We have arrived in Boston (well, Cambridge, technically).
We left our New York accommodation at 8.30 this morning to avoid the complication of trying to navigate through the New York Marathon, and then had three hours to kill at the airport. Some of the Scholars found little nooks to nap in, while others amused themselves with comparing terrible coffees with worse ones.
I found a bunch of magazines with AI features and accidentally bought them. And also one on Mars (as research for the short story I’m writing).
We had dinner at a little Japanese restaurant—which was delicious—and then came back to our hotel for a debrief and a chat about the week to come.
Boston (Cambridge) is so pretty. It’s nice to be under the open sky again and surrounded by trees. And I’m looking forward to my Harvard meetings; I’ve also been invited to a seminar discussing how search engines reinforce racism. It should be interesting!
On Thursday I’m going to sneaky sneak over to MIT for a meeting about a super cool PhD program which mashes together History / Anthropology / Science, Technology and Society. Excitement!
Oh, and the fatigue is starting to subside. Hooray!
Trees!! I am happy.
Josephine Newman 
Hi Josephine, here is something for your seminar:
There was an item on AM today about the “Somali Crime Wave” in Melbourne. In fact it was a positive if disturbing story. Positive because a judge has, unusually, come out to criticise the way the media is overstating the problem. The facts are that the Somali crime rate is 10 times higher than the average, but Somalis are 0.1% of the population, so even if the rate for that population is high, they still only account for 1% of crime. The media, however, reports every crime involving Somalis. Four Corners tonight will be about this issue.
My takeaway from this is that perhaps the search engines are just a mirror that reflects what people are excited about at the moment. But maybe they do act as a lever that makes it easier to disseminate and retrieve whatever crap that mostly brainless and sometimes malicious/cynical types seek to propagate. #Somali Crime Wave, for example, allows trivia that should be forgotten quickly to be exhumed and reprised.
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