Links for November 23-December 4, 2020

When AI sees a man, it thinks “official.” a woman? “smile”| “The AI services generally saw things human reviewers could also see in the photos. But they tended to notice different things about women and men, with women much more likely to be characterized by their appearance. Women lawmakers were often tagged with “girl” and “beauty.” The services had a tendency not to see women at all, failing to detect them more often than they failed to see men.” // Studies like this help to reveal the bias baked deep into the algorithms that are meant to be ‘impartial’, with this impartiality truly constituting a mathwashing of existent biases that are pernicious to 50% of society.
The ungentle joy of spider sex | “Spectacular though all this is, extreme sexual size dimorphism is rare even in spiders. “It’s an aberration,” Kuntner says. Even so, as he and Coddington describe in the Annual Review of Entomology , close examination of the evolutionary history of spiders indicates that eSSD has evolved at least 16 times, and in one major group some lineages have repeatedly lost it and regained it. The phenomenon is so intriguing it’s kept evolutionary biologists busy for decades. How and why did something so weird evolve?” // This is a truly wild, and detailed, discussion of the characteristics of spider evolution and intercourse.
Miley Cyrus-Plastic Hearts // Consider me shocked, but I’m really liking Cyrus’ newest album.