Back in the day, the go-to guy for science at Bisbee High School was H.B. \u201cFuzzy\u201d Warren. I have no idea what the initials stood for\u2014those were never revealed. Ditto for his nickname. If Fuzzy was fuzzy once, he certainly wasn\u2019t fuzzy by the time I walked into his physics class as a junior. I managed to pass, but that class marked the beginning of the end of my formal science education. Less than two years later in 1962, Bill was working for Motorola and learning how to do computer programming. Not me, I was off on a path for becoming a science-free English major. Eventually computers escaped the labs and spread to the rest of the world, bringing with them a whole new world as well as a whole new world of problems, including the word algorithm.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve always had problems spelling algorithm. For starters, I always used to leave out the R, but now I have a handy-dandy way of remembering to use the R. All I have to do is think about that guy who allegedly claimed he had invented the Internet. Then there\u2019s the rithm part. That\u2019s challenging, too. I always think there should be a Y in it as in \u201crhythm and blues.\u201d So far I haven\u2019t found a mental elastic band to put around my head to remind me that the word contains an I not a Y!<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, my life is now being adversely affected by two separate algorithms, not just one!<\/p>\n
Last week on TV we saw a show where a fictional character ends up being mislabeled as someone else by faulty facial recognition software, aka an algorithm. As a result, the innocent guy is gunned down by cops who think he’s someone else. It was only a story after all, but boy did I get it.<\/p>\n
For the past several months, I\u2019ve been plagued by an unending stream of Facebook notifications for someone named Joanna. Many of those notices have to do with Joanna\u2019s vaccine status, suggesting places where she could go to get a booster shot. (Hey, Facebook, my vaccination status is between me and my Maker and between me and my husband, but certainly not between me and a bunch of total strangers on Facebook! It\u2019s none of their business!) <\/p>\n
But back to my problem with Joanna. The first time it happened, I thought, \u201cWait a minute. Joanna is a fictional character. She doesn\u2019t exist in the real world, and she doesn\u2019t need to be vaccinated.\u201d Then I hit the delete button which I\u2019ve been doing on a regular basis ever since. Delete, delete, delete! A lot of the Joanna notifications have to do with Nelly\u2019s Taqueria which I assumed was located somewhere in the backwoods of Texas. Nope, I just checked. It\u2019s somewhere in the wilds of New York in a town called Hicksville. If that isn\u2019t the wilds, I don\u2019t know what is!<\/p>\n
Eventually I decided there was a real Joanna somewhere, but I didn\u2019t worry about her all that much until last week. On Friday when I tried to respond to a comment on my blog on Facebook, my reply was labeled as being from \u201cthe Joannas.\u201d There\u2019s really no way to fix it. It\u2019s not like I can write to Facebook and say, \u201cLook you guys, you\u2019ve got me mixed up with somebody else.\u201d I\u2019m pretty sure they won\u2019t pay any attention. So if you put a comment on Facebook and get a reply that says it\u2019s from \u201cthe Joannas\u2019 you can be pretty sure it comes from me rather than from a correspondent named Joanna who may or may not be a fictional character. Got it?<\/p>\n
Then my AlogoRithm problem set in\u2014a different one this time\u2014simultaneously attacking both my Apple Watch and my iPhone. Those versions of my step-counting app on those got their noses out of joint and stopped speaking to one another. Steps that counted on the watch wouldn\u2019t necessarily count on the phone. Bill\u2019s device trouble shooting mantra goes like this: IF IT DOESN\u2019T WORK, REBOOT! So I tried that twice, once on the watch and once on the phone. No go!<\/p>\n
Last night, before charging the watch, I happened to check my pedometer app. It said I had ZERO steps. (By the way, after the word App, I hit the wrong key and my screen went blithely off to the App Store. No, no, no, I did NOT want to go there!) I looked from the watch to the phone which said I had 11,583. Then I happened to check my app settings on the phone. They had me on \u201cWheelchair\u201d mode. They also had me listed as an eight-foot-one-inch male! No wonder my steps were screwed up. I fixed the settings.<\/p>\n
This morning things were back to normal. My Apple Watch steps and my iPhone steps are in sync. YAY!<\/p>\n
I just wish Joanna was that easily fixed because I just got a whole new batch of notifications for her from someone named Klark. As long as they\u2019re coming to me, I doubt they\u2019re getting through to her.<\/p>\n
Sorry about that, Joanna, you might try letting Facebook know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Back in the day, the go-to guy for science at Bisbee High School was H.B. \u201cFuzzy\u201d Warren. I have no idea what the initials stood for\u2014those were never revealed. Ditto for his nickname. If Fuzzy was fuzzy once, he certainly wasn\u2019t fuzzy by the time I walked into his physics class as a junior. I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-Ef","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2495","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2495"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2495\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2496,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2495\/revisions\/2496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}