Yeah, they don't see it as useful, but many people do, and it's part of national heritage. Maybe the government should take care of it? After all 4.5 million quid a year is a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of digitization and the recurring cost of ensuring the integrity of the data. Oh, this is the government?

Digitize their whole collection? Okay. How big is that? 8 million objects? So, digitization means what? Full scientific photography of each object? Or are we talking 3D-scans too? Let's assume just the photography part. Each object needs to be signed out, transferred to the digitization center, set up on the digitization apparatus with controlled lighting, color control cards, rulers, whatever other targets you want, and photographed completely, before being returned to storage. Meanwhile the digitization team needs to prepare the metadata, verify the images, archive the images and metadata, as well as generate a reproduction master for use on the website. And you need a long term archival plan, with offline copies being remotely stored and routinely checked/corrected for bitrot. The cost of preparing the metadata alone will exceed $12M. Heck, the cost of having employees move those objects around the museum will cost more than $12M. If digitization only costs $1.50/object, we'd have a lot more digitizations in the world.

You mean the Chinese server farm that can't respect robots.txt and DoS'd my server? They have a social media wing?

How about shooting it through an airlock? Their proof-of-concept model there has a long tube sticking out of the centrifuge. I'd think you'd open the lower aperture, release the projectile, and, when the escape-velocity-traveling projectile is in the tube, close the lower aperture and open the upper one. As a bonus, the projectile might fly through a gradually denser atmosphere. Or it might hit all kinds of turbulence...
The number of ways this can fail is impressive, though.

The four key words. I'm not sure we need to ask, "what part of human psychology can be exploited by this tech to make people miserable and tech companies rich?" But "it just fucking works": yes. Skype doesn't. Teams doesn't. Jitsi doesn't. You watch how Zoom handles goofy bandwidth around the world, how it discriminates between speech and noise, and how it prevents a meeting from dissolving into chaos. That's not a commodity; that's some serious tech with the sole purpose of making things work. And yes, try giving a technical presentation to forty people in a foreign language and having no video reactions. Even bored and surfing the internet, those people on video would help enormously in feeling the crowd. It's harder than being on a well-lit stage, speaking into the black hole.

True, but every bridge in the country can be blown up on short order.

Indeed. Even many researchers think they can just have everybody use their iPhones on the documents they want and digitization is "solved". Certainly, for an individual, those pictures are useful, and I have a HDD with a bunch o' manuscripts that come from digital photos or microfilm scans that works well for my proposes. But a library or archive will want to have scientific photos (go ahead and look up the FADGI guidelines for imagery of two-dimensional objects), taken in controlled lighting, with color reference cards and a means to make measurements. Otherwise, the same object in different photographs does not look the same. And yeah, metadata. The library digitization project next door spends far more per codex on metadata and description encoding than it does on Hasselblads and photographers.

"Children of the Magenta" is an aviation-specific reference to the generation of pilots trained to rely on automation beyond its point of utility. It was coined in 1997 by American Airlines captain Warren Van Der Bergh, and he was referring to American pilots. For an example of how you get "Children of the Magenta", some airlines require pilots to use autoland whenever available, and never hand-fly while on the line. Thus pilots get trained to follow the magenta guiding lines of the automation. This leads to situations where, confronted with an automation failure, the reaction of the pilots is to try to restore automation. Now, automation fails for a variety of reasons, but chiefly because the aircraft is in a situation where automation can no longer do the pilot's job, for example, a sensor failure or something broke.

The fact of the matter is, while we all want a pilot like Sullenberger or Liu Chuanjian up front, aircraft have to be flyable by even the worst pilots. The Lion Air MCAS problem should have been resolved when the first flight crew to encounter it turned around and landed at their point of departure. Instead, probably due to commercial pressures, they continued their flight with manual trim and the stickshaker going continuously until touchdown. The next crew fought for a bit, then one of the two people up front did the worst thing possible, repeatedly: tap the trim button just enough to reset the MCAS for another cycle of nose-down trim. The Ethiopian crew apparently knew what the problem was, but disabled electric trim before neutralizing loads. Then they found themselves unable to mechanically trim the aircraft and unaware of the procedure to unload the plane.

One of Boeing's responses, especially to Congress, has been to blame the pilots. Yes, the pilots didn't perform outstandingly in these cases. And maybe they were "Children of the Magenta". Yet the core problem is one of bad design, a bandaid on a jury-rigged solution to keep a 50-year-old design in the air so that airlines following the Southwest model don't have to train their crew on two different types.

Compare to "Children of the Magenta" cases like the Colgan flight outside of Buffalo, where the pilot reacted to the stick shaker by pulling back, even overriding the stick pusher (training to the FAA test emphasized minimizing loss of altitude in a stall), or the recent Superjet crash, which at this point looks like a pilot was unfamiliar with flying the aircraft in a degraded FBW state ("Direct Law") and, on approach in a perfectly flyable airplane with plenty of fuel, promptly ignored seven predictive windshear alerts ("Windshear. Go Around" -- the record shows that he did not go around), and killed a lot of people. In those two cases, the part of the automation that actually flies the plane dropped out, putting control in the hands of the pilot and, at some point, providing strong instructions one what the pilot should be doing. In both cases, the flight crew proved so unable to fly the plane that they even ignored the sage advice of the machine that was trying not to get them killed.

Yes, racism plays a role here, especially as to how Boeing's spun the issue. Asia and Africa are huge growth areas for aviation, and that's where Boeing is selling a lot of planes, especially ones like the MAX that are designed to cram a lot of passengers into a small space and carry them at a fraction of the cost. But the Chinese were right to ground the plane immediately regardless of GP's explanation. "Children of the Magenta" refers to a training culture more than a national or ethnic one.

As more information came out, the more damning it got. Here's what you missed:
The for-pay feature was an AoA indicator that would show the AoA relative to the nose. The AoA disagree warning existed on previous 737s (NGs), and many operators and many in Boeing assumed it existed on the MAX. It was only after LionAir lost one that Boeing realized that they didn't have the feature any more. Perhaps it was removed when the optional AoA indicator was implemented.

The light would probably have helped Lion Air diagnose the problem before dispatch on the second and fateful flight. It might also have given the Ethiopian crew earlier warning of what was happening.

The text would make some kind of sense, in a way more convincing then the current leading candidate: "we have drawings and a text designed to resemble meaning written in a pseudo-alphabet."

Swiss citizen. Expat?

Just 'cos they got one of them fancy-ass machines at Migros doesn't mean they're everywhere.

Give some credit to medieval philosophers: they had an interest in contemporary as well as ancient thought, and the game was to present something with enough novelty to be racy, but not too much to be dangerous. That part hasn't really changed, I'm afraid. Of course, then they got libraries and paper, and then they discovered the magic of copypasta.
Using Google for research at least clues you in to the popular and subtle memes in the field.
On the other hand, googling for results returns:
Did you mean insults ? Showing results for insults instead.

"Take seriously" = "Have a legal team in place." As in "we take shoplifting seriously." The message isn't "we care about you", but rather "although we screwed up, any legal action against us regarding your privacy will be met with force."

Double-spacing is a hangover from manual typing, and most of us who learned in that era learned by typing with something resembling Courier. Most typewriters couldn't handle proportional fonts or adding extra space after a period, so double-spacing was the way around that. When I see something double-spacing, I recognize that person as someone who is generally old enough to have learned on a typewriter (or the first generations of word processing), and who doesn't engage heavily with IT. Those people are also likely to be less distracted in reading and thus capable of reading faster. The "3 percent increase" for them reading with double spaces is hardly significant.

Hell no. You don't digitize manuscripts destructively. There's not yet an official standard for digitizing medieval MSS, but the short version is that amateurs use cellphones or consumer cameras, wannabes use "archival scanners" (which require the document to be flat), and pros use a rig with medium-format cameras. but, for OCR, as their examples show, the current tech doesn't benefit from detailed images. This team is starting with the Papal Registers, which the ASV has been selling in a 300 dpi black-and-white (not grayscale) format for at least 15 years. 96% character recognition is about what other MSS OCR teams are getting. As TFA implies, people don't write letters; they write words, but you can't get the computational power to read words. So this inherently limits their approach, even with easy-to-read Carolingian Miniscule (the picture, btw, is of a "transitional hand" or "proto-gothic" more than CM). So they then choose between likely readings according to latinity. Cool, but with archival documents, the most valuable information for traditional research are the proper names, and these are usually less "Latinish" than the rest, so the net result is to increase the batting average slightly while grounding into a lot more double plays. In short: pilot project that uses digitizations from 2 generations back, produces results that aren't useful thanks to methodology dictated by current technology, and makes a few interesting tweaks. It would be cool to see, but first it'd be great to digitize and publish online the ASV. Of course, it's not so bad to go to Rome, go through the rigamarole of getting access to the ASV, and working directly with the originals. But the current catalog system dates from the eighteenth century, and is harder to read than the medieval manuscripts. So, you get what you can; if you're lucky they let you stay till 1600. Then you gotta find something to do in Rome until the next morning.