'Everybody's so worried about offending everybody': Crime writer Patricia Cornwell reveals frustration at trying to figure out politically-correct alternatives to words forbidden by woke 'progressives'

American crime writer Patricia Cornwall said she has to find politically correct ways to refer to people in her books because 'everybody's so worried about offending everybody'.

The best-selling author revealed she recently spent 45 minutes trying to figure out the least offensive way to refer to people who fish for a living and also criticised social media for making people 'divisive'.

In an interview with the Sunday Times, she discussed how she was abandoned by her father and psychotic mother, before focusing on the political pressures currently facing writers.

Cornwell, 65, told the newspaper some words have been forbidden because of wokeist 'progressives'.

She added: 'I deal with this all the time, like you can't say a vehicle is "manned". It has to be "crewed".

'I spent about 45 minutes yesterday trying to figure out the politically correct way to refer to people who fish for a living. Can't call them '"fishermen". So I called them fisherfolks.

'Everybody's so worried about offending everybody. I mean, when are they going to say you can't call them black holes any more? What will it be? A non-white hole?'

Cornwell also criticised social media for its 'brutal categories' that cause 'endless rage'.

She added: 'Instead of pulling everybody together it's divisive.

'They keep saying we are different. We're treated different because I'm a woman, or I'm gay or I'm black or I'm white, or I'm Hispanic or trans or whatever it might be. And that is a real shame.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10200807/Crime-writer-Patricia-Cornwell-reveals-frustration-using-politically-correct-words-writing.html

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Data scientists aim to detect internet censorship in real time

While the internet has proven a force for freedom, controlling the flow of online traffic is one of the most powerful methods used by 21st-century totalitarian governments.

By blocking or throttling areas of the internet, a nation-state can slow or even entirely cut off the spread of information, or prevent the use of applications and tools it considers dangerous or threatening to its rule. But for obvious reasons, these governments involved do not advertise their activities, making it hard to detect these restrictions.

A new multi-institutional study led by University of Chicago Prof. Nick Feamster will build new AI and data science tools to monitor and detect internet censorship, develop new statistical techniques to identify censorship with greater levels of confidence, and ultimately create a “weather map” for certain types of nation-state interference and control of online information. The $1 million grant, funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), brings together researchers from the UChicago Data Science Institute (DSI), Princeton University and SRI International.

“Our goal is to increase our levels of confidence about what is being censored, when censorship occurs, and where it is being censored,” said Feamster, Neubauer Professor of Computer Science and director of research for the Data Science Institute.

“Our past work on measuring internet censorship has developed tools to identify possible instances of censorship, but the measurements have some amount of uncertainty, and thus we need to develop more robust statistical techniques,” he said. “We also aim to derive and provide real-time insights from that data—another significant data science challenge since the scope and scale of the internet is so massive.”

https://news.uchicago.edu/story/data-scientists-aim-detect-internet-censorship-real-time

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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