fascination with leeches who employed them vastly in his treatment of Napoleon's soldiers. Broussais used around fifty leeches a time per patient and was thus called "the vampire of medicine" for his fascination with bloodletting. He claimed, among other things, that all "fevers" had the precisely same origin: inflammation. Letting out "bad blood" was thus a plausible solution to the issue.

Women wore embroidery in colors inspired by leeches' dim, soft shades. A whole sort of fashion - à la Broussais - was born out of this unusual fascination. The notable traits of this fashion, according to Michel Valentin who wrote a large biography of Broussais, were purple garnitures - embroidery, trimming - and top coats that resembled leeches' colors.

This conclusion was, of course, the result of the "humoral theory", which was widely supported in Europe. Rooting from Greece, it centered around the idea that the human body held inside four types of liquids: two kinds of bile, phlegm, and blood. Each humor was associated with two qualities, either hot or cold, and either wet or dry. Having one of the liquids "in excess" was associated with certain conditions (for blood, it was any that caused redness, for example), hence bloodletting was a naturally sought out practice.

The leeches were placed “inside the nostrils, on the inside of the lower lip, on the chest, and on the side, sometimes by four at a time.” Leeches could access otherwise inaccessible parts of one's body (such as perineum) and were often used for treatment conditions that were believed to be connected to genitalia - for example, "nymphomaniac" states. To apply a leech, one would hold a small leech-containing vessel filled with water to the desired spot, wait until it bites, and then gently remove the container; tubes could be used as well.

A whole industry related to leeches was established in the 19th century: propagating leeches rose to the state level of importance and leech keeping became a popular activity. Leeches were, in fact, nearly hunted to extinction in some European countries in the 19th century, including England. Containing leeches started to become complicated: leeches only needed meals once every six months (and thus were not suitable for frequent use) and required specific conditions of containment. Thus, the mechanical leech quickly became a popular invention. The first prototype of 1817, called bdellomètre, is credited to French doctor Jean-Baptiste Sarlandière.

Transactions of the Pharmaceutical Meetings (1855) notes some statistical numbers regarding the "leech hunt" of the 19th century: in imports alone England received 8 million leeches annually, besides the large numbers collected within the country. The practice of using mechanical leeches (two types for different purposes) is mentioned as "ingenious" and discussed as a great opportunity to keep the natural leech healthy. The book tracks down purchases of various vessels for fresh water used as leech enclosures.

Actual preservation and propagation of leeches are described in various books of the time, though the peak of such publications in England comes around in the 1850s. In 1855, Specification of Nathaniel Johnston: Breeding, Rearing and Carrying Leeches is published. Johnston, whilst in Paris, invented an apparatus for keeping and breeding medicinal leeches: a complicated water vessel to keep leeches at the perfect temperature and humidity for the breeder - the inventor titled these containers hirudinieres. A similar invention was marked by another author in Specification of George Lifford Smartt: Vessels for Preserving Leeches and Fish Alive.

There was a lot of thought and effort put into keeping leeches healthy and vital - either for medicinal purposes or out of personal fascination.

[mariacallous]

It no longer makes sense to speak of free speech in traditional terms. The internet has so transformed the nature of the speaker that the definition of speech itself has changed.

The new speech is governed by the allocation of virality. People cannot simply speak for themselves, for there is always a mysterious algorithm in the room that has independently set the volume of the speaker’s voice. If one is to be heard, one must speak in part to one’s human audience, in part to the algorithm. It is as if the US Constitution had required citizens to speak through actors or lawyers who answered to the Dutch East India Company, or some other large remote entity. What power should these intermediaries have? When the very logic of speech must shift in order for people to be heard, is that still free speech? This was not a problem foreseen in the law.

The time may be right for a legal and policy reset. US lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are questioning Section 230, the liability shield that enshrined the ad-driven internet. The self-reinforcing ramifications of a mere 26 words—“no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider”—has produced a social media ecosystem that is widely held to have had deleterious effects on both democracy and mental health.

Abraham Lincoln is credited with the famous quip about how you cannot fool all the people all the time. Perhaps you cannot, but perhaps the internet can. Imperfect speech has always existed, but the means and scale of amplification have not. The old situation cannot be the guide for the new.

Section 230 was created during a period when policy was being designed to unleash internet innovation, thereby maintaining America’s competitive edge in cyberspace. The early internet was supported by a variety of friendly policies, not just Section 230. For instance, sales arranged over the internet were often not taxed in early years. Furthermore, the internet was knowingly inaugurated in an incomplete state, lacking personal accounts, authentication mechanisms, commercial transaction standards, and many other needed elements. The thinking was not only that it was easier to get a minimal design started when computing power was still nascent, but also that the missing elements would be addressed by entrepreneurs. In effect, we were giving trillion-dollar gifts to parties unknown who would be the inevitable network-effect winners.

Section 230 was enacted as part of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, a larger legislative effort within the umbrella 1996 Telecommunications Act. Section 230(c)(1) provides immunity for online services regarding user-generated content, ensuring the companies hosting content are not treated as publishers of this information. Section 230(c)(2) offers Good Samaritan protection from civil liability when the companies—or platforms, as we call them today—in good faith remove or moderate objectionable content.

After President Bill Clinton signed the 1996 Telecommunications Act into law, it was unclear how the courts might interpret it. When the dust cleared, Section 230 emerged as something of a double-edged sword. It could be used to justify censorship, and at the same time be deployed as a corporate liability shield. Most importantly, it provided the runway for the takeoff of Google, Twitter, and Facebook. (And now TikTok—which, being a Chinese company, proves that Section 230 no longer serves American interests.)

The impact on the public sphere has been, to say the least, substantial. In removing so much liability, Section 230 forced a certain sort of business plan into prominence, one based not on uniquely available information from a given service, but on the paid arbitration of access and influence. Thus, we ended up with the deceptively named “advertising” business model—and a whole society thrust into a 24/7 competition for attention. A polarized social media ecosystem. Recommender algorithms that mediate content and optimize for engagement. We have learned that humans are most engaged, at least from an algorithm’s point of view, by rapid-fire emotions related to fight-or-flight responses and other high-stakes interactions. In enabling the privatization of the public square, Section 230 has inadvertently rendered impossible deliberation between citizens who are supposed to be equal before the law. Perverse incentives promote cranky speech, which effectively suppresses thoughtful speech.

And then there is the economic imbalance. Internet platforms that rely on Section 230 tend to harvest personal data for their business goals without appropriate compensation. Even when data ought to be protected or prohibited by copyright or some other method, Section 230 often effectively places the onus on the violated party through the requirement of takedown notices. That switch in the order of events related to liability is comparable to the difference between opt-in and opt-out in privacy. It might seem like a technicality, but it is actually a massive difference that produces substantial harms. For example, workers in information-related industries such as local news have seen stark declines in economic success and prestige. Section 230 makes a world of data dignity functionally impossible.

To date, content moderation has too often been beholden to the quest for attention and engagement, regularly disregarding the stated corporate terms of service. Rules are often bent to maximize engagement through inflammation, which can mean doing harm to personal and societal well-being. The excuse is that this is not censorship, but is it really not? Arbitrary rules, doxing practices, and cancel culture have led to something hard to distinguish from censorship for the sober and well-meaning. At the same time, the amplification of incendiary free speech for bad actors encourages mob rule. All of this takes place under Section 230’s liability shield, which effectively gives tech companies carte blanche for a short-sighted version of self-serving behavior. Disdain for these companies—which found a way to be more than carriers, and yet not publishers—is the only thing everyone in America seems to agree on now.

Trading a known for an unknown is always terrifying, especially for those with the most to lose. Since at least some of Section 230’s network effects were anticipated at its inception, it should have had a sunset clause. It did not. Rather than focusing exclusively on the disruption that axing 26 words would spawn, it is useful to consider potential positive effects. When we imagine a post-230 world, we discover something surprising: a world of hope and renewal worth inhabiting.

In one sense, it’s already happening. Certain companies are taking steps on their own, right now, toward a post-230 future. YouTube, for instance, is diligently building alternative income streams to advertising, and top creators are getting more options for earning. Together, these voluntary moves suggest a different, more publisher-like self-concept. YouTube is ready for the post-230 era, it would seem. (On the other hand, a company like X, which leans hard into 230, has been destroying its value with astonishing velocity.) Plus, there have always been exceptions to Section 230. For instance, if someone enters private information, there are laws to protect it in some cases. That means dating websites, say, have the option of charging fees instead of relying on a 230-style business model. The existence of these exceptions suggests that more examples would appear in a post-230 world.

Let’s return to speech. One difference between speech before and after the internet was that the scale of the internet “weaponized” some instances of speech that would not have been as significant before. An individual yelling threats at someone in passing, for instance, is quite different from a million people yelling threats. This type of amplified, stochastic harassment has become a constant feature of our times—chilling speech—and it is possible that in a post-230 world, platforms would be compelled to prevent it. It is sometimes imagined that there are only two choices: a world of viral harassment or a world of top-down smothering of speech. But there is a third option: a world of speech in which viral harassment is tamped down but ideas are not. Defining this middle option will require some time to sort out, but it is doable without 230, just as it is possible to define the limits of viral financial transactions to make Ponzi schemes illegal.

With this accomplished, content moderation for companies would be a vastly simpler proposition. Companies need only uphold the First Amendment, and the courts would finally develop the precedents and tests to help them do that, rather than the onus of moderation being entirely on companies alone. The United States has more than 200 years of First Amendment jurisprudence that establishes categories of less protected speech—obscenity, defamation, incitement, fighting words—to build upon, and Section 230 has effectively impeded its development for online expression. The perverse result has been the elevation of algorithms over constitutional law, effectively ceding judicial power.

When the jurisprudential dust has cleared, the United States would be exporting the democracy-promoting First Amendment to other countries rather than Section 230’s authoritarian-friendly liability shield and the sewer of least-common-denominator content that holds human attention but does not bring out the best in us. In a functional democracy, after all, the virtual public square should belong to everyone, so it is important that its conversations are those in which all voices can be heard. This can only happen with dignity for all, not in a brawl.

Section 230 perpetuates an illusion that today’s social media companies are common carriers like the phone companies that preceded them, but they are not. Unlike Ma Bell, they curate the content they transmit to users. We need a robust public conversation about what we, the people, want this space to look like, and what practices and guardrails are likely to strengthen the ties that bind us in common purpose as a democracy. Virality might come to be understood as an enemy of reason and human values. We can have culture and conversations without a mad race for total attention.

While Section 230 might have been considered more a target for reform rather than repeal prior to the advent of generative AI, it can no longer be so. Social media could be a business success even if its content was nonsense. AI cannot.

There have been suggestions that AI needs Section 230 because large language models train on data and will be better if that data is freely usable with no liabilities or encumbrances. This notion is incorrect. People want more from AI than entertainment. It is widely considered an important tool for productivity and scientific progress. An AI model is only as good as the data it is trained on; indeed, general data improves specialist results. The best AI will come out of a society that prioritizes quality communication. By quality communication, we do not mean deepfakes. We mean open and honest dialog that fosters understanding rather than vitriol, collaboration rather than polarization, and the pursuit of knowledge and human excellence rather than a race to the bottom of the brain stem.

The attention-grooming model fostered by Section 230 leads to stupendous quantities of poor-quality data. While an AI model can tolerate a significant amount of poor-quality data, there is a limit. It is unrealistic to imagine a society mediated by mostly terrible communication where that same society enjoys unmolested, high-quality AI. A society must seek quality as a whole, as a shared cultural value, in order to maximize the benefits of AI. Now is the best time for the tech business to mature and develop business models based on quality.

All of this might sound daunting, but we’ve been here before. When the US government said the American public owned the airwaves so that television broadcasting could be regulated, it put in place regulations that supported the common good. The internet affects everyone, so we must devise measures to ensure that our digital-age public discourse is of high quality and includes everyone. In the television era, the fairness doctrine laid that groundwork. A similar lens needs to be developed for the internet age.

Without Section 230, recommender algorithms and the virality they spark would be less likely to distort speech. It is sadly ironic that the very statute that delivered unfathomable success is today serving the interests of our enemies by compromising America’s superpower: our multinational, immigrant-powered constitutional democracy. The time has come to unleash the power of the First Amendment to promote human free speech by giving Section 230 the respectful burial it deserves.

[khaleesiofalicante]

The Hindu mythology ask reminds me of the times I user to make family trees and flow charts of Ramayana and Mahabharata. So this is gonna be a long one..sorry!

1. Amar Chitra Katha is a great place to start, you can also watch the old televised cartoon versions of the same...I used to love them..they are a little biased but a great place to start! You ll find them on the big magic channel (if ur from India..idk if it still exists tho lmao) or maybe even on youtube. There are soap operas too if you like drama and stuff...Mahabharata has a super famous one!

2. I LOVED THE KRISHNA CARTOONS TOO. It was called Little Krishna- the prince of Vrindavan (dat music is still my fav). I used to cry every Sunday to watch it on TV.

3. Idk if this is ur thing but I used to visit old libraries and ask for books from there, librarians are actually super cool and underrated. I used to tell them I want the full version of Mahabharata..bonus if it's in those maroon hardbound covers cuz that means it's more inclusive of info)

4. If you want to learn about other Hindu gods like Shiva and Brahma, you can start with short stories type books by Tiny Tot Publications (again idk if they still publish..my books are so old😭)

5. You can go to any famous temple in your area too and try to find stories behind that. (I once visited a temple where people believe Krishna comes every night with Radha for Rasleela)

6. I have lately been really enjoying Amish and Devdutt Patnaik. They wrote books from Raavan, Sita and Draupadi's POV. Can you imagine that? They are very unbiased. You should definitely check them out.

Last tip as someone who has been a Hindu mythology reader since I was like 5

You can never know every story. You ll never find one book that has every story. This was something that used to annoy my brain because I was like if there's a story about the king's maid's daughter...I need to know that too. But it's impossible, trust me. So just keep taking info as you can and DO NOT TRY TO FIGURE OUT CHRONOLOGY OF THE EVENTS. You ll go crazy. Like basics within Ramayana and Mahabharata is fine but the other short stories will make u go crazy.

Good luck! Hope you enjoy!

[stephensmithuk]

Thor Bridge

Most Holmes stories are "The Adventure of X". "The Problem of Thor Bridge", published in 1922 and forming part of the Case-book collection, is one of the exceptions. Others include "The Five Orange Pips", which is the full title.

This was originally published in two parts in The Strand, with a recap of the plot before the second part.

Cox & Co. was founded in 1758 as a military logistics company, getting money and other supplies to troops in India. Later Cox & Kings, the Indian company is now the process of liquidation after going bust in 2020, while the British arm is now a travel agent under the Abercrombie & Kent group.

The Family Herald was a weekly periodical that ran from 1843 to 1940.

The United States had 45 states in 1900; Utah had joined in 1896 and Oklahoma would be next in 1907. New Mexico and Arizona were the other two non-states at this time in the lower 48.

Senators were elected by state legislatures until 1912.

The city of Winchester is the county town of Hampshire and has been inhabited since before the Romans turned up. Traditionally seen as the capital of the old kingdom of Wessex - there was in fact no fixed capital, but it still was of major importance. Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles takes place in a fictionalised "Wintonchester".

Winchester today hosts a Crown Court that sits in session all year round. HM Prison Winchester, built between 1846 and 1850, is still an active prison, although today male only. One of its most notable inmates was serial killer Rosemary West, who was held there during her trial.

Claridge's is a famous five-star hotel in Mayfair, frequented by celebrities and royals.

At the time, the British definition of "billion" was a million million i.e. a modern trillion. A milliard was the term for a thousand million, but we now use the US definition.

Brazil had gained its independence in 1825, three years after declaring it. It had ousted its monarchy in 1889 and become a republic after a coup.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Nickolaus Hines

Published: Oct 18, 2021

In 2016, the famous nun Mother Teresa was declared a saint by Pope Francis — but many people say she doesn't deserve it.

Ever since the Vatican made Mother Teresa a saint in 2016, the response has been controversial and polarizing.

In order for Mother Teresa to achieve sainthood, the Vatican had to recognize two miracles that the famous nun performed after her death. Pope John Paul II recognized the first miracle in 2003, just six years after she died in 1997. And Pope Francis recognized the second miracle in 2015.

The popes claimed that Mother Teresa performed miracles when she cured one woman and then one man of their respective tumors. However, these “miracles” have been disputed by some — especially since a doctor who worked on the woman’s case said that she had been treated with drugs.

But debates over Mother Teresa’s miracles didn’t dissuade the Vatican from moving forward with its plans. Pope Francis officially proclaimed Mother Teresa a saint on September 4, 2016. But the decision remains controversial, and the dispute over her miracles is just one small part of it.

Of course, Mother Teresa’s sainthood may seem well-deserved to some. After all, she cultivated a mostly sparkling reputation as a selfless humanitarian while she was alive. But in recent years, her image has lost its luster. And when you take a closer look at her story, it’s not hard to see why.

Inside Mother Teresa’s “Selfless” Intentions

Mother Teresa was intent on converting as many people to Catholicism as possible, even at the expense of the poor and sick.

No one builds a church purely for the love of God — especially in places like India where critical services, like hospitals, are lacking. Religious groups that erect churches in these areas do so not just out of the kindness of their hearts, but to increase the number of people who believe in their faith.

Like those missionaries, conversion — the Church’s key to survival — was Mother Teresa’s primary goal. And in the context of the Catholic Church, charity can be viewed as a self-interested act.

“It’s good to work for a cause with selfless intentions,” said Mohan Bhagwat, the head of a Hindu nationalist group. “But Mother Teresa’s work had ulterior motive, which was to convert the person who was being served to Christianity. In the name of service, religious conversions were made.”

And when The New York Times reviewed the British documentary Hell’s Angel, a film that highlighted some of Mother Teresa’s flaws, the paper concluded that she was “less interested in helping the poor than in using them as an indefatigable source of wretchedness on which to fuel the expansion of her fundamentalist Roman Catholic beliefs.”

Still, some argue that even if Mother Teresa had ulterior motives, at least the people she cared for were better off for it. But others who have actually visited and worked in her medical centers wholeheartedly disagree.

The Horrific Conditions At Mother Teresa’s Medical Centers And Missions

Though Mother Teresa’s medical centers were meant to heal people, her patients were often subjected to conditions that made them even sicker. In the same documentary, an Indian journalist compared Mother Teresa’s flagship location for “Missionaries of Charity” to photographs that he had seen of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Nazi Germany.

“Workers washed needles under tap water and then reused them. Medicine and other vital items were stored for months on end, expiring and still applied sporadically to patients,” said Hemley Gonzalez, a noted humanitarian who briefly volunteered at Missionaries of Charity.

Gonzalez continued, “Volunteers with little or no training carried out dangerous work on patients with highly contagious cases of tuberculosis and other life-threatening illnesses. The individuals who operated the charity refused to accept and implement medical equipment and machinery that would have safely automated processes and saved lives.”

It wasn’t just volunteers who criticized Mother Teresa’s treatment of patients, either. In her hospice care centers, Mother Teresa practiced her belief that patients only needed to feel wanted and die at peace with God — not receive proper medical care — and medical experts went after her for it.

In 1994, the British medical journal The Lancet reported that medicine was scarce in her centers and that patients received nothing close to the treatment that they needed to relieve their pain.

Meanwhile, some doctors took to calling her missions “homes for the dying” since her Calcutta home for the sick had a mortality rate of more than 40 percent. But in her view, this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

In response to all the criticism, Mother Teresa allegedly said, “There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s Passion. The world gains much from their suffering.”

However, when it came to her own suffering, Mother Teresa apparently took a different stance. When she began experiencing severe heart problems, she received care in a modern American hospital.

The Questionable Company That Mother Teresa Kept Throughout Her Life

While neglecting the needs of the sick, Mother Teresa was also called out for rubbing elbows with several wealthy — and corrupt — world leaders.

This included Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, who was eventually charged with crimes against humanity for his abuse of his fellow Haitians.

At one point, 60 Minutes released footage that showed Mother Teresa praising Duvalier’s wife Michele. In the footage, Mother Teresa said that she had “never seen the poor people being so familiar with their head of state as they were with her. It was a beautiful lesson for me.”

That wasn’t the only friendship that raised eyebrows. Mother Teresa also received $1.25 million from her friend Charles Keating.

Keating was one of the key figures behind the 1980s savings and loan crisis, brought about by housing market and loan speculation, which cost American taxpayers $124 billion. And while he was on trial, Mother Teresa wrote to the judge presiding over his case — seeking clemency for him.

“I do not know anything about Mr. Charles Keating’s work or his business or the matters you are dealing with,” she said. “I only know that he has always been kind and generous to God’s poor and always ready to help whenever there was a need. It is for this reason that I do not want to forget him now while he and his family are suffering.”

Though a co-prosecutor of Keating actually responded to Mother Teresa after his conviction — and pointed out that one of the people Keating stole from was a poor carpenter — he never got a response from her.

And that wasn’t the only issue related to Mother Teresa’s finances.

The Enduring Mystery Of Where Mother Teresa’s Money Went

Countless well-meaning Catholics gave money to Mother Teresa’s charitable organizations throughout the years, but many of them would never see their generous donations go toward good works.

Keating’s $1.25 million donation alone would seem large enough to lift all of those in her care out of poverty, but one volunteer said that “even when bread was over at the soup kitchens, none was bought unless donated.”

Once, after running up an $800 tab at a grocery store to feed people at her charity, Mother Teresa refused to get out of line until someone else paid.

A 1991 report in the German magazine Stern also estimated that only seven percent of the millions of dollars she received were used for charity.

But seven percent of what total figure, exactly? The world will never know. Nirmala Joshi, the leader of Missionaries of Charity who succeeded Mother Teresa, said the donations were “countless,” and there was only one person with the actual numbers. “God knows,” Joshi said. “He is our banker.”

One is left to wonder where all of that money was actually going — and what happened to it after Mother Teresa’s death.

Mother Teresa’s Views On Reproductive Rights

Though it’s not surprising that a Catholic nun would be against abortion, Mother Teresa still raised eyebrows when she discussed her stance while she was accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.

In reference to Bosnian women who had been raped by Serbs and who were seeking abortions for their unwanted pregnancies, Mother Teresa said, “I feel the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a direct war, a direct killing — direct murder by the mother herself.”

She also rallied against birth control, claiming that “natural family planning” would solve the woes of women who were not ready for a child.

What Mother Teresa did promote in the realm of family planning — like abstinence — didn’t help anyone, either. And despite abstinence-only education being proven ineffective, she still stuck by her claims.

But even though she gained some critics for views like these, Mother Teresa was mostly successful at avoiding controversy while she was alive. However, a glimpse of her “dark side” would slip through the cracks every so often — especially when it came to her infamous homes for the sick. 

In hindsight, these issues are hard to ignore today. And it’s also difficult to understand why the Catholic Church decided to make Mother Teresa a saint. She may have been revered for helping the poor and the sick, but her practices ensured that they were mired in pain until their final moments.

==

Reminder: Mother Teresa was a sadistic fundamentalist.

[reasoningdaily]

Across a sterile white table in a windowless room, I’m introduced to a woman in her forties. She has a square jaw and blonde hair that has been pulled back from her face with a baby-blue scrunchie. “The girls call me Marmalade,” she says, inviting me to use her prison nickname. Early on a Wednesday morning, Marmalade is here, in a Finnish prison, to demonstrate a new type of prison labor.

The table is bare except for a small plastic bottle of water and an HP laptop. During three-hour shifts, for which she’s paid €1.54 ($1.67) an hour, the laptop is programmed to show Marmalade short chunks of text about real estate and then ask her yes or no questions about what she’s just read. One question asks: “is the previous paragraph referring to a real estate decision, rather than an application?”

“It’s a little boring,” Marmalade shrugs. She’s also not entirely sure of the purpose of this exercise. Maybe she is helping to create a customer service chatbot, she muses.

In fact, she is training a large language model owned by Metroc, a Finnish startup that has created a search engine designed to help construction companies find newly approved building projects. To do that, Metroc needs data labelers to help its models understand clues from news articles and municipality documents about upcoming building projects. The AI has to be able to tell the difference between a hospital project that has already commissioned an architect or a window fitter, for example, and projects that might still be hiring.

Around the world, millions of so-called “clickworkers” train artificial intelligence models, teaching machines the difference between pedestrians and palm trees, or what combination of words describe violence or sexual abuse. Usually these workers are stationed in the global south, where wages are cheap. OpenAI, for example, uses an outsourcing firm that employs clickworkers in Kenya, Uganda, and India. That arrangement works for American companies, operating in the world’s most widely spoken language, English. But there are not a lot of people in the global south who speak Finnish.

That’s why Metroc turned to prison labor. The company gets cheap, Finnish-speaking workers, while the prison system can offer inmates employment that, it says, prepares them for the digital world of work after their release. Using prisoners to train AI creates uneasy parallels with the kind of low-paid and sometimes exploitive labor that has often existed downstream in technology. But in Finland, the project has received widespread support.

“There's this global idea of what data labor is. And then there's what happens in Finland, which is very different if you look at it closely,” says Tuukka Lehtiniemi, a researcher at the University of Helsinki, who has been studying data labor in Finnish prisons.

For four months, Marmalade has lived here, in Hämeenlinna prison. The building is modern, with big windows. Colorful artwork tries to enforce a sense of cheeriness on otherwise empty corridors. If it wasn’t for the heavy gray security doors blocking every entry and exit, these rooms could easily belong to a particularly soulless school or university complex.

Finland might be famous for its open prisons—where inmates can work or study in nearby towns—but this is not one of them. Instead, Hämeenlinna is the country’s highest-security institution housing exclusively female inmates. Marmalade has been sentenced to six years. Under privacy rules set by the prison, WIRED is not able to publish Marmalade’s real name, exact age, or any other information that could be used to identify her. But in a country where prisoners serving life terms can apply to be released after 12 years, six years is a heavy sentence. And like the other 100 inmates who live here, she is not allowed to leave.

When Marmalade first arrived, she would watch the other women get up and go to work each morning: they could volunteer to clean, do laundry, or sew their own clothes. And for a six hour shift, they would receive roughly €6 ($6.50). But Marmalade couldn’t bear to take part. “I would find it very tiring,” she says. Instead she was spending long stretches of time in her cell. When a prison counselor suggested she try “AI work,” the short, three-hour shifts appealed to her, and the money was better than nothing. “Even though it’s not a lot, it’s better than staying in the cell,” she says” She’s only done three shifts so far, but already she feels a sense of achievement.

This is one of three Finnish prisons where inmates can volunteer to earn money through data labor. In each one, there are three laptops set up for inmates to take part in this AI work. There are no targets. Inmates are paid by the hour, not by their work’s speed or quality. In Hämeenlinna, around 20 inmates have tried it out, says Minna Inkinen, a prison work instructor, with cropped red hair, who sits alongside Marmalade as we talk. “Some definitely like it more than others”. When I arrive at the prison on a Wednesday morning, the sewing room is already busy. Inmates are huddled over sewing machines or conferring in pairs over mounds of fabric. But the small room where the AI work takes place is entirely empty until Marmalade arrives. There are only three inmates in total who regularly volunteer for AI shifts, Inkinen says, explaining that the other two are currently in court. “I would prefer to do it in a group,” says Marmalade, adding that she keeps the door open so she can chat with the people sewing next door, in between answering questions.

Those questions have been manually written in an office 100 kilometers south of the prison, in a slick Helsinki coworking space. Here, I meet Metroc’s tall and boyish founder and CEO, Jussi Virnala. He leads me to a stiflingly hot phone booth, past a row of indoor swings, a pool table, and a series of men in suits. It’s an exciting week, he explains, with a grin. The company has just announced a €2 million ($2.1 million) funding round which he plans to use to expand across the Nordics. The investors he spoke with were intrigued by the company’s connection to Finland’s prisons, he says. “Everyone was just interested in and excited about what an innovative way to do it,” says Virnala. “I think it’s been really valuable product-wise.”

It was Virnala’s idea to turn to the prisons for labor. The company needed native Finnish speakers to help improve its large language model’s understanding of the construction-specific language. But in a high-wage economy like Finland, finding those data laborers was difficult. The Finnish welfare system’s generous unemployment benefits leaves little incentive for Finns to sign up to low-wage clickwork platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. “Mechanical Turk didn’t have many Finnish-language workers,” says Virnala. At the same time, he adds, automatic translation tools are still no good at Finnish, a language with only 5 million native speakers.

When Virnala pitched his idea to Pia Puolakka, head of the Smart Prison Project at Finland’s prison and probation agency, she was instantly interested, she says. Before the pandemic, another Finnish tech company called Vainu had been using prisoners for data labor. But Vainu abruptly pulled out after a disagreement between cofounders prompted Tuomas Rasila, who had been in charge of the project, to leave the company.

By the time Virnala approached her with his proposal in 2022, Puolakka was eager to resurrect the AI work. Her job is to try and make the relationship between Finnish prisons and the internet more closely resemble the increasingly digital outside world. So far, she has been installing laptops in individual cells so inmates can browse a restricted list of websites and apply for permission to make video calls. She considers data labor just another part of that mission.

The aim is not to replace traditional prison labor, such as making road signs or gardening. It’s about giving prisoners more variety. Data labeling can only be done in three-hour shifts. “It might be tiring to do this eight hours a day, only this type of work,” she says, adding that it would be nice if inmates did the data labeling alongside other types of prison labor. “This type of work is the future, and if we want to prepare prisoners for life outside prison, a life without crime, these types of skills might be at least as important as the traditional work types that prisons provide,” she says.

But how much data labeling offers inmates skills that are transferable to work after prison is unclear. Tuomas Rasila, the now estranged cofounder of Vainu, who managed the prison project there for a year, admits he has no evidence of this; the project wasn’t running for long enough to collect it, he says. “I think asking people, who might feel outside of society, to train the most high-tech aspect of a modern society is an empowering idea.”

However, others consider this new form of prison labor part of a problematic rush for cheap labor that underpins the AI revolution. “The narrative that we are moving towards a fully automated society that is more convenient and more efficient tends to obscure the fact that there are actual human people powering a lot of these systems,” says Amos Toh, a senior researcher focusing on artificial intelligence at Human Rights Watch.

For Toh, the accelerating search for so-called clickworkers has created a trend where companies are increasingly turning to groups of people who have few other options: refugees, populations in countries gripped by economic crisis—and now prisoners.

“This dynamic is a deeply familiar one,” says Toh. “What we are seeing here is part of a broader phenomenon where the labor behind building tech is being outsourced to workers that toil in potentially exploitative working conditions.”

Toh is also skeptical about whether data labor can help inmates build digital skills. “There are many ways in which people in prison can advance themselves, like getting certificates and taking part in advanced education,” he says. “But I'm skeptical about whether doing data labeling for a company at one euro per hour will lead to meaningful advancement.” Hämeenlinna prison does offer inmates online courses in AI, but Marmalade sits blank-faced as staff try to explain its benefits.

Science

Your weekly roundup of the best stories on health care, the climate crisis, genetic engineering, robotics, space, and more. Delivered on Wednesdays.

By the time I meet Lehtiniemi, the researcher from Helsinki University, I’m feeling torn about the merits of the prison project. Traveling straight from the prison, where women worked for €1.54 an hour, to Metroc’s offices, where the company was celebrating a €2 million funding round, felt jarring. In a café, opposite the grand, domed Helsinki cathedral, Lehtiniemi patiently listens to me describe that feeling.

But Lehtiniemi’s own interviews with inmates have given him a different view—he’s generally positive about the project. On my point about pay disparity, he argues this is not an ordinary workforce in mainstream society. These people are in prison. “Comparing the money I get as a researcher and what the prisoner gets for their prison labor, it doesn't make sense,” he says. “The only negative thing I’ve heard has been that there’s not enough of this work. Only a few people can do it,” he says, referring to the limit of three laptops per prison.

“When we think about data labor, we tend to think about Mechanical Turk, people in the global south or the rural US,” he says. But for him, this is a distinct local version of data labor, which comes with a twist that benefits society. It’s giving prisoners cognitively stimulating work—compared to other prison labor options—while also representing the Finnish language in the AI revolution.

Without this kind of initiative, Lehtiniemi worries that non-English languages are being locked out of this next generation of technology. Smart speakers still struggle to understand Finnish dialects. “Not all Finnish people speak English very well, so there's a need for these local forms of data labeling as well,” Lehtiniemi says. Metroc isn’t the only company that has been forced to get creative about finding Finnish data labor. In 2011, the national library created a game to incentivize volunteers to help digitize its archive. In 2020, broadcaster YLE teamed up with Helsinki University and the state development company VAKE to ask volunteers to donate recordings of them speaking Finnish.

There is a sense in Finland that the prison project is just the beginning. Some are worried it could set a precedent that could introduce more controversial types of data labeling, like moderating violent content, to prisons. “Even if the data being labeled in Finland is uncontroversial right now, we have to think about the precedent it sets,” says Toh. “What stops companies from outsourcing data labeling of traumatic and unsavory content to people in prison, especially if they see this as an untapped labor pool?”

It's also not clear whether labor conditions in Finland's prisons—which famously focus on rehabilitation—could be replicated in other countries with a less progressive approach to justice. In the US, 76 percent of prisoners report that prison labor is mandatory, according to civil rights group, the ACLU. “The prison system in the United States is very, very different from what we have in Finland or Nordic countries. It's a completely different idea,” says Rasila. “In Finland, there is an exclusively positive feeling around the project because everyone knows that this is very voluntary.”

AI companies are only going to need more data labor, forcing them to keep seeking out increasingly unusual labor forces to keep pace. As Metroc plots its expansion across the Nordics and into languages other than Finnish, Virnala is considering whether to expand the prison labor project to other countries. “It’s something we need to explore,” he says.

[scotianostra]

Patrick Colquhoun was born born in Dumbarton, on March 14th 1745.

Colquhoun was sent to the new world and served an apprenticeship as a sixteen-year-old in Virginia in North America. Likely working in a tobacco store.during the American Revolution he was part of the Government militia, in what was a Glasgow regiment to contribute to the government’s war effort. This part of history is being explored at the moment in the hit show Outlander.

On his return to Glasgow he became one of the city’s famous/imfamous ‘Tobacco Lords’. He had multiple commercial interests and was also a co-partner in the Glasgow-West India firm, Colquhoun & Ritchie, that traded with Jamaica and Antigua. As such, his wealth was derived from transatlantic slavery and its commerce, perhaps this is why he is not as well known in his native Scotland, we have a habit of brushing over the shame in the abhorrent trade of human beings.

In 1782 he built Kelvingrove House - in what is now Kelvingrove Park - as his residence. Colquhoun was Lord Provost of Glasgow, 1782-1784 and founder and the first Chairman of Britain’s oldest Chamber of Commerce in Glasgow in 1783. He was an honorary graduate of the University and the Colquhoun Lectureship in Business History is named for him. He moved to London in 1789 where he became a magistrate and published pamphlets on policing and other social issues of the day.

It is due to his work in London and those writings on policing he is credited with being the founder of the first regular investigative police force in England, The Thames Valley Police the first regular professional police force in London. Organised to reduce the thefts that plagued the world’s largest port and financed by merchants, the force was directed by Patrick Colquhoun and consisted of a permanent staff of 80 men and an on-call staff of more than 1,000. Two features of the marine police were unique. First, it used visible, preventive patrols; second, officers were salaried rather than stipendiary, and they were prohibited from taking fees. The venture was a complete success, and reports of crimes dropped appreciably. (In 1800 the government passed a bill making the marine police a publicly financed organisation.) This was a decades before Robert Peel established the Metropolitan Police, and it has to also be noted around the turn of the 18th City of Glasgow Police was established.

Colquhoun’s treatises on police also inspired the foundation of police in Dublin (Ireland), Sydney (Australia), and New York (USA).

Colquhoun’ has also been criticised for his violent oppression “wholly in the service of an industrialist and property-holding class in the earliest incarnation of socio-economic warfare in the Atlantic economy.” He “organised political surveillance by spies and snitches of those opposing slavery. In addition to his Virginia cotton interests he owned shares in Jamaican sugar plantations.” So by many accounts a nasty piece of work.

Colquhoun has been called ‘the Father of Glasgow’ because of his role in promoting Glasgow’s trade and manufacturing during the late 1700s. In fact, he referred to himself in this way when drawing up his will in 1817. We have a name for such people in Scotland, and it really fits this guy- Baw Heid.

[jeannereames]

Do you think we lost useful / important information along with the account / biography Ptolemy Soter wrote of Alexander? Could you talk a bit about this book?

If I recall correctly (and I can be very wrong in this) Arrian used Ptolemy’s book as one of his main primary sources. Did any bits of it survive that are useful to modern historians?

@akriticsongs, first, yes, Arrian used Ptolemy, along with Arisobulos, as his two chief sources for his own history. These weren’t all he used, and he certainly editorialized on them, giving his own opinions throughout. We shouldn’t take his history as a “cut-and-paste” version of theirs. That makes getting back to theirs a bit of a struggle.

One reason Arrian gives for using Ptolemy is that he was a king, and it wouldn’t do for a king to lie.

That assessment may make modern historians crack up laughing—as it should. But we must also recognize that Arrian isn’t simply being obtuse; his history was written to flatter his patron—the Emperor Hadrian. A king. Not just a king, but a king with a noted fondness for Greek culture and Greek philosophy—the first emperor to wear a beard after Greek fashion.

Was Arrian being serious about his claim? Well…probably not, although he also wasn’t playing the same sort of inside-out “I’m going to compliment you in order to insult you” games Virgil played with Augustus in his The Aeneid. Nonetheless, and whatever he says, I doubt he took Ptolemy’s history entirely uncritically.

I am not an expert on Arrian. There have been a couple of really good assessments of Arrian as an historian published recently: V. Liotsakis’s Alexander the Great in Arrian’s Anabasis (2019) and D. W. Leon’s Arrian the Historian: Writing the Greek Past in the Roman Empire (2021). The links go to their Bryn Mawr reviews. The former is more inclined to analysis of passages while the latter casta a wider net to place Arrian in context as a historian. I like both, as they do different things.

Getting back to Ptolemy’s original, Tim Howe speculated that Ptolemy was influenced by Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern tradition in the book we coedited, Macedonian Legacies (2009), “Alexander in India: Ptolemy as Near Eastern Historiographer.” And more recently, he edited an entire collection, Ptolemy I Soter: a Self-Made Man (ed., Tim Howe, 2018).

It’s too bad we don’t still have Ptolemy’s original history, for two reasons. It would be the only surviving contemporary account, and it could illustrate how later Roman-era historians parsed and refitted earlier histories to their own takes.

My personal first choice of Hellenistic-era writings I’d like to see recovered would be Marsyas’s works on ancient Macedonia (and Alexander). But after that would be Ptolemy’s history. Both would provide us with pre-Roman views of Macedon and Alexander. We don’t have that. The first Macedonian writing about Alexander (et al.) that survives (Strategemata) is late imperial military historian Polyaenus, who wrote a little after Arrian (during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, not Hadrian). There are recent debates as to whether he’s really Macedonian, but even if he was, c. 500 years separated him from his country’s most famous son. And if he calls himself a Macedonian, he was born and raised in Bithynia, and later lived in Rome, so how “Macedonian” he was would be a good question to ask. Like a lot of writers of or influenced by the Second Sophistic, he engaged in a fair bit of Hellenic beautification.

So the upshot is: yes, having Ptolemy’s history would be extremely useful, but even if we did, it would bring a different freight to problems to navigate. It might, however, help us to better assess the later Roman-era historians we do have.

[maplesunflowers]

I WILL GLADLY TELL YOU ABOUT GEF!!!! 👀

@krazys-ass-emporium

Gef the Talking Mongoose was an "alleged" talking mongoose that lived in the walls of a farmhouse owned by the Irving Family (consisting of the father, James, the mother, Margaret, and their at the time 13-year-old daughter Voirrey) on the Isle of Mann in the 1930s.

When the Irvings first moved into the farmhouse in 1931, they would hear persistent scratching, rustling, and vocal noises behind their farmhouse's wooden wall panels that variously resembled a ferret, a dog, or a baby. According to the Irvings, a creature named Gef introduced itself and told them it was a mongoose born in New Delhi, India, in 1852.

The Irvings claimed that Gef had communicated to them that he was "an extra extra clever mongoose", an "Earthbound spirit" and "a ghost in the form of a mongoose" and once said, "I am a freak. I have hands and I have feet, and if you saw me you'd faint, you'd be petrified, mummified, turned into stone or a pillar of salt!"

The story of Gef became popular in the tabloid press, and many journalists and investingators, including Harry Price, flocked to the Isle to try to catch a glimpse of the creature. 

Margaret and Voirrey Irving sold the home in 1945 after the death of James Irving. They reportedly had to sell the farm at a loss because it had the reputation of being haunted. In 1946, Leslie Graham, who had bought their farm, claimed in the press that he had shot and killed Gef. The body displayed by Graham was, however, black and white and much larger than the famous mongoose and Voirrey Irving was certain that it was not Gef.

Voirrey died in 2005. In an interview published late in life, she maintained that Gef was not her creation.

If you want a really good video on Gef, I HIGHLY recommend this one by Jules Dapper! She goes into way more depth on the subject!

ALSO FUN FACT:

The song "Eighth Wonder" by Lemon Demon is based of the story of Gef the Mongoose!

[ducktoonsfanart]

Louie Duck (Quack Pack) as Alexander the Great - Conquerors - Real Ducks in History - History in Duckverse - My version

I’m posting some of my drawings that I’ve done before, this time related to history and one by one where our famous Duckverse ducks play famous historical figures. See more about it here: https://ducktoonsfanart.tumblr.com/post/749604818515050496/donald-duck-as-napoleon-bonaparte-scrooge-mcduck

I’ve always wanted to do a special project called Duckverse in History and my plan is to draw my favorite characters as redraws from famous works of art as well as famous historical figures. And since history is my favorite science, and my favorite field, I definitely wanted to do something related to it and related to one of my favorite historical characters. Since I don’t want to complicate the situation, I will gradually publish a drawing related to that historical figure from time to time. I started this last year for Duckvember only to finish at the end of April.

This drawing shows Louie Duck (the Quack Pack version, not the Ducktales reboot) shows Alexander the Great, another brilliant conqueror from the fourth century BC (born 356 BC, died 323 BC, reigned as king of Macedonia from 336 BC) and I drew it as a redraw from the mosaic of Alexander the Great from the battle of Issus in which he confronts the Persian king Darius III from Pompeii, probably from the first century BC. Alexander the Great was the son of Philip II and the king of Macedonia who united Greece and fought against Persia and managed to conquer an entire empire in his twenties. He traveled through the Persian Empire and reached India and wanted to continue, but his soldiers did not want to continue, so he returned to Babylon, his new capital. He certainly changed the world at that time and introduced a new culture, called Hellenism, as a combination of ancient Greek culture and the culture of the Ancient East and ancient India. I drew Louie as Alexander because as a young man he is a great adventurer and rides his black horse Bucephalus and is eager for extremes, yet unlike Alexander, Louie shows a bit of his shyness, but is still brave enough to take on new challenges. I also added a helmet as worn by Alexander III in his time. Behind Louie are the pyramids from Egypt, the Ishtar Gate from Babylon and the imperial palace from Persepolis where the Persian rulers lived and it actually shows the lands that Alexander the Great conquered.

I'm planning to draw my favorite Duckverse characters as famous historical figures as my own ideas for my Duckverse in history AU. Unfortunately, due to the lack of time lately, it's going to be a bit tight, and unfortunately bad things have happened at my house, which is why I had to be on hiatus for a long period, last month and this month. Sorry about this, there will definitely be new surprises next week so don't miss it in the future.

I certainly hope you like this drawing and this idea and that these characters have such historical roles. Of course, Duckverse in history I combine mostly everything related to Duckverse (Donald Duck comics, OG Ducktales, Three Caballeros, Darkwing Duck and Quack Pack) and it’s mostly my version and my idea. By all means if you like this and support these ideas, feel free to like and reblog this, but please don’t use these same ideas without mentioning me and without my permission. Thank you!