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Standards Massachusetts

Mechanical 330

Bias and Fairness in Large Language Models

https://thebrandhopper.com/2020/11/13/marketing-concept-diffusion-of-innovation/

In the early stages of a new technology, innovation is fluid, experimental, and highly uncertain. Multiple competing designs, architectures, and approaches coexist as inventors, startups, and firms explore possibilities. Without established standards, there is no dominant design—products vary widely in features, interfaces, and performance. This “pre-standard” or “ferment” phase fuels rapid, radical innovation. Engineers iterate quickly, creativity thrives, and breakthroughs emerge through trial-and-error.

However, fragmentation creates compatibility issues, high risk for adopters, and market confusion. Investment is speculative, and many early solutions eventually fail. Only after a dominant design or technical standard wins (through market forces, regulation, or consensus) does the industry stabilize. Innovation then shifts from product architecture to incremental improvements, manufacturing efficiency, and complementary services. The early chaotic period, though messy, is essential—it determines which technologies shape the future.

Today we sort through the literature on the stabilization of American English as the de-facto “Language of the Internet” and the Artificial Intelligence zietgeist

Readings: Bias and Fairness in Large Language Models

Relata:

Electropedia: The World’s Online Electrotechnical Vocabulary

Call for Members

Rogers Building

The earliest installation of a passenger elevator in a university building in the United States was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. In 1861, Otis Brothers & Co., the company founded by Elisha Graves Otis, installed the first passenger elevator in this three-story structure that housed laboratories, classrooms, and offices for faculty and students.

This early installation of a passenger elevator marked an important milestone in the history of vertical transportation on college and university campuses, and it paved the way for the adoption of elevators in other educational institutions as they expanded in size and height over time.

Department of Facilities

The History of Elevators

Standards Massachusetts

Nitro Cold Brew

Consolidated Financial Statement 2024: $3.541B

Nitro cold brew is bubbling up in coffee shops almost everywhere. The nitrogen-infused beverage became one of the hottest new offerings for coffee lovers looking for something different. The cold brew — made by steeping coffee grinds in cold water for multiple hours — is dispensed from a stout tap, similar to what you’d find at your local bar.

Image: Chemical & Engineering News

WBUR City Space | Campus Planning & Operations

Meet Ria McGuire (@BU_CAS’25), Student CEO of Saxbys café inside the CDS building. We talked to McGuire about her responsibilities, her time at BU, and how this experience will aid her as she prepares to graduate. ☕

Her story ➡️ https://t.co/UZUBOt8rLh pic.twitter.com/gKbcDolzu6

— Boston University (@BU_Tweets) November 24, 2024

Howard Zinn taught at Boston University from 1964 to 1988. His intellectual legacy has not held up well among serious historians. Zinn presented American history as a simplistic morality play of evil elites versus virtuous “the people.” Scholars across the political spectrum, including left-leaning historians like Michael Kazin and Sam Wineburg, have criticized it as a “polemic disguised as history” and a Manichean fable rather than rigorous scholarship. The book is filled with selective quoting, decontextualized facts, major omissions, and heavy reliance on secondary sources that support his Marxist-tinged narrative. Detailed critiques, such as Mary Grabar’s Debunking Howard Zinn, document numerous factual distortions regarding Columbus, the American Revolution, slavery, WWII, and more. Zinn openly rejected “disinterested scholarship” in favor of activism, producing advocacy rather than balanced analysis. While influential in activist and popular circles, its methodological flaws and lack of nuance have kept it outside mainstream academic respect.

City Journal (February 6): “The Downfall of Ibram X. Kendi”

Discusses the collapse of Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, alleging mismanagement of $55 million with minimal research output. Describes Kendi as a “symbol of the BLM era’s destructive passions” and notes his move to Howard University.

— Christopher F. Rufo

BU’s 2024 #GivingTuesday will support several programs, including several scholarship funds and campus resources, including BU’s Newbury Center, LGBTQIA+Student Resource Center, Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), and more.

Details ➡️https://t.co/lvUgazyjVA pic.twitter.com/ceLI57tspe

— Boston University (@BU_Tweets) December 3, 2024

Memorial Church Sunday Service

Hillsdale College | The Theological–Political Problem and the American Founding | Glenn Ellmers

From George Washington to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, 18 August 1790

The Best Breakdown of America You’ve Never Heard: Richard Miniter

In Federalist No. 2, John Jay [1764 Graduate of King’s College; now Columbia University] argues that a strong union under the Constitution will promote peace and prosperity, which are conducive to the spread of religion and morality:

“Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs… These considerations, and many others that might be mentioned, prove, and experience confirms it, that artificial distinctions and separations of [America’s] land are essentially unnatural; and that they may be eradicated and extirpated by the united and advisable efforts of individuals and communities…”

The Federalist Papers discuss themes of morality, social order, and the importance of a cohesive society, they do not explicitly emphasize the importance of Christian faith to the American constitutional republic. The authors generally focused on principles of governance, political theory, and the structure of the proposed Constitution.

“The experience of the sacred is a universal phenomenon,

found in all human societies, however primitive or complex.”

— 1957 Mircea Eliade (‘The Sacred and the Profane’)

Other Campus Worship Livestreams

Harvard’s Memorial Chapel, also known as Memorial Church, was designed by the architectural firm Coolidge, Shepley, Bulfinch, and Abbott. The church was dedicated on Armistice Day, November 11, 1932, as a memorial to Harvard alumni who died in World War I.

Sunday Service Announcements and Music Notes

Annenberg Hall

Standards Massachusetts

Readings / The Education of Henry Adams

Readings / The Administrative State

John Harvard, the namesake of Harvard University, was a 17th-century English minister lived on campus from 1607 – 1638 and conformed to Puritan ideal of dedicating Sundays to worship, prayer, and rest.

Briar U

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English Fry Up

2028: Multipurpose Athletic Facility (Nameplate cost $350M)

“Book of Household Management” Isabella Beeton’s 1861

The Full English Breakfast, or “fry-up,” originated in the Victorian era (1830s–1900s) as a hearty meal for the rural gentry and emerging industrial working class in Britain. It combined affordable, energy-dense ingredients—butter-fried eggs, back bacon, sausages, fried bread, tomatoes, mushrooms, baked beans, and black pudding—designed to fuel long days of manual labor or fox-hunting. By the Edwardian period it had become a symbol of British identity and was served in hotels and boarding houses to travelers.

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In the United States, the fry-up arrived on college campuses primarily after World War II via two routes: British faculty and students at elite universities (Oxford-Cambridge exchanges, Rhodes Scholars) and the 1960s–70s “British Invasion” cultural wave. Dining halls at places like Yale, Harvard, and certain Ivy League-adjacent schools began offering weekend “English breakfasts” as novelty brunches. The tradition stuck hardest at boarding schools and liberal-arts colleges with strong Anglophile traditions (e.g., Choate, St. Paul’s, Middlebury, Kenyon).

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By the 1980s–90s, beans on toast and proper rashers of back bacon became hangover cures at off-campus houses, cementing the fry-up as a once-a-semester ritual rather than daily fare.