Inequalities.

When the temperature got up towards 30 in Vigo recently a friend commented that we probably never get such weather in the UK. When I assured him that it does happen, he assured me that it must be only rarely. And so, here I am at our son's house not far from London, with blue sky and sunshine and soaring temperatures. He assures me that they have had this weather for a good few weeks. (Everyone predicts that it will stop when the schools break up at the end of the month.)

Looking at the weather forecast, I notice that the predicted high temperature here is 27 degrees, as opposed to a predicted high of 22 in Manchester. So there is a bit of regional difference. The Northern Powerhouse is clearly not doing much about the weather.

Here's another difference from once place to another:-

In El Salvador a young woman has been sentenced to 30 years in prison. She was raped, more than once, over and over, ended up pregnant and finally gave birth to a stillborn child. She was found guilty of murder on the ground that she did not seek proper antenatal care. How does that work?

By contrast, in the UK a man has been sentenced to 25 years for killing two women, five years apart, both former girlfriends.

It's a strange world. And there are still places where women poor treatment.

It seems too that inequality also exists in the world of technology. Here is a link to an article about how sexist technology can be. It reports the case of an academic trying to gain access to the locker room at her local gym. She identified herself by her title: Dr. The automatic door system would not let her in because it only recognised Dr as a male title. Therefore she was not allowed into the women's changing room!

Some of this is because computers and computer systems are now capable of learning. By reading a lot of text, a computer can learn that Paris is to France as Tokyo is to Japan. It develops a dictionary by association. And so certain occupations become male preserves, just because on the real world that is more often the case. And when asked “Man is to woman as computer programmer is to ?”, the computer model will answer “homemaker”. Or for “father is to mother as doctor is to ?”, the answer is “nurse”. "Of course", the article tells us, " the model reflects a certain reality: it is true that there are more male computer programmers, and nurses are more often women. But this bias, reflecting social discrimination, will now be reproduced and reinforced when we engage with computers using natural language that relies on Word2vec. It is not hard to imagine how this model could also be racially biased, or biased against other groups."

We still have some way to go to have a perfectly balanced world.