Running a Shortest Splitline Algorithm on the UK - and other mapping adventures

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South Western tip of England split into three.

How do you fairly split a country into electoral subdivisions? This is a difficult problem. Whatever you choose, you'll piss off someone. A politician will be annoyed that their loyal voters are no longer in their district. And voters will be annoyed that they're now lumped in with people from the wrong side of the […]

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Fitting 1 dimensional data into 2 dimensional space

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A few notes to myself. Let's consider a set of 1 dimensional data. For example, the alphabet: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ What do we mean by "1 dimensional"? Consider the element "B". From there you can go left to "A" or right to "C". Left and right are the only directions you can move. You cannot go up […]

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Book Review - Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

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A Black woman, face sorrounded by circuits, looks to the future.

From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity. Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing […]

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How to Hypnotise an Artificial Intelligence

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Last week I attended a talk by Dr Irina Higgins from Artificial Intelligence company DeepMind. It was a fascinating look at how their AI works, and how it is trained. If you've ever played a video game online, it is likely you've been training an Artificial Intelligence agent without realising it.Ethical? — Terence Eden (@edent) […]

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Use DRAKON to Generate Code from Flowcharts

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It's 1986. You're working on the Russian's Buran space programme - trying to create a re-usable space vehicle which will exceed the capabilities of the American's "Space Shuttle". There's a problem. You have very complicated real-time algorithms which you need to review, improve, optimise, and then turn into code. How do you do it? Obviously, […]

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