56 | New Scientist | 27 February 2021
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Computer says no job
Is there nowhere left where we are
safe from machines judging us?
They criticise our writing with
their passive-aggressive squiggly
underlines, tell us when we haven’t
taken enough daily exercise and
now they are rating our suitability
in job interviews.
This latest encroachment comes
as some firms have started using
artificial intelligence to assess
people’s performance in online
job interviews by rating their
personality traits and apparently
looking at what else is in view.
The approach is said to be more
objective than boring old humans.
Researchers tested one AI
interviewer by presenting it
with actors who gave repeated
performances with one variable
tweaked each time, and the results
were bewildering. One applicant
was rated as less conscientious if
she wore glasses, but more so if she
wore a headscarf. People also got
better scores if they sat in front
of a bookcase, although at least
that makes more sense. Presumably
the AIs have picked up on the old
mental shortcut: “reads books,
must be smart”.
Now that TV interviews are
usually done from people’s
homes, those who care about
their public image go to great
lengths to ensure the camera
happens to catch them in front
of bookshelves carefully curated
for maximum intellectual gravitas.
Feedback recommends the
Twitter account Bookcase
Credibility (@Bcredibility) for
documenting this important
societal trend. The account analyses
people’s literary (and home decor)
choices in the manner of the most
egregious flights of post-modernist
fancy. It is a pandemic must-read.Small world
Speaking of strange computer
stuff, 32-year-old, Liverpool-based
journalist Liam Thorp was baffled
when he was invited to receive a
covid-19 vaccine because he had
no pre-existing health conditions.realise I’d shrunk to the size
of a Borrower,” he said.
When Thorp shared his story
on Twitter, it emerged that he
isn’t the only one. One person had
been previously called in for a flu
vaccine because his weight had
been recorded not as 170 pounds,
but 170 stone – for non-imperial
measurement purists, that is
14 times higher. It seems the
measurement had been taken
at face value, because when the
man walked into the clinic the
vaccinator looked at him and said:
“There must be some mistake!”
Another person’s height was
recorded with the decimal point
having jumped one place to the
left, giving her a stature of 16.7
centimetres. She got as far as being
ordered to see the practice nurse
for “the obesity talk”. Even sat
down face to face with her patient,
the nurse didn’t catch on to theproblem, and when it was pointed
out, the respondent says the nurse
turned “rather grumpy”.Up the creek
Lots of us are eager to be vaccinated
against the coronavirus, but some
are going to extremes to jump the
queue. From Florida comes word of
two women of 34 and 44 years old,
respectively, who turned up at a
coronavirus vaccination clinic
dressed as “grannies”, according
to ABC News. Their costumes
consisted of glasses, gloves and
bonnets, so perhaps they were
channelling 19th-century
grandmothers. An officer at the
scene called the incident “ridiculous”.
Even more effort was put in by
the wealthy Canadian couple who
flew to a remote town in the Yukon
territory to get the shot. The region
is being prioritised in the vaccine
roll-out because it is home to many
Indigenous people who are at
higher risk. Rodney and Ekaterina
Baker chartered a private plane to
fly in, and told the clinic they were
local motel workers.
Feedback’s theory is that their
ruse was inspired by Netflix comedy
series Schitt’s Creek. It is about a
self-centred and wealthy couple
who lose their fortune and are
forced to work at... a motel in rural
Canada. Like the husband and wife
in Schitt’s Creek, Rodney is an
entertainment mogul and Ekaterina
an actor. The name of the small
town whose vaccine clinic they
crashed? Beaver Creek. The
coincidences are uncanny – kind of.
The couple’s actions are all the
more eyebrow-raising considering
that at the pandemic’s start,
Ekaterina posted on Instagram:
“During this unique and tender
time I stay home for: all the kids
so they don’t have to say goodbye
to their parents and grandparents
too soon.”
It’s a sentiment that Schitt’s
Creek grande dame Moira Rose
couldn’t have put better herself,
but it must have slipped Ekaterina’s
mind when she visited the vaccine
clinic in Beaver Creek last month. ❚On ringing up his doctor to ask
why, the answer came that it was
his weight problem.
This took Thorp aback. True,
lockdown had left him a little
“on the chunky side”, in his
words, but not that much. The
next day, however, the clinic
rang back to confess an error.
His weight was listed correctly as
111 kilograms, but his height was
recorded not as 6 feet, 2 inches,
but as 6.2 centimetres.
That gave Thorp a body mass
index (BMI), the standard way of
measuring obesity, of 28,000 kg/
m^2 , some way over the usual
healthy BMI range. Thorp now
understood the clinic’s concern,
although he did wonder why
no one had been in touch earlier
to check up on Liverpool’s only
clinically obese Tom Thumb.
“I knew I had put on a few
lockdown pounds but I didn’tGot a story for Feedback?
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