- Oct 2024
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idlewords.com idlewords.com
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Tim Kadlec, for example, is an excellent writer on the topic of performance. His personal site is a model of parsimony. He is full of wisdom on the topic of reducing bloat. But the slides from his recent talk on performance are only available as a 9 megabyte web page, or a 14 megabyte PDF.
It seems like even those trained to reduce bloat can still get affected by it.
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That's almost 100 KB more than the full text of The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov’s funny and enigmatic novel about the Devil visiting Moscow with his retinue (complete with a giant cat!) during the Great Purge of 1937, intercut with an odd vision of the life of Pontius Pilate, Jesus Christ, and the devoted but unreliable apostle Matthew. For a single tweet.
Its insane how large simple things on websites have gotten to.
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www.responsible-datasets-in-context.com www.responsible-datasets-in-context.com
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By focusing on books that librarians have chosen to continue to make available to readers, OCLC was able to create a list of widely read novels that includes both classic texts and more recent, popular works by living authors.
Couldnt this technically lead to some sort of bias? Since the study focuses on books that librarians choose to keep available? Of course a vast majority may be extremely popular novels, I wouldnt be surprised if there are some that have slight preference for popular but lesser known novels or those that dislike a certain author. I could be completely wrong but would be something to take into account.
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We can use a similar approach to look at the nationalities of authors whose works are represented on the list. Focusing on the AUTHOR_NATIONALITY column, we can count how many times each country code appears, and see that over 80% of the novels were written by authors from the U.S. or the U.K.
The researchers primarily speak and read english which will greatly influence what are considered "classic" books. The data is influenced by the creator's language as that is what they have known the whole time. They wouldnt know about classics from Spanish speaking contries or French speaking countries unless they have actively been pushed in english translated versions.
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