The "crowd" will include activists for one (or more) sides of contentious political disputes, who will feed the database with typical word choices of their enemies, in the hope of branding them as potential genocide perpetrators. The result will be a produce far more false positives than true ones (if it produces any of the latter at all).
Having just examined the contents of the database, so far it appears to contain a lot of terms not widely used since the sixties or even the 19th Century. Time will tell how impartial this database is.
Most of the issues raised in the article resonate with me. I was downsized from an IT Admin job a while ago. I was partially relieved when it happened. By the time I was let go I had high blood pressure, headaches, and a damaged tendon in my arm from typing so many emails and reports for management and others (in addition to the daily IT support tasks).
The main stressors for me was a non-technical IT operations manager who wanted a report on everything using no technical jargon, (and at least a 30-60 minute meeting after any unexpected outage), an unspoken expectation that you had to work extra unpaid hours to get the work done, an under-budgeted and under-staffed IT dept, and a few difficult users.
The general view from upper management was that the IT Dept is not a profit center. Therefore it should be funded and staffed to the minimum. Some people in other departments said I had the most difficult job in the company.
That's interesting. Here's an example of women being treated differently. I knew of one female manager of a small department who got away with atrocious behavior - swearing, making threatening gestures and statements to (mostly male) staff members. None of the male staff members would protect themselves from these attacks due to the macho code of honor. Basically she knew she could get away with this behavior. Upper management never upbraided her as far as I know due to the politically correct office culture. A male manager at this organization would never have the nerve to act like this.
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The "crowd" will include activists for one (or more) sides of contentious political disputes, who will feed the database with typical word choices of their enemies, in the hope of branding them as potential genocide perpetrators. The result will be a produce far more false positives than true ones (if it produces any of the latter at all).
Having just examined the contents of the database, so far it appears to contain a lot of terms not widely used since the sixties or even the 19th Century. Time will tell how impartial this database is.
Most of the issues raised in the article resonate with me. I was downsized from an IT Admin job a while ago. I was partially relieved when it happened. By the time I was let go I had high blood pressure, headaches, and a damaged tendon in my arm from typing so many emails and reports for management and others (in addition to the daily IT support tasks). The main stressors for me was a non-technical IT operations manager who wanted a report on everything using no technical jargon, (and at least a 30-60 minute meeting after any unexpected outage), an unspoken expectation that you had to work extra unpaid hours to get the work done, an under-budgeted and under-staffed IT dept, and a few difficult users. The general view from upper management was that the IT Dept is not a profit center. Therefore it should be funded and staffed to the minimum. Some people in other departments said I had the most difficult job in the company.
That's interesting. Here's an example of women being treated differently. I knew of one female manager of a small department who got away with atrocious behavior - swearing, making threatening gestures and statements to (mostly male) staff members. None of the male staff members would protect themselves from these attacks due to the macho code of honor. Basically she knew she could get away with this behavior. Upper management never upbraided her as far as I know due to the politically correct office culture. A male manager at this organization would never have the nerve to act like this.